Escaping Samsara

The Unspoken Language of Food in an Indian Mother’s Kitchen

For most of my life, I have only eaten, never cooked.

As a child, I was fed fried anchovies coated in chilli powder, turmeric, salt, and pepper. Tiny crisps of flavour burst in my mouth, tucked into the centre of a rice ball rolled by my mother’s hand. Steel containers full of fried and preserved jackfruit, mango, banana, and cassava root lined our kitchen shelves, ready for me to snack on when I returned from school. It took a colossal amount of effort to maintain my food habits.

My mother spent a sizeable part of her life alternating between two kitchens: one with the gas cooking range for the curries and the other for the wood-burning stove for rice and desserts made in uruli, ornate bronze and copper pans for special occasions. A hypochondriac, the thought of disposable plastic coming in contact with food vexed her. She unpacked anything that came in plastic packets and transferred them to steel or ceramic containers. To this day, she refuses to refrigerate cooked food. My mother makes all her dishes from scratch multiple times a day, after picking the freshest of choices from the greengrocer. My father could never purchase the right kind of vegetables and grains: “Do you not see how yellow these lentils are? It has clearly been bleached and dyed,” she would say.

She wanted her child to live a long, healthy life and compromised nothing when it came to feeding me. Meanwhile, I ran around the house demanding fried fish and Parle-G (Parley- G) biscuits to dip in tea.

But as I grew into adolescence and encountered restaurant food and the world of packaged crisps, my tastes changed. My mother’s food made did not buzz in my mouth with the intense combination of sweet and spicy like the chilli-garlic Hakka noodles I bought from the mall’s food court. Gourmet Lays, which PepsiCo created to target the Indian palette, obsessed me as they hung from storefronts with gold embossed letters on their inflated packets.

One day, after gorging on fried rice and butter paneer at a restaurant after school, I refused the supper my mother made me. I had not bothered to tell her I would be eating out. The salted rice, the ash gourd curry and the Rasam she had laid out on the dining table looked so unappetising that I went straight to bed after telling her: “Ash gourd tastes like nothing, Amma. And the curry looks white. That is so weird. Tasty things don’t look like that. Tasty things look colourful.”She did not reply.I noticed the disappointment in her eyes, but I chose to overlook it.

Also called winter melons, ash gourds thrive in the humid heat of Kerala. The vines snake around most of our backyard and produce melon-shaped fruits with a fuzzy ash-coloured exterior. They found their way into Keralite cuisine because they grow in abundance and are a nutritious addition to the dining table. It tastes like a cross between cucumber and melon; very mild and watery. The ash gourd, combined with the freshly grated and ground coconut flakes, enfeebles the spices in the curries which are made with them. Since the flavour of any dish is a combination of taste, colour and smell of the dish, and the curry lacks colour and has an unremarkable smell, it takes longer for younger people to appreciate the nuances of ash gourd curries.

Like most,I was only asked to eat, to consume and to contribute nothing to the intricate processes that went into making the food. As a male child growing up in a patriarchal society, I never thought about the conveniences that were offered to me. I was completely removed from the laborious and intricate processes of producing an endless array of curries and perfectly fragrant rice.

 It was in high school that I tasted the labour of cuisine for the first time. I have seen my mother travail in the kitchen through the corner of my eyes. She would stand with her hands on her waist, staring elsewhere as she stirred the contents of the saucepan. She sang sometimes. The songs of her childhood found a release as she disembowelled fresh-caught sardines. She hated cooking fish. The stench and the labour it took to rake the scales off them were exasperating. But she made everything seem effortless. But her actions seemed so effortless. She spread the dosa batter into perfect circles on the iron griddle within three turns of her wrists. The dosas came out crisp, as thin as fingernails.

One day, I told her that I wanted to attend college in Delhi, or even move abroad. “Really? And who is going to make your food for you? We can’t afford for you to be eating out every day. I am telling you; you will starve. You don’t even know how to cook rice,” my mother said.

