The Same Word

Chapter 1: I. The Last Jar

The Kensington Market Ferment Fair was held every September in a church hall that smelled of vinegar, garlic, and ambition. A hundred jars lined the long folding tables: sauerkraut and kombucha, pickled beets, preserved lemons, one suspicious cloudy thing labeled Grandma's Secret. An elderly judge in a Blue Jays cap moved down the rows with a tiny wooden spoon, tasting and frowning like a man defusing bombs. Meenakshi Subramaniam stood behind table forty-one, beside a jar of her grandmother's mango pickle, and wished she were dead. She was thirty-one years old, a transit planner with a master's degree and a perfectly good Saturday, and she had been conscripted. "You will take the maangai oorugai," Paati had told her at breakfast, in the voice of a woman handing down a commandment. "You will win. If you do not win, you will not tell me." The pickle was red as a sunset, thick with chili and mustard seed and sesame oil, and it had not won. The judge had tasted it, gone a remarkable shade of purple, drunk a pitcher of water, and moved on to table forty-two. First prize went to a man in a beard selling sauerkraut. "That," said a voice at her elbow, "was a crime." She turned. The man at table forty-two was tall and slightly rumpled, in a black apron dusted with flour and red pepper flakes. He had an open, tired, friendly face and glasses that kept sliding down his nose. In front of him stood a large glass jar of kimchi, glowing like a stained-glass window, with a handwritten label in Korean. "I tasted yours," he said. "While the judge was distracted. I have not been the same since. My mouth is a war zone. It was the best thing I've eaten all year." "I tasted yours," said Meena, because it was only fair. "It's very good. It's also, I think, trying to kill me." He laughed, a quick surprised bark. "Daniel Park." "Meena." "My halmoni made me enter," said Daniel, gesturing at the jar. "My grandmother. She said, 'You will win, or you will not come to dinner.' I think she was joking. I'm not certain." "My grandmother said almost exactly that." Meena stared at him. "Word for word, practically." "Is it always the grandmothers?" "It's always the grandmothers." They stood in the vinegar-scented hall among the losing jars, grinning at each other like conspirators. Somebody dropped a tray. A child shrieked. At the far end of the room, the sauerkraut man was being photographed with a blue ribbon. "What do you call your dad?" asked Daniel, out of nowhere. "Sorry?" "I'm doing a bit of research. For a theory." His ears had turned pink. "I call mine Appa." Meena blinked. "Appa," she said slowly. "I call mine Appa." "You're not Korean." "I'm Tamil. It means 'father.' It's been Appa for about two thousand years." "It means 'daddy' in Korean," said Daniel, in wonder. "What about your mother?" "Amma." "Umma," said Daniel. "It's Umma." They stared at each other. They had, it seemed, been sharing the same two words their whole lives, across eight thousand miles and a language family that had never once met. "Well," said Meena, with the unsteady feeling of a woman walking onto thin ice, "that can't be a coincidence." "No," Daniel agreed gravely. "I think we should get coffee and investigate."