You are driving. Or walking. A hearse passes - empty or full; nobody stops to check - and before your brain has finished forming a thought, your hand is already at your hair.
THEY keep finding me. At the garage. At the temple gate. In the queue at the fish market, where an aunty I have never met gripped my arm and said, "you left out the pickle jar," as though I had wronged her grandmother's memory. So pull your chair in closer. There is more.
Every household had one. Not the good glass jars from the shop - the old cream-coloured ceramic ones, wide-mouthed, with the brown screw-on seal that never sat straight again after the first year. Inside: mango achar, dark with oil, sharp enough to clear your sinuses from three rooms away.
There was a law in that kitchen, unspoken, unwritten, and non-negotiable - you did not touch that jar unless you had bathed. And truthfully, even then you still couldn't touch it. Ma - or more often, Ajji - bathed before she made the pickle, and again before lifting the lid to check on it days later. You, small and certain a quick rinse under the tap was close enough, learned fast, and usually loudly, that it was not.
"That jar sat in the cupboard like a small deity with a brown lid, and only one woman in the house had ever been granted an audience with it."
