Author: ndinamoni@gmail.com

It started with biryani.

Memorial Day weekend. A friend’s wife had gone to India a few days earlier, leaving behind an empty house that quietly volunteered itself as the venue for the evening. One friend cooked. He arrived with a pot of chicken biryani, fragrant and unhurried, sprinkled with fried onions on top and dried raisins hidden inside. Not a few raisins in one corner. Everywhere. You could not escape one in any bite, and you did not want to. The moment you bit into one, the juice would infuse into your mouth. Sweet, unexpected, perfect.

After the first bite, chicken, raisin, rice, spices all arriving at once, someone asked the inevitable question. Do you have any pickle?

Our host thought about it. Then picked up his phone and called his wife. She was 12.5 hours ahead, somewhere in the middle of her afternoon in India, and she answered. No pickle in the house. Our host reported back. We accepted this.

The biryani ran out. The friend who cooked went back to his own home for more, and returned with something better than store-bought, a homemade lime pickle. We opened it, and immediately the next question formed itself. Do you have pappadam?

Our host called his wife. She answered. No pappadam either. Another friend knew he had some at his place, went and got it.

Now we had biryani, homemade lime pickle, and pappadam. Which meant only one thing was missing. You have to be a Malayali to understand the specific joy of a boiled egg with biryani, pickle and pappadam. It is not a combination you explain. You just know.

Someone asked about eggs. Our host reached for his phone.

The table revolted. Hands went up. No. Don’t. Put it down. Find out yourself.

Our host looked genuinely lost for a moment, a man standing in his own kitchen, not knowing what it contained.

Our host found the eggs in the fridge. They were there all along.

And that was the evening. Biryani, lime pickle fetched from one home, pappadam fetched from another, eggs found after a small intervention. His kitchen contributed almost nothing to its own party. Not because he is a bad host. Just because the person who knew where everything was kept was 12.5 hours away, and he called his wife every time without hesitation. And every time, she answered.

We laughed about it that night. It was funny. It still is.

But somewhere on the way home I kept thinking about it. About how completely we can live inside a life that someone else quietly organizes around us. The pickle, the pappadam, the location of eggs in our own fridge. We don’t notice any of it until it’s gone.

We are more dependent on our spouses than we will ever admit. Most of us just haven’t had a Memorial Day party to prove it.

A few years ago I was in the UK watching a film that audiences widely loved. I was enjoying it thoroughly. During the interval I heard a couple of people nearby tearing it apart. Completely dismissing it. And I remember feeling a mild surprise, not because they disliked it, but because there was no curiosity in the dismissal. No question of why the filmmaker made the choices they made. Just a verdict.

That is where I think we go wrong with art. Disliking something is perfectly fine. Personal taste is personal. What I like you may not like and there is nothing to debate there. But there is a difference between not liking something and not trying to understand why it was made. The second one is a closed door. The first one is just preference.

This comes back to me every time I think about something a friend said after visiting museums in Holland. He came back and said that Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings are better than Van Gogh and the only reason Van Gogh is so famous is because nobody is promoting Raja Ravi Varma. I am not sure why my friend felt the way he did. I have seen a couple of Van Gogh paintings myself and I liked them. But I am no art connoisseur. I cannot tell you why one painting is greater than another. What I do know is that my friend was not wrong to feel what he felt. And I was not wrong to feel what I felt. We were just standing in different places looking at the same wall.

That is the thing about any art form. The question worth asking is never whether you liked it. The question worth asking is why someone made it, and why it moves certain people the way it does. You do not have to change your opinion at the end of that inquiry. But you will almost certainly come out of it a little more interesting than when you went in.

A friend’s daughter won third place at a science exhibition last week. Smart kid, good result, proud parents, and one firm condition: nothing on social media.

Her parents are not the type to flood your feed. They post occasionally, the way most people my age do. A trip here, a family moment there. Something worth sharing with people who actually know them. So when their daughter won, the instinct was there. But the condition held.

I found this oddly moving.

Think about how we grew up. Our parents didn’t announce our achievements either, but that wasn’t a philosophy. There was no platform, no audience waiting, no little heart button to press. Pride lived in the house. Sometimes it didn’t even make it to dinner conversation. You could ask whether there were achievements worth announcing in my case, and I wouldn’t put up much of a fight on that front.

Then came our generation. We corrected hard. Every gold star, every participation ribbon, every school play where your child stood at the back and moved their mouth approximately near the words. Posted, tagged, captioned. We turned small victories into little public festivals. We were making up for something, I think. All those years of quiet houses.

And now this girl wins third prize at a science exhibition and says: keep it off the internet.

Not out of embarrassment. Not because she lost. Because she wanted it for herself.

Which is, if you think about it, exactly what our parents were doing.
Except our parents didn’t have a choice.

I don’t think of myself as a particularly kind person. Practical, mostly. Mildly suspicious of strangers at gas stations, definitely.

So when a woman approached me at the Costco pump one afternoon and asked for a dollar, my first instinct wasn’t generosity. It was math. Her story was detailed enough to be either completely true or completely invented. She had left her purse at home. She just needed enough gas to get back, get it, and return. One dollar.

I gave it to her mostly because I couldn’t work out which it was.

Then she said she’d have to use my card to pay at the pump. That part I hadn’t agreed to. I stood there doing the mental calculation. How much is this going to cost me, and at what point does skepticism become the smarter choice. I swiped anyway. She filled for nearly two dollars. Asked for my number to Zelle the money back.

I got in the car thinking, well. That’s probably the last of that.

