This morning I woke up exhausted from dreaming. Once again that familiar trope. I am in a dark, dingy examination hall in a government-run school in Kurla. There’s a surprise test for which I am totally unprepared. The format is multiple choice and has something to do with general knowledge and I find myself asking the same question, to whom is this kind of knowledge ‘general’ or even ‘generic’. Everyone around me is cheating. I try but am unsuccessful. I don’t have the skill for it, but I remember feeling comforted by the gesture of someone assuming I might actually know something. I feel solidarity in my helplessness. I remember a New Yorker cartoon, a professor standing in front of a blackboard that has the words Final Exam underlined. He is addressing his students. The text reads, “I’d like to extend a special welcome to those of you who are joining us for the first time, as part of a nightmare you’re having.” I wondered, when I woke up, whether my dream had been triggered by my encounter with the cartoon a day ago, or whether it was a psychic manifestation of stress. It took me a while to really awaken, but when I did, mostly motivated by hunger, two words floated in my brain before making their way to my tongue—French Toast. 

As I walked from my bedroom to the kitchen, stopping, en route, to wash my dream-drenched face, I had already summoned the memory of my father’s version of French Toast. He always uses two bowls, one for the milk and sugar mixture, the other for the beaten egg, and he almost always used ladi pav, slicing it up, dipping it lovingly in the milk, then the beaten egg, then frying it until it was lightly caramelised, but not so long it stopped being juicy. I struggled to successfully recall the last time he made me this particular breakfast. I cracked open an egg, holding my breath for fear it might have already moved to an embryonic stage (my father-in-law’s farmer friend who keeps gifting us eggs told us his chicken had been sitting on this batch for three days). As I prepared the mixture in which the sliced whole wheat bread would be drowned before meeting the hot buttered surface of the pan, I thought of my sister. Through most of our school years she and I spent Thursday mornings experimenting with eggs. It was our thing. Thursday was when our school took the day off. We had the luxury of waking up late, unlike every other school day, when we would be up at 6 am and our mother cooked us breakfast, tied our hair, packed our dabbas and sent us off before leaving for work.