ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

My Indian friend had a baby near the middle of March, and had been wanting me to come over and meet her new baby, as well as her mother, who has come from India to help out for a few months. So I agreed to come to her house on Saturday and visit with them. This was the first time I had actually been to visit at her house.

So I made my strawberry cake-pie that I know she likes, and went over to her house around lunchtime yesterday. Since I’ve heard that as far as being ready for things on time, having a new baby is kind of like having all the floors in your house made out of quicksand, I was not very surprised to find that she wasn’t quite ready for me to be there. So I sat in their parlor with her mother, who was hanging on to the baby as she hiccuped endlessly, and made polite small talk until my friend was able to get dressed.

She was very happy to see me, and since we hadn’t seen each other in months, we chatted happily when she came out. “Do you want to hold the baby?” she asked. I had secretly wanted to, but felt weird asking. “Hold her head like this,” she instructed me, placing this baby on me and nestling the baby’s head in the crook of my arm. The baby looked at me. I thought she seemed a little suspicious of me, but she didn’t make any angry sounds. It must be tough to be a baby. People want to hold you and look at you all the time and you don’t even know them.

The baby said, “Uh uh uh,” and grunted.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “Does it mean anything?” My friend explained that the baby was probably hungry, but it would be all right because her mother was in the other room fixing a bottle. “Is it true that you can teach babies sign language to tell you when they need something?” I asked her. She said that was true. I looked at her baby and tried to imagine such a tiny person signing something to us. This seemed completely crazy to me.

My friend’s baby is nice looking, and has a lot of thick, black hair. She is pretty terrific. Apparently she was unusually quiet and calm while I was there, since normally she doesn’t sleep very much, and prefers to scream instead. But no screaming occurred during my visit.

A couple of weeks ago, I acquired a large, stuffed horse from someone whose kids had outgrown it. When I was little I would have given almost anything for a giant toy horse like this. So I had gotten this idea that I would give the horse to my Indian friend’s son, who is in Kindergarten this year and probably is feeling a little neglected from all the attention that his parents have to give his little sister now. The horse had a couple of places that needed patching, and I had to open up a seam near one of his legs so I could add some polyfill stuffing to rebalance him a little bit, but I used an upholstery repair needle and the repairs went really quickly. Since I know her son is really into stuff like Spiderman and Transformers, I wasn’t sure how well a plain old horse would go over, but I at least knew that he liked stuffed animals because a couple years ago I gave him a stuffed meerkat and he practically went into delighted convulsions over the thing.

The experience of giving him this horse has convinced me that there are few pleasures in life that can compare to giving a small child a gift they weren’t expecting. When I first got there, he was at a soccer game with his father, and when he got back, I heard him shouting, “Is Melissa here yet?!” I secretly love it when kids like me. I don’t know if I will ever have any of my own, but it is just so nice to feel that someone just plain likes you. And kids are so obvious about it. He ran into the parlor and asked me, “Will you read me my Spiderman book?!” I told him of course, and added that I had brought something for him. He jumped up and down a few times to show how overjoying this news was, and ran into the other room to change out of his soccer clothes.

He went to the car with me to get the horse, and before I opened it, I told him it was a stuffed toy and asked him if he wanted to guess what kind of animal I had brought. “A bear?” he hazarded. I told him no, it was a kind of animal you can sit on. “HIPPOPOTAMUS!” I told him sorry, no, and opened the car to show him a horse that was probably larger than he was. He began screaming with delight and seized it immediately. He was having trouble moving it, so I held up the back end while we took it in the house. He immediately threw it on the floor and straddled it when we got inside. “I’m naming it Horsey!” he said. “No! Africa!”

“That’s a good name,” I told him.

“Wait, I want to name him Kobe,” he said.

The alleged sex offender? I thought. “What made you decide that?” I asked.

“My friend on my soccer team is called Kobe,” he told me.

“Oh. I get it now,” I said.

He “rode” the horse around the entryway a little bit, then had a big wrestling match with it on the floor of their sitting room. After a little bit, he recovered from his ecstatic joy and put the horse on the floor with its head on the couch, between him and me. He stroked its mane happily while I read him a beginning reader’s novelization of Spiderman 3. Between you readers and me, I didn’t think too much of the adaptation. Not that the movie itself wasn’t a terrible joke, anyway.