My son had been watching the whole thing from the passenger seat. He looked at me and said, simply, “You are a kind person.”

Not that was kind of you. Not good job, dad. Just a fact he was reporting, the way you’d confirm something you’d already known for a while.

In that moment, I had already let the money go. Whatever she did with it, wherever it went, it didn’t matter anymore. Something else had just happened that was worth considerably more than two dollars.

The Zelle notification came through in an hour. She had paid it back in full, with a thank you.

Honestly, by then it was almost beside the point.

I hadn’t thought he was paying that close attention. I hadn’t thought a one-dollar decision at a gas pump was the kind of thing that registered.

I didn’t know such a small act could leave that kind of impression.

I still think about what he said more than I think about the dollar.

We were supposed to start at 5:45. A smaller group this time, which meant we actually did.

I had done Butcher Jones once before, almost two years ago in March. That time there were wildflowers and everything felt generous. May is a different proposition. The desert has already made up its mind about summer, and by nine in the morning it was telling us clearly.

But here is the thing about this trail. It doesn’t feel like most Phoenix hikes. You walk out expecting the usual, rock, scrub, a ridge, a view if you earn it. Butcher Jones gives you water. A lot of it, and for a long time. The trail follows the Saguaro Lake shoreline, the lake always present alongside you, and then cuts across toward the Salt River arm, another wide open body of water waiting on the other side. Saguaro and Salt River are connected somewhere. We just never saw where.

We found oleander and lilac in bloom near the water. Pink and purple against all that brown and blue. Nobody expected it.

We started in the quiet. A few people were just beginning to launch their boats as we set off. By the time we came back, the lake had become something else entirely, campers along the shore, paddleboards on the water, a full summer Saturday in progress.

6.1 miles. Not much elevation. A lot of sky and a lot of water, which in Arizona is its own kind of strenuous.

We were supposed to start at 5:45 AM. That was the plan. We started at 6:15. That’s just how it goes when a group of adults assembles in a parking lot before sunrise.

The trail fee was $5. Cash only, drop it in an envelope. Nobody had a pen. Some of us had $10 and no change. We sorted it out the way groups always do: improvisation, mild chaos, and someone eventually finding a solution. Then we started walking.

Elephant Mountain Loop. 7.4 miles, 1,444 feet of elevation gain. I had looked at exactly one thing before signing up: the elevation. That’s my usual filter. Most trails I do are under 4 miles, so I look at how hard the climb is and leave it there. I did not look at the distance. 7.4 miles is nearly double what I normally do. I found this out the hard way.

The first stretch was manageable. Ascents, yes, but mild ones. The creek crossing came along the way: dry, just rocks and sand, not a drop of water. Somewhere in that stretch the thought crossed my mind: what does this look like in monsoon season? Does it actually flow? How would anyone hike through here with water rushing across the path? The questions came and went as I kept walking.

Then the real climb started. What came before the creek was warmup. What came after was the actual work, the kind of ascent where you stop making conversation and start making deals with yourself about the next hundred feet.

The saguaros on the slope were doing interesting things in the morning light. One of them had arms going in three different directions, like it had spent a century arguing with itself about which way to grow. I stopped for that one.

When we reached the highest point on the trail, someone said we could go a little further. Off trail. Up to the actual peak. There was a sign. The sign said closed.

We looked at the sign. We looked at the peak. Then we spotted another group already up there, having made the same calculation ahead of us.

We went.

The view from up there was the kind that makes the entire morning make sense. The whole valley laid out below, hills receding into haze in every direction, the city a faint suggestion at the edge of the horizon. One of those views where you stop taking pictures for a moment because you realize the camera isn’t going to get it anyway. Then you take the pictures.

Then someone said we had 4 miles left.

The way back was different. The group split into three somewhere on the descent. The fast ones ahead, the steady ones behind, me somewhere in the middle with my camera. That’s the thing about long trails. They sort people out eventually. Everyone finds their own pace when the summit is behind them and it’s just distance left to cover.

I made it back. I drove home. I sat down and discovered that 7.4 miles of desert climbing had done something that months of gym sessions had not managed. It had actually activated my glutes. I have been working on lower body strength all year. Apparently what was needed all along was a closed trail and poor planning.

The lesson I am taking from this: read the full trail description, not just the elevation. And when someone suggests a detour, go. The detour is usually the point.

I am not someone who calls people often.

But I think about them. Old colleagues from a project that ended years ago. Friends from a city I no longer live in. They show up in my thoughts, sometimes randomly, sometimes when something reminds me of them. I savor the memory. I smile, or I become a little sad. And then I continue with my day.

No message sent. No call made. Just the feeling, held privately, and then released.

A friend said something once that stayed with me. We were talking about presence, how being seen creates connection, how absence quietly erodes it. He said it almost in passing.

Out of sight, out of mind.

I paused. Turned it over. It was one of those observations that feels obvious the moment you hear it, and yet you had never quite said it to yourself that clearly before.

Most of us who have moved away from home understand this in a particular way. We left. The relationships we had with parents, with childhood friends, with the people who knew us before we became who we are now, moved to the phone. And the phone is only as good as the calls we make.

I think of people. But they cannot feel me thinking of them. The warmth I hold privately goes nowhere. It doesn’t arrive. It doesn’t count.

I hold people in my thoughts like it is a form of tending. It isn’t.

And then I think about the other side of this. Not what I do to others, but what others may be doing to me. Right now, somewhere, someone is thinking of me. Savoring a memory. Smiling, or becoming a little sad. And doing nothing.

I just don’t know who.