Meatless Days / Sara Suleri

 Word Count: 253

Parker Greene

From Meatless Days by Sara Suleri

" … 'Sara,' said Tillat, her voice deep with the promise of surprise, 'do you know what kapura are?' I was cooking and a little cross 'Of course I do,' I answered with some affront. 'They're sweetbreads, and they're cooked with kidneys, and they're very good.' Natives should always be natives, exactly what they are, and I felt irked to be so probed around the issue of my own nativity. But Tillat's face was kindly with superior knowledge. 'Not sweetbread,' she gently said. 'They're testicles, that's what kapura really are.' … " (pg. 731)

Sara is from Karachi, Pakistan where her father is a journalist and her mother is a Welsh-born teacher. Sara grows up having learned many things from her mother, but mostly learned about the different foods she grew up eating. One time her friend Tillat decided to tell Sara that kapura is not actually sweetbreads, that they are actually testicles. After hearing this from Tillat, Sara, was initially in denial from hearing this news to where she decided to ask her mother about this news. "It was my mother, after all, who had told me that sweetbreads are sweetbreads, and if she were wrong on that score, then how many other simple equations had I now to doubt?" Sara was now facing a huge dilemma of what she truly knew and what she didn't. She had began to doubt her world around her just from hearing this news from Tillat about kapura.