“What?”
He clears his throat, sitting up straighter. “Sorry. Nothing. I was going to ask about the kind of travel you do for work, but probably better to talk about something else, right?”
“Oh. Right.” I force a smile, but inwardly berate myself. I’m not sure why that reference to my job slipped out. It wasn’t purposeful. Probably just a mistake due to the travel, and jet lag, and mind-blowing sex.
We turn on the TV as we wait for the food to arrive, a UK baking show that isn’t my particular brand of reality television but that I enjoy nonetheless.
“Do you bake?” I ask, thinking about his penchant for desserts.
“No,” he says. “I’ve tried, but everything has to be so precise, so perfect, or it doesn’t come out right. It’s not the way I was taught to cook.”
“But you cook?”
He smiles. “Yes,thatI can do. My parents insisted that all of their children have the basic life skills to be able to feed themselves, so every Saturday they’d teach us something new. My younger sisters and I would crowd around our parents in the kitchen as they taught us how to make appam and ishtu, chicken curry, and parotta. And though I can’tbakeany desserts, I know how to make payasam. I used to make it for my sisters once a week.”
“I like payasam,” I say. “I never learned how to make it, though. Or anything, really. My mom worked a lot, so she’d make a big batch of food once in a while and freeze it, and we’d pull stuff out whenever we needed it. I started pitching in when I got older, but I’d just make something easy, like pasta with premade sauce.” I laugh, thinking about those undercooked noodles with a tinny tomato taste. “It was never particularly good, but she never made me feel bad about it. I don’t think we ever even tried to make dessert. I’ve only hadpayasam at restaurants, though most of the ones near us were North Indian, so they called it kheer.”
“It’s the same here. It tastes almost identical to me, but I only hear it called payasam when I’m at a South Indian restaurant.” He pauses. “Do you know what ‘payasam’ means?”
I shake my head.
“It comes from the Malayalam word for ambrosia. Or nectar.” His expression softens, growing slightly distant. “Those were part of the cooking lessons, these little fun facts about what we were making. I didn’t realize it until later, but I think…my parents worried about us. Money was tight and we only were able to go back and visit family in India every few years or so, but they wanted us to still feel connected. They wanted us to know where we came from. That even though we were living here, even though we’d made our home here, our roots were elsewhere. I think they just…wanted us to understand who they were. And who we are.”
A string tugs at my chest, his words wrapping around me, forming a cord between us.
“I get that,” I say. “My mom’s never said it like that exactly, but I’m pretty sure she felt that way too.” A piece of hair falls in my face, and I tuck it behind my ear. “We didn’t have any family close by, any family in the U.S. at all, really, so it was just the two of us. And she’d talk about that sometimes, how it was different for her growing up. How she’d always had cousins and aunts and uncles around, and how she was sometimes sad she couldn’t give that to me. Though she shouldn’t have been. She was amazing and present, and still is, but I always felt bad that moving meant she had to give that up. That we both had to miss out on it.”
He hums in acknowledgment, his arm tightening around my shoulders, his fingers playing with the ends of my hair. I settle against him, and we quietly watch the baking competition on-screen. Acontestant accidentally knocks over a rival’s tray, and I laugh when the rival responds kindly with a cheerful “accidents happen,” and the incident’s over before it’s barely begun.
“I’ve seen this show before,” I say. “It’s popular in the U.S. too, but it’s always so funny to me how nice everyone is.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Are people in the U.S. not nice?”
“No, they are, but not in our reality shows. Competition shows like this are built around…well, competition. If something like that happened on one of our networks, the music would swell, there’d be some kind of ominous sound, and the contestants would yell. Maybe call each other names. Stuff that would have to be bleeped out.”
“Who’d want to watch that?” he says, his nose wrinkling.
“Plenty of people,” I say, a bit defensive. Those kinds of shows may not be my particular favorite, but any judgment about viewer preferences tends to raise my alarm. “Sometimes the drama’s a little manufactured, heightened, but that doesn’t mean real things aren’t happening underneath. Other shows are more subtle about it, and some have it at the forefront, but really, it’s just a stylistic difference.”
He listens, his expression thoughtful, and adjusts the frames of his glasses over the bridge of his nose. “But a difference in style can sometimes mean a difference in substance,” he says.
“I…I’m not sure I follow.”
“Well, say you had the same paragraph, the same exact words, but one person delivered it as an angry monologue, another as a slow, acoustic song, and another as spoken word. Even though they’re all saying the exact same thing, their stylistic choices could impart different meaning, might bring different things out of the same text.”
“I suppose,” I say, thinking about how two different producers could create wildly different storylines from the same raw footage. “Though with shows like these, it’s different, because the producersare actively involved in the creation of the text. They’re present while things are filmed, impacting the narrative.”
He nods excitedly. “Yes, so the stylistic choice of the show, determined by the producers or whoever is in charge, is impacting the substance. At least to a degree.”
I ruminate on that as the show continues, a montage of the English countryside playing before the contestants present their trifles to the judges.
I take my work seriously. My co-workers do as well, and producer involvement in crafting narrative has always been part of the appeal of reality television to me. It’s not static; the creation isn’t confined to some writers’ room. It’s active, the storyline constantly changing, and we’re part of that, intervening here and there, co-creating the story with our contestants. But does the style, the format of our show, impact the narrative as well?
I’m not sure I’ve thought about that as much.
A knock sounds on our door, and I open it for a hotel employee. She’s incredibly efficient, setting down a tray on the small desk in the corner, asking me to sign the bill, then leaving quickly.
“I can pay you for my half,” the man says, but I wave his offer away.
