So here's me: forty-eight hours ago, bravely surviving on liquids like some kind of spiritual detox influencer. Except this wasn't wellness. This was post-endoscopic banding, one band freshly installed, and a doctor's instructions that left very little room for negotiation—liquid diet for forty-eight hours. I told myself I was fine. I was strong. I was, for all practical purposes, soup.
Then came the magic words: you can now start semi-liquids. And just like that I felt upgraded—not to business class, let's not get carried away, but at least out of the very back row. Premium economy of the digestive world.
Naturally, my brain had its own idea of what "semi-liquid" meant, and that idea was keema matar. Minced meat, soft green peas, and a masala that clings to the back of a spoon—comfort food in its most direct form. My body, predictably, had other plans. There is a band in my esophagus now, and it does not negotiate, and it does not care how convincing the craving is. Semi-liquid, it turns out, does not mean chunky minced meat with peas that have an attitude and a full masala Bollywood number playing behind them. It means smooth. Soft. Emotionally stable food. Keema matar right now would be less "comfort" and more a direct provocation—my body's polite way of asking why I insist on testing it.
So this is where I live at the moment: somewhere between moong dal and thin khichdi, in a personality built entirely around blended soup and mashed potato, where everything on my plate has exactly one job, which is to glide through without a fight. Even curd has had to tone itself down. Even buttermilk has had to behave. Even oats, of all things, have had to learn some humility. There is a strange comedy in watching your own diet get this disciplined without your permission, in realizing that the food equivalent of "keeping the peace" is now a daily requirement rather than a metaphor.
And there's a longer list of things I've started avoiding the way you avoid a text from someone you used to love a little too much: spicy gravies, fried food, anything chunky, anything citrus, anything whose entire personality seems built around testing this band's patience. Not because I don't want them—I want them constantly, embarrassingly, at hours of the day that have nothing to do with hunger—but because right now the goal is healing, not auditioning for whichever reality show rewards the worst decision-making around food.
Here's the part I didn't expect: how much this small, almost comic restriction has turned into a genuine lesson in the gap between wanting and being ready. I want the keema matar. I am not lying about that, not softening it for effect—there are entire minutes of my day spent doing something close to mourning a dish I have not technically lost, just postponed. But wanting something and being able to hold it safely are two completely different conditions, and most of the discomfort of this whole process has nothing to do with the food itself and everything to do with sitting inside that gap without rushing to close it. The craving doesn't go away just because the timing is wrong. It just waits there, fully formed, asking to be noticed, and the actual work is learning to let it exist without immediately obeying it.
Am I dreaming about keema matar? Constantly. Am I going to eat it this week? Not unless I'm trying to get personally unfollowed by my own doctor. For now, I am on good terms with Dal. I have made a kind of peace with khichdi. I respect the band, mostly because it has left me no other option, but also because it's teaching me something I clearly needed to learn the slow way: that wanting a thing badly is not, on its own, permission to have it yet.
One day, keema matar, we will absolutely reunite, and it will be everything I've been imagining at odd hours for two weeks straight.
But today is not that day.
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