My best friend Antubala was a budding chef and her otherworldly recipes cured me of hunger forever

The first thing Antu gifted me was her lice, which found fresh real estate on my head. And the guavas, of course

My one and only childhood friend was a girl called Antubala. She lived in a tree. It was a guava tree in the overgrown garden at the back of our house. Its branches were very keen to enter my room, and rapped loudly on the pane day and night. One afternoon, when I opened the window at a particularly sharp rap, I saw two wicked green eyes set atop a cucumber nose staring at me belligerently from among the leaves. The eyes belonged to a nut-brown face with a head full of matted hair attached to a body like a stick insect’s.

“Well?” I asked. “Well,” she said. “There are young green guavas all over this tree. You, with your slug-body, obviously cannot reach them. I can get them for you if you let me in.” And so began a lifelong friendship that has brought me only pain. The first thing Antu gifted me was her lice, which found fresh real estate on my head. And the guavas, of course.

Once Antu was inside the house, she demanded to be led straight to the kitchen. (Thankfully, the entire household was having their siesta at the time.) Entering the kitchen with a whoop, she quickly plundered the jars of rock salt and chilli powder, generously sprinkling both on the green guavas cut in half. She thought of me only after she had gobbled up at least four. My teeth rattled as they hit the unripe guavas hard as Antu’s heart but I soldiered on, shedding copious tears from the chilli. Meanwhile, Antu inspected the kitchen, poking her dirty fingers into the dough, breathing into the boiled milk, and shaking the setting curd so that it became a watery mess. Job over, she looked at me, guffawed, called me a sissy and disappeared through the window.

I felt the effect of Antu’s guavas late at night: my stomach cramped as if ten thousand sharks were waltzing inside. My mother emptied a bottle of Gelusil down my throat and said, “Antubala has found you, I see. It will only be downhill for you from here.” And so it was.

My playroom was the garret stuffed with broken furniture, window frames, empty paint cans, my grandpa’s bed pan, and my father’s Hawaiian guitar. Antu soon joined me there. Since she was a budding chef, we tried out various recipes. The first was brick squash, which involved finely grinding brick and then adding water and my mother’s kewra essence to it. We tested it on my sister, who went yellow, green and magenta by turns after taking a sip. When she went howling to mother, I was locked up in the puja room, which was a horror chamber because of its lizards the size of dragons.

It was a sad day as I cowered in the corner of the dark puja room, anticipating an attack from the dragons any time. In desperation, I called Antu, who suddenly appeared before me. Her eyes were glittering, a sure sign of danger, but I was still grateful for her presence. The first thing she did was remove the bead necklace from the Ganesha idol and wear it. Then she attacked the jars of batasha  (jaggery candy) my grandma kept there for the gods. The empty jars were rolling on the sacred floor in no time. 

Stuffed with the sweets, Antu then drank up the Ganga Jal from the steel tumbler in which grandma had offered it to the idols. “The gods will punish you,” I lashed out at Antu, at which she stuck out her tongue and said, “They already have more than enough to eat and wouldn’t care less. The punishment for attempted murder of your sister is much more severe, mind you.”