My first meaningful encounter with food took place on the French Riviera in the summer of 1991. I don’t remember it, but the story has been told to me countless times. It happened as I, a toddler with a short temper and a shrill voice, had just convinced my parents to feed me whatever was available in the car we were in; in that case, a piece of a Snickers bar.
...From my seat at the kitchen table, I watched my mother pick up a bright red pepper from her baking sheet, its skin shrivelled and scorched in several places after being roasted in the oven for nearly an hour. She held it from its bottom with both hands over a large glass bowl, and gently tore it in half. Warm pepper juice poured into the bowl along with some seeds that she would remove later. She peeled off the burned skin, and broke apart the flesh into pieces, which she also placed into the bowl.
...Welcome to Panorama’s second Quarterly issue. Panorama exists to not only publish extraordinary diverse travel literature and imagery, but to widen the definition of what travel is. This Quarterly explores the idea of ‘treasure’ through travel-themed fiction, memoir, essays, poetry, photography, and illustrations.
...A traveller by definition is a person far from home, and as such, is receptive to a never-ending stream of impressions roused by the strange. It started as a lark, a self-assigned challenge to combat boredom. I get antsy sitting around between trips. So I decided to reset my reality, or rather my perception of it, to venture out and rediscover my own city with the eyes, ears and nose of a deliberate stranger.
...This is where you could have died when you were four. Your tiny body smashed against the tree trunk, your back bent into an impossible zigzag of broken bones, your ribs forced in all directions, your kneecaps catapulted to the back of your wriggling legs, your head cracked wide open like a pomegranate, its bloody seeds raining through the fissures of your skull onto the ground.
...In 2014, I started my life over by returning to San Diego, the Californian city on the Pacific Ocean. It’s a city I have claimed as home, even though landlocked New Delhi will always be mine. Less than six miles east of the beaches of San Diego is a eucalyptus forest that still holds wildlife as well as humans. Rancho Santa Fe — the ranch of holy faith. That’s the forest I pick to hide.
...Our classrooms had earthen floors and windows the size of full moons – a truant’s blessing, but I wasn’t one. We sprinkled water every morning after sweeping, to pacify dust, and lugged tins of cow dung, on Fridays, for bi-weekly cementing of floors. That was before the Constituency Development Fund gave classrooms a facelift and saved kids from the displeasure of crouching in flea-infested cowsheds at dawn, before corporal punishment was banned, before after-school fistfights became dishonoured, before the slavery of carrying jerrycans of water to irrigate stunted hedges ended.
...It’s 1989, my brother’s fourth birthday. We all huddle together on Towan Beach, our backs against the autumn sea-gusts, and anoint him with headphones and a wired-up beeping stick. His present is a metal detector and we’re here to seek our fortune.
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