Titles of my autobiography I have discarded
-Everything I know I learned from my mother
-Life changed the second time my sister went into hospital
-Shame is a social construct
-My first day at nursery, the teacher blushed when I described an aubergine
-While my parents argued, my sister made up potions to cure them and I wrote stories about lizards
-The things I learnt from my parents about a long-distance marriage
-My first memory is my sister coughing while she sang
-These are the stories handed down in my family
-When my sister couldn’t go to University, I became a doctor
-Summers in Mumbai, winters in Essex
-The first time I made daal, I burnt the spices
-I found out I was allergic to fruitcake at my wedding
-My nana taught me to make egg curry through Skype
-There are no pictures of my father in my parents’ house
-In Mumbai, there’s no concept of personal space
–Some stories don’t travel well between continents
-On my sister’s first day at primary school, the teacher laughed when she described an aubergine
-How do you find what you’re looking for if you don’t know what it is?
-You can’t buy saffron in Saffron Walden
-Mother said my first word was medicine
-My mother was an unreliable narrator
Anita Goveas is British-Asian, based in London, and fueled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She’s on the editorial team at Flashback Fiction, an editor at Mythic Picnic’s Twitter zine, and tweets erratically @coffeeandpaneer Links to her stories can be found at https://coffeeandpaneer.