While all this was happening, my friend and her mother had disappeared into the kitchen for quite a while and it took me a little bit to figure out that this was because they were putting the finishing touches on an elaborate banquet of Indian food. “I was going to have four more dishes,” her mother said apologetically, “but the baby wasn’t sleeping very well today.” I assured her that this looked delightful, and that it was much, much more than I’d expected.

I took a small plate and tried a portion of everything on the table. It was wonderful. Much better than the Indian restaurants I’ve been to here in town. I felt a little awkward, because as their guest of honor, I was served first while they continued to work in the kitchen. Her husband took some food and we sat there eating with our plates on our laps, since the entire dining table was covered with the elaborate spread they had prepared.

My friend and her mother then proceeded to stuff me with Indian food until I was physically ill. I have never experienced anything like it. After I had finished my first plate, I was more or less comfortably satisfied, and in the back of my mind, was anticipating that after we ate, we’d sit and have a nice chat, and maybe an hour or so later we’d have some tea and maybe a piece of the strawberry cake I’d brought. Then they began clucking about how I had eaten nothing, just nothing at all, and against my protests, piled my plate with more and more food. Her mother stayed in the kitchen and made naan bread, and with each new batch she carried another steaming, delicious piece out and placed it on my plate.

I was beginning to get pretty uncomfortable and had no idea what to do. They would not take no for an answer, and none of the other “food pushers” I’d run into had ever been quite like this. “Don’t you like it?” they asked sorrowfully when I told them I couldn’t eat anymore. After stuffing me until I could hardly take it, then then insisted that I eat the dessert they had made. I could tell that the food was delicious, but I was so full that none of it tasted good anymore. By the time dessert was over, I was almost desperate to leave. They sent me home with most of the leftovers, too, which I have not had the appetite to dip into just yet.

After I left, the incident troubled me the rest of the day, and not just digestively. I tried to explain it to my boyfriend, but he didn’t understand why I couldn’t just say no or refuse to eat it. I don’t completely know myself. But they were, like, unstoppable. I knew they must have spent hours and hours on this meal, and the way they were acting really made me feel like I’d be really insulting them and their effort if I didn’t eat triple servings of everything. When I was a Japanese major back in my KU days, we learned a lot of Japanese customs, such as that when someone gives you a gift you’re supposed to refuse several times and let them insist on giving it to you, so you seem appropriately humble, and things like that. So I don’t know if there was something like that at work here, and I just wasn’t catching on, or if it’s normal for Indian people to force each other to eat until they throw up.

Since I don’t understand all the nuances of Indian customs, and I really wanted to make my friend happy by making a good impression on her mother, whom I will probably not meet again for a very long time, if at all, I didn’t want to insult their hospitality. So I guess that was my problem. My friend asked me to come back sometime in the next couple of weeks to see them again before her mother had to leave, and I am uncomfortable with this prospect. I said okay, since I didn’t know what else to do, and she said next time I should make sure not to eat any breakfast, since then I can be a better eater! I don’t know how to explain to her that I can’t eat like that, without making them feel like I wasn’t grateful for all the effort they put into the whole thing, or that I didn’t like their cooking. They fed me probably twice or three times what I normally eat in a day, at one sitting.

I really hadn’t expected any of this. I don’t know why, but I had in the back of my mind this idea that we’d have some simple cold cut sandwiches or something, some tea, and some of my cake. We didn’t even cut into the cake! I just left it there. I had no idea that my visit would make my sick for the rest of the day. I couldn’t even manage to eat any dinner last night. My boyfriend suggested that I should go over at a time that wasn’t close to a meal, but she made it pretty clear she wants to do the same thing again next time. I’d offer to meet her somewhere else, but she has a new baby that she can’t really leave, so I don’t know. I think I am just going to have to explain to her that even though the food was wonderful, it made me sick to eat so much last time, and I can’t do that again. I hope I can convince her to just make less food next time.

It’s great to spend time with my friend, but this made me sick enough that it pretty much hosed the rest of my Saturday. Also, it probably set me back a week as far as my Weight Watchers efforts go. I can’t afford to have another visit like this!