Her comment was unnerving. Cooking took place in my home every day, but it was something I knew little about. I realised I had to get involved in it at some point in my life as an essential part of survival. The next day, I poured coconut oil into a wok for the first time in my life. My hands were shaking. I was planning on making a conceited spiced onion curry with roti because my mother said it was one of the easiest things she made. She stood on the other side of the kitchen and said something to the effect of: “Less is more.” But her recipe-less cooking methods were incomprehensible to me. She never measured the salt or the asafoetida or the amount of neatly sliced vegetables she added to the dish. She left me to decide on the amounts of ingredients I was supposed to add to the curry. I was supposed to wait for the oil to heat up, but I did not know how long that would take. The onions I put in sizzled and burned immediately. Frustrated, I put in garam masala, in hopes that it would mask the pungency of the burned onions. The delicate powder burned in the heat and filled the room with a nose-piercing odour. I looked apologetically at my mother. It had taken me about half an hour to slice the onions, my eyes burning, my knife slipping dangerously close to my fingers. They burned in a matter of seconds. My smug approach to the skills needed to craft a good curry burned with them.

The men around me went a long time in their lives without ever picking up elementary cooking skills. Yet, the cooks at restaurants and caterers at weddings and events were predominantly men. They were the pot-bellied stirrers of the giant pots with enough Sambar to feed all the hundreds who attended Kerala’s elaborate wedding ceremonies were all men. Their spatulas like oars. They stirred the sizzling oil as they spattered spice mixes into it to activate their aroma.

The society I lived in gendered the art and science of making food. Masculine food was about attaining a heightened delivery of flavour: fried and battered Chilli Gobi, Chicken 65, decadent Biryanis made in a hole dug into the earth. Feminine food was about balance, nutrition, and comfort. They are mostly unknown outside the domestic sphere. Think of the melange of vegetables unified by coconut flakes in an avial, or spinach or cabbage shredded and sautéed into a melt-in-your-mouth thoran, or a tamarind-infused fish curry…They fulfil the desires of more than just your senses. At least, it feels like it. But you would never buy them at a restaurant. People my age almost never express cravings for them. Those dishes simply existed in the sidelines of our minds, even though we ate them daily.

I never fully understood how important my mother’s food was for me until I lost access to it. As I found a new life as a student in the United States, I felt a hunger that I had never felt before. I felt hunger as more than an absence of physical nourishment. I felt it as an absence of culture and identity. For most of my life, I took the cuisine of my ancestors for granted. Even as they laboured in the spice plantations in Northern Kerala to supply the tea and cardamom for the Empire, they found time to incorporate foreign vegetables into their own food. Potatoes, tomatoes, and chilli peppers found their way into Kerala’s food from all the way in South America, transported by Portuguese colonial vessels. The same food sustained a booming population through artificially induced famine during my grandparent’s youth. The same cuisine fed the children of independence as they built their lives in a new nation recovering from the assaults of colonialism. India is often called a nation of amnesiacs. My parents never found time to tell me the details of colonial history, I am unsure how much they even knew. But the intricacies of Indian cuisine, where scores of spices are mixed and matched to create flavours that speak to every one of your tastebuds, have parallels in the history of the nation and forces of immigration, diplomacy, colonialism, and global trade.

The hunger I felt for my mother’s food was also a hunger to know and understand this history and its ramifications in the modern day. My ignorance on matters of cuisine reflected my ignorance of the history of my people. Above all, I had overlooked the resilience of women in their everyday lives.

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Today, boxes of my mother’s best ground spices travel towards me every couple of months, packed in a DHL box postmarked for central Kentucky. On its way, it stops in Bengaluru, Frankfurt or Paris, before it is sorted in Erlanger near Cincinnati. They pass through multiple scans and customs inspections. Sometimes, the package arrives opened and combed through manually. The package and its contents must meet the myriad laws and specifications of global freight. The day the shipping company delivers the package, I call my mother to let her know I got it.

I video call her on WhatsApp, our primary medium of communication, every week. The first thing she asks me when she answers the phone is about the food I have eaten that week. She wants to know what I have cooked and how it tasted, whether I added turmeric into the curry or if the coriander powder she sent me came in handy. She talks about the easiest ways to cook potatoes as an accompaniment for roti and then the ways to make it most delicious. “Slice the onions as thinly as possible. Put spinach in your lentils, you need the vitamins for your eyes, and it elevates the texture,” she says. Never has she said out loud once that she loves me. It is through food that she expresses it all. Her love is palpable across oceans, for I can taste it every time I cook. One day, I hope to feed her with the same recipes she has handed down to me. I hope she will taste a version of the goodness that she has enkindled.