Banana Chips

or, the formula to oneness

He’d turned up with a bag bigger than the bottle. The chips glowed like embers from within. These were the spicy kind. All three of us had cleared our evenings. We had a date with fast cars and the filthy rich.

I think I remember watching a guy make them fresh over an outdoor kadhai, sweating from the sun and maybe also the bubbling oil. I’d not yet learned not to stare. I watched, unblinking, as he used a paring knife and sliced translucent vertical strips off bananas on the cusp of ripe, straight into the oil. The pater I’d accompanied finished his purchase of the deep-fried. Potato, on this occasion.

It’s always the salt and pepper that baffles me. You get your little round coconut-oil fried slices. They’re yellow and salty; pair well with popular fiction and pinot. You get the long, thin ones, the breadth burning your very breath as you watch your pretentious, popular-with-the-white-so-why-not-me-trans-community anime. It goes with Gundam.

The pepper…I couldn’t possibly tell you. I’ve watched miscellaneous uncles and aunties ask for it, at my local ‘south indian’(Kannadiga) store. There’s a rhythm to this.

I ask for coffee, chicory if they have it. A knowing smile. “Moka Pot?”, as he walks over, barely waiting for affirmation before he grinds it that fine. In that time, a man who is either irate or hurried will enter and push past me. He will find his salt and pepper banana chips. He will stare at me the way an Indian man stares at a trans woman. He will pay. He will leave. I will meet his ilk next month, as I did last month.

The snack of the uncourteous, the perverse. I’ll pass.

A bag that should’ve been illegal to sell sat ignored. Banana chips be damned, Charles Leclerc was about to win. The fangirl I am and the sports addicts these boys are, we were transfixed. It’s raining in Monaco. It’s raining in Maharashtra. He can win this. He will win thi-

“Box box……STAY OUT STAY OU-”…

“NO XAVI!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!”

Our gazes fall. Two centimeters to the left of the banana bag. We’re looking at the rum. We fire up the Pokémon emulator a pretty lady helped me make on Discord. The chips meet their fate while I drunkenly lose a game from the 90s. Freaking Geodude. (My favourite’s Sylveon; I’ve never watched Pokémon).

I’ve looked for that large a bag since. I have failed. I have hung the hopes of reading some dozen Asian-American authored trauma diaries on the availability of this bag. I have made do with several smaller ones.

Pedestrian, I call it: this simple coexistence of my vice and what society considers a virtue. In the mould of my sisters, and my actual sister, before me, I splay myself on flooring, cushioning and bedding, kindle in one hand, the other hand obscured by Kannada branding or the colours of the Fritolay company.

This is my Jihad.

I feel whole, having read; I feel sick, an oral fixation left untreated. Were cigarettes not in my past, this is where they would rest. Full ashtrays and autobiographies come to mind.

A dark longing the doctors now call dysphoria relents only now: Salty carbohydrate and narrative fiction. Traversing my evenings in a woman’s body humbled me. So that’s why there’s a whole Book of Revelations.

I did it with tea once. I tried. I put 4 bags of rooibos in a Stanley, filled it to the brim and spent the evening reading Camus. A chef and a programmer watched an Idris Elba movie beside me.

The next morning, I exhausted the dregs of a meagre wage on Kerala’s finest banana chips. I’m not that girl. I want to wear my leg warmers and curl up with my plushies in a room that suggests lace and looks pink,but…

But my knees get sweaty and I ride bicycles. My plushies get flung off my bed the second I hit REM, so they live in a cupboard.

I curl up regardless. I have a cushion and I have a playlist. I read of, say, a rock musician eulogising her mother through tales of disciplining in Korean supermarket aisles. I read of a woman falling for a billionaire’s daughter with the world ending, but for the hill they’re on. I hoover deep-fried banana detritus off the bedsheet.

There’s a failed architect with summer in her hair, salt on her lips and me in a sketchbook. She’ll never write about her mother. There’s a world ending out the window. A hill outside mine. She said she’d come.