I
Boukhara
Souriya
âMy mother told me a long time ago
you can eat a mountain of salt with someone
and still you cannot know them.
I lived with Moshiach and Souriya
together in one house for forty years,
Mirka and I raised our daughters with them.
At our table we did not eat a mountain of salt.
Together we ate maybe this much.â
His hands and his mindâs eye reckoned out
a mound from his belly to his chin.
âSo how could I know what she would do to me?â
Basmati
I donât measure the rice
I wash it in an ancient sieve
using my palm and the tips
of my fingers stroking towards
my belly and up and
then brushing away with
the back of my fingers, the rice
a caress on the knuckles
and a satisfying gravel
on the flat of my hand
the cold water cooling
my pulse like eau de cologne
the suggestion of fragrance
promising from the lifeless
wetting grains
my left hand dreaming
on the sieve handle
shuffling the sieve
like a wallah working a fan
the metal strips
of the handle loop pressed into
my dry palm
two different rhythms one dry and hard
and one too cold now
and lively with rice back and forth
back and forth
Our Food
The smell of rice cooking is the smell of my childhood
and a house devoid of cooking smells is no home.
Sometimes I visited other houses which smelled like our house
heavy with the steaming of mint or dill
and tiny cubes of seared liver all seeping into rice,
which would become green and which was called bachsh.
We felt foreign, shy of our differentness
unable to explain the sweetness of brown rice called osh sevo,
where prunes and cinnamon and shin meat had baked slowly
melting into the grains of rice which never lost their form.
Our eggs, called tchumi osh sevo, were placed in water
with an onion skin and left to coddle overnight
so that their shells looked like dark caramel
their flesh like café au lait.
Our salad was chopped,
a woman appraised her refinement by how fast
and how finely she could chop cucumbers, onions, parsley,
coriander and trickiest of all tomatoes âno collapsed tomatoesâ
a young girl would be scolded if she tried to get her efforts
into the large bowl that she and her mother
(and the other women, if there were a party) were filling.
The knife scraped across the raised chopping board,
always away from the body in a sweeping gesture.
The combination of ingredients never measured
other than by eye. Salt, pepper and lemon, vinegar
or Sabbath wine added at the last moment
so that this slota should not be asalak â mushy.
Joma
Unevenly edged, cream, indigo, orange and aquamarine oblongs,
parallel against a coral background. Long wide cuffs and hems
brocaded with plum, yellow, turquoise and sapphire chevrons.
No two joma are the same. These came from Boukhara.
When stored theyâre turned inside out by hands in arm holes,
then turned inward by hands back to back.
Then the great weight of silk is rolled by one hand over the other
the thickness pressed under the right elbow and wrapped in muslin
which absorbs the scent in the grosgrain but not the colour from the ikat.
We dance at weddings, with them around our shoulders
our backs straight, elbows bent, hands raised, wrists rotating
then we drape them around someone else, miming an invitation
to follow the old ways. On Pesach, we come to a table
vivid with stacks of romaine lettuce, and clouds of salty water
wearing my grandparentsâ gestures in ceremonial coats
which carry the musk of generations, of free men.
Doyra
Shallow, like a big tambourine, without jingles,
its thick cream parchment fixed to its dark
wood hoop by round headed brass tacks. Yula
first warmed its surface with a candle flame.
Then he raised and lowered the drum time and time
again, balancing it on his palms, as though to estimate
its weight, ...