LOVE. LOSS. COOKING.
The 5 am alarm would go off as per usual and I would look at my mother with half-open squinty eyes, wondering why she must wake up so early every morning. My mother always used the landline phone as an alarm, which was set 15 minutes apart — at 5:00 am first and then at 5:15 am again. She would always wake up at 5:00 am every day but would set the second alarm anyway because ‘what if I sleep through the (super loud, unmissable) 5 am alarm.’
My sleepy, tired mother would saunter off into the kitchen, open the windows, and put the tea pot on the stove top. Tying her dishevelled curly hair in a bun and tucking her nightdress at the hip, she would turn on the tiny radio perched on the windowsill above the kitchen table. A Marathi song would come on and she would begin her day. This was her daily ritual for as long as I knew her. A morning cup of tea and a song on the radio were a prerequisite to accomplishing all the morning chores, especially cooking.
I haven’t seen my mother quite as joyful as she was while cooking. From the mundane everyday food to a festive delicacy, I remember how her food made me feel — garishly joyful. She was always found cooking in the kitchen, because her kids always demanded ‘something different’ to eat almost all days. Idlis for me, Dosas for my brother, and everyday food for my dad — my mother cooked like it never tired her out.
Most of my favourite memories of my mother reside in our kitchen. I would always follow her around the house, and my idea of fun was watching her cook. I would routinely sit by the stove and chat as she cooked food. Festivities were especially memorable because I would don the role of her official Food Taster.
Half her attention would be spent on worrying about me catching on fire for I would refuse to sit anywhere else but next to that stove. I was not allowed to speak because it disrupted her concentration on the delicate tasks at hand. Every time I would try speaking to her, she would simply say, “Tu baher jaa baghu! (You! go out right away). I would promise to stay quiet, and the same conversation would repeat shortly after.
As her official Food Taster, I was tasked with resolving only one query “Khusakhushit jhalay ka? (Is it crumbly?) While she was looking for an expert opinion from a 7-year-old, all I could come up with is “It tastes delicious!’ She would always look at me half disappointed and ask again, “Yes, but is it crumbly?” And I would simply repeat myself, while going for a second serving, ‘It is delicious, Aai!’
LOVE.
Cooking is an art for my grandmother. Her philosophy is quite simple — food must not only BE appetizing, but also LOOK appetizing. It is almost therapeutic to watch her at work in the kitchen. An everyday meal demands as much attention as a festive delicacy. Be it the morning poha or the evening misal, everything tastes like a recipe of perfect goodness.
My constant childhood memory of my grandmother is her visiting our