I do not remember the first time I said ‘teslam eedek’ to my mother. It is quite a strange phrase when taken out of its Egyptian context but it can be used in so many different situations, by friends, coworkers, and strangers. You say it to the girl offering you a biscuit during Eid prayers and to the waiter or barista handing you your tea. Trying to explain it to others results in clunky near-misses and half-baked notions of what it means to thank and bless the hands that prepared your food.
If you put it into Google Translate right now all that will come up is ‘Thank you’
…because saying ‘send a greeting to your hands for delivering this food’ might be a bit of a mouthful.
But, oh, how many greetings were sent to mothers, titas, wives, daughters, khalat, and ‘amat.
It is a strange thing —teslam eedek— an adage said almost like a permanent recording set to play at every meal. Akin to common fixtures like ‘what’s up’ and ‘I’m fine,’ it got relegated to the void of meaningless expressions; a statement that meant nothing then and means nothing now.
Right?
‘Teslam eedek’ we said, a collection of little girls, to our mothers as we bound up the path to our houses, the smell of the meals they prepared reaching all the way to the street. I was a compass and her kitchen, my north star. We all competed —my sister and I, with the neighborhood girls— all of us claiming our mothers’ ownership of the food we wanted to eat. It was the most serious of battles, each of us a general guiding scents and tastes in the air, commanding spices and ingredients to obey and attack the enemy lines. We had to win the most coveted prize of all: a tray of mahshi kromb and waraq ‘enab or a pot of molokhiya.
‘Teslam eedek,’ my mother said to Tita, her mother-in-law, as she showed her the perfect way to make roz m’amar. Measure the milk with your eyes and your heart and that little voice inside you that says if people can still move after the meal, then you haven’t fed them well. Use the freshest buffalo milk you can find, boil it nice and slow, and don’t you dare throw away that layer of cream and fat forming on its surface. That eshta is heavenly. Let them keep their black gold from under the ground and the pure gold they like to adorn their women in—this is white gold. It keeps them fed. It keeps them happy. It keeps them calm.
‘Teslam eedek,’ my Nana said to her Greek neighbor as she taught her a different recipe for moussaka. Don’t forget to salt and dry all your vegetables. Add your eggplants, zucchini, and potatoes only after they’ve been fried well. The minced beef and bechamel sauce must be perfection, or it’s not worth putting it all together in the tray. Bake it, bake it until your heart is content or you hear someone calling from the shores of the Greek Isles. For generations now, people will look at your moussaka in confusion. All your Egyptian family and friends will never understand why your mesaka’a is different from theirs, why it tastes so foreign.
‘Teslam eedek,’ we all said to our eldest aunt that one Eid when the old oven in the old house in the old village decided it did not want to cook anymore. The boom shook the family home to its foundations, and my aunt’s silence shook my soul to the very core of my being. We found her hunched and cowering by the wall of a kitchen that had seen brides and daughters and wives and mothers and women welcomed into the family and women who wanted to never set foot in it again. The first words out of her mouth were, “The food is fine,” as we stared at the oven that no longer had a door. I cannot fathom the thought . A few seconds and a few centimeters stand between my aunt and her shattered bones, her folded abdomen, her cracked ribs under the weight of ‘teslam eedek,’ ‘teslam eedek,’ ‘teslam eedek.’ But she was right. The food was fine. And she took the ducks out of the broken oven and turned on the stove.
‘Teslam eedek,’ my sister and I said to our mother after she had flown hours across miles of ocean with food carefully wrapped up in her luggage. Our relationship is as strained as it will ever be and looking into each other’s eyes is a herculean task. Life is too fragile, and we are all our mothers’ daughters, and greetings become heavy with the past and the future. But a mother cooks a daughter a meal, and the daughter says ‘teslam eedek,’ and life continues forward.
‘Teslam eedek,’ I whispered to my youngest aunt, my doppelganger, the name my father always mistakenly calls me, in a voice I know she did not hear. I have come to a realization that should have occurred to me ages ago, before the phrase lost all meaning and became foreign to my tongue. She was packing up the extra food after a divine Ramadan iftar, and I was snacking on the tray as she took it away. I had waited for this evening the whole month to have her mumbar and I told her as much. “You know, Roaa, I’ve never eaten at one of these gatherings.”
Your hands gather greetings only and not food, palms empty of anything of sustenance while overflowing with ‘salamaat.’
I do not remember the last time I said ‘teslam eedek’ to my mother. A phrase that was as integral to our dinner table as the plates and cutlery suddenly became scarce. We outgrew it—that’s what we said. It lost its potency the more we said it, and so we relegated it to special occasions, exceptional performances, expensive restauranteurs. The blessings of their hands fell to a childlike whimsy and naivety.
So, my mother now cooks, all her ingredients pre-prepared in jars and cans by a faceless pair of hands that have never seen a ‘salam.’ My grandmother, who would have ripped the arthritis from her fingers to roll our grapevine leaves, is easily persuaded to stop. My aunts, whose backs and hearts and bodies have never been the same again, say ordering take-out might be the best option.
In our moments of greatest joy or greatest suffering, in our moments of nothingness where life’s mundanity soldiered on, they hurried to lay the table, and we hurried to fill our mouths. Father is outside waiting for his tea. Uncle needs another serving of rice. Grandfather is seated with an empty plate in front of him. The children are hungry. We are hungry. They are hungry. So, they stirred and grilled and chopped and fried and stuffed and served, served, served. All to choruses of rushed ‘teslam eedek,’ of mumbled ‘teslam eedek,’ of spoken around a mouthful of food ‘teslam eedek.’
After days and months and years and occasions of the robotic repetition of ‘teslam eedek,’ it became evident that their hands no longer belong to their bodies. The food they crafted matters more than the bones, muscles, tendons, joints wrapped in the too rough and too stained and too burned skin of their hands.
Because after ages of getting nothing but greetings, they now have neither food nor ‘salamaat.’
One of these days, my husband, my children, my guests will tell me ‘teslam eedek.’
But the day my hands will truly be greeted will be when those words leave my mother’s palms to fall into mine.
