Even home doesn't always feel safe

People think home is safe.

Sometimes it isn't.

Not because anyone wants to hurt me. The opposite — everyone's trying to help, in the only way they know how.

But love and safety aren't always the same thing.

The roti tawa is the same tawa my food touches. The atta dabba sits open on the counter while my rice is being made. The same spoon stirs everything.

Wheat flour is in the air. Literally. You can see it floating in the morning light when amma kneads dough.

I used to think I was being dramatic. Then I'd get sick after a meal at home and not understand why.

It took me a long time to even say it out loud: "My own kitchen isn't safe for me."

That sentence broke something inside me the first time I said it.

Because home is supposed to be the one place. The one place you don't have to scan, ask, double-check.

I tried to explain. I drew diagrams. I bought a separate pan. I labelled a separate dabba.

The pan got used for something else "just once." The dabba got opened with the same hands that had just touched atta. "It's fine, I washed them."

Nobody meant any of it. Everyone forgot, the way people forget things that aren't living in their body.

I stopped eating dinner at the table for a while.

I'd make my own food in a corner, on a small induction plate I bought myself, with utensils I kept in my room.

It felt lonely. It felt embarrassing. It felt like I was building a tiny apartment inside my parents' house.

The hardest part wasn't the food.

The hardest part was watching my mother's face when I quietly said no to the meal she'd spent the evening cooking.

She didn't say anything. She just nodded and looked away. And I went to my room and cried into a pillow because I knew she thought I was rejecting her, when really I was trying to stay alive.

Slowly, things changed.

She started asking questions instead of getting hurt. She watched a video. She asked me to show her how to clean the counter properly.

One Sunday she handed me a plate and said, "I made this on the new pan. I washed everything twice. Tell me if it tastes okay."

I cried before I even took a bite.

It's still not perfect. Some days I still cook separately. Some days I still get glutened in my own house.

But now, when it happens, I'm not alone in it. Someone else in this house also feels it now. Someone else also says "I'm sorry, I should have been more careful."

That's not a cure. But it's the closest thing to feeling at home I've had in a long time.