The water spilled over the rim, hissing on the stove, making a mess the way things do when no one is watching. I turned down the flame, wiped the counter, and cleaned what could be cleaned. The bubbles subsided.…
“Frozen Momos” began with a practical question: what kind of food do you make for dinner when the world feels unmanageable? Cooking from scratch assumed a surplus of energy that I didn’t have. Frozen food is already decided and sealed in plastic. You do not improvise. You follow instructions: boil water, wait, eat.
I wanted to show how ordinary gestures like wiping a counter, boiling water, or spacing momos can create the appearance of control during times like these. The story stays close to the kitchen, letting geopolitical rhetoric and xenophobia seep in sideways through television noise, text alerts, and sirens. Anxiety does not announce itself out loud. It builds, like steam under a lid, until it fills the room.
The momos carry memories. As a child, making them was a shared, collective activity, one that was tactile and boisterous. In the story, preparing them alone as an adult becomes something else. The rules of steaming, spacing, and timing run parallel to contemporary obsessions with containment. The interruption at the door reflects how threats appear in everyday life, without spectacle and easy to misread. When the dumplings rupture, it isn’t because something has been done incorrectly. Something can be done lovingly and with memory, and still come apart.
The narrator eats what remains. There is no redemption arc here. What interested me most was how little it takes to collapse the sense of order that domestic rituals promise, and how life continues anyway.
RACHANA PATHAK is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the City College of New York. Her work has appeared in Peatsmoke Journal, Fractured Lit, The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), and others. She is working on a collection of shorts about the Nepali diaspora. Find her on Instagram @plantistan.
