You want my crab curry recipe? The one I have to hide from my strictly vegetarian mother? The stink of death is in that curry. And more onions than you can imagine, and tamarind pulp. Still want it?
I have three mud crabs from the Maroochy River rattling about in the freezer, undergoing euthanasia. My kitchen is full of sediment, riversand, and mangrove muck. I’m committed to this now. How do I clean these things?
It involves prying open the shell, scraping and washing. It is tedious and never done. We will be eating the silt of generations smothered in masala. My mother will smell it on us a mile off.
There must be instructions on YouTube, right? Something about removing dead man’s fingers. This is a messy business.
Did you expect neat, clean prayer when two compliant, pious girls meet skin-to-skin? You chop the onions. You know my eyes can’t cope with them.
I haven’t cried in all the years I’ve lived alone. There are so many ways to peel onions without tears.
Yes, that’s the kind of thing my mother says as she snatches the knife from me, tetching at my ineptitude. She’d love you if you were a thirty-five-year-old IT professional named Rajiv.
Who could love a middle-class white girl with a mortar and pestle spilling with antennae and prawn-eyes, a grey-brown sludge of brains or guts and shell that won’t disintegrate? She can’t meet me like this. I stink of onions, estuary mud and saltwater.
The smell will pull her like a fish snagged on the line. Perhaps we should have made salad instead. Something healthful, gleaming with lemon and oil.
I want tamarind-soaked flesh, briny and sour. Isn’t that what you want too?
Maybe I want a salad. Maybe I want you to savour me down to my empty shell. Maybe I want to keep hiding inside this recipe.
I have spent too many years on a diet of lettuce and bland starch. What was held in these prawn heads? Starch dreams of gods or salt? They are crushed now. They are to be devoured.
Have you chopped the onions? Pulped the tamarind? You must get your biggest pot, your hottest element, more oil than you can imagine. Put the onions in, allow the smoke and smell to choke you.
This kitchen has been holding a low simmer for years. This fragrance, the edge of char, the saltwater: how can I say this is who I have always been?
What do you think led me to you, even as I hid it from myself? Part of me is frightened, pulls to safe beige starch.
The only thing we can do is take the bitter seeds we have been fed and temper them.
Warm the spices in sesame oil - cardamom, fennel, cumin, star anise.
I could stay in this kitchen forever. Your skin, and mine, and the all the onions and shellfish in the world simmering together.
And when it’s time to eat? Or when my mother comes home, looking for soup?
All she will see is a pile of shells. You and I will be peeled, and she will see what is underneath.
She will be …
She will be. And we will too, love.