In our home, water changes its nature daily, as if governed by some inexplicable bureaucracy of taste. One morning brings ginger, another cumin, then cinnamon, sometimes even fenugreek. There exists no discernible pattern, no filing system for flavors. Each dawn requires the same ritual, a tentative sip from the jug to determine the day’s assignment. Today, inevitably, it is cumin. I hate cumin.
This uncertainty disturbs me, and the architect of this chaos is my father. He is a tall man, though somewhat rounded by age, a condition neither uncommon nor officially documented anywhere. Since Mother’s departure, he has assumed responsibility for filling the main water jug, a vessel positioned in the hall precisely before the kitchen entrance. The kitchen now falls under the jurisdiction of the house’s male inhabitants, a transfer executed without forms or ceremony.
My father’s memory has started failing him with increasing frequency, yet each morning, without exception, he prepares the flavored water and fills the jug. This task was once performed religiously by his mother, then by mine, a tradition passed down through generations of women, now entrusted to a man.
In earlier years, father had been a novelist. He wrote short stories that achieved modest recognition within our small state. He possessed a reputation for crafting unexpected conclusions, plot reversals that arrived like delayed correspondence. My father appreciated suspense, but he valued resolution even more, that peculiar satisfaction that accompanies the end of waiting, when the answer proves both surprising and more fitting than any original hypothesis.
As a child, he would compel me to read extensively, which perhaps explains my current aversion to literature. He would address my questions with methodical patience, responding to questions with patience and genuine interest. I have since ceased asking questions. Perhaps childhood permits easier interrogation; maturity automatically attaches prefixes of contemplation, followed by judgment, and frequently, inexplicable anger.
Perhaps his final short story will lack resolution entirely, his magnum opus, the work he has awaited permission to write throughout his career. It would represent the culmination of his disappointment in his son and rage at his wife’s abandonment. A narrative that proceeds somewhere and concludes nowhere, approximating his own life. An ending that does not feel like an end.
I want to taste the water on the day he completes his novel. Maybe he will introduce some unprecedented flavor. But honestly, I just hope it will not be cumin.
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