When the kettle began to sing, I knew something at home had started its quiet ritual. A high, trembling note threading through the kitchen, threading through the day, and that meant: comfort, warmth, arrival.

My mother made Maggi noodles the way someone builds a sanctuary. It wasn’t just the packet that promised “two minutes”; it was the promise inside her hands, the slow choreography behind the small story of dinner. She did not trust “two minutes.” She believed in the time it took to make something matter.

First, she would heat the oil, patient and unhurried until it shimmered like sunlight caught in a puddle. Then came the small, neatly cut potatoes, slipping into the pan with a soft hiss, followed by fennel and a scatter of spices that bloomed in the air like old perfume. Next, the peas, tiny green planets freed from their pods rolled in with a gentle clatter. Sometimes carrots too, ribbons of orange catching the lamp-light above the stove, glowing like quiet flames. I perched on the counter, legs swinging, watching the steam rise in lazy spirals. I didn’t yet understand that every slice, every stir, was her way of saying, I care. I’m here and I love you.

The yellow noodles went in next. They tumbled and curled, softening in the water’s embrace, soaking in the masala, the warmth, the promise. She hummed then — an old, sorrowless tune, drifting from her lips like a breeze through curtains. The smell filled the apartment: ginger, powdered spice, the faint echo of something golden and whole. It was the smell of home before the words arrived.

When she carried the bowl across and slid it before me, it wasn’t just food. It was something larger: a statement in silence, a bridge between our unspoken spaces. Steam curled upward, dancing underneath the yellow light of the stove, making the air thick with the possibility of calm. I always burned my tongue on the first spoonful — impatient, wanting everything at once and she would smile, the smallest hint of knowing, and turn back to whatever work lingered behind her. We never said much. It didn’t need saying yk. It was one of those things where silence spoke loudly.

The years went on. I stretched upward. The kitchen smelled a little less like magic and a little more like habit. She still made Maggi, but now the humming had faded, and the bowl often waited for me, steam vanished, the table quietly dim. The nights grew longer, the silences deeper.

One evening, after a heavy day at work and school, I came home late. The house was dark. The stove held a covered pot. Inside, the noodles had gone soft, water-logged, spent waiting. I ate them anyway. They tasted like warmth and love, the weight of something that screamed of her never ending support no matter how far or how close I am.

As I grew older, the bowls kept coming.

Through school exams, through storms, through the long, aching quiet that sometimes filled our house — there was always a bowl waiting. On the table, on the counter, on the nights I came home late and thought she’d forgotten. The steam might have faded, but the message never did.

Those bowls were never just food. They were small, wordless letters of love — sent across the distance between us. When I was too tired to speak, she would hand me warmth instead. When I failed, she didn’t console me, she fed me. And when I succeeded, she did the same. Each bowl said the same thing in a different language.

Even now, when I make Maggi myself, I try to copy her rhythm, the swirl of the spoon, the hum in the air, the soft clinking of the pot. But it never tastes quite the same. Maybe love has flavors that don’t survive the journey from giver to receiver. Maybe hers lingered only because she never tried to explain it.

They say Maggi takes two minutes. But she taught me that some things take just a little longer. They simmer. They linger and…they don’t vanish when the bowl is empty.

@pplcallmetat

PS: I wrote this as an assignment and thought I would share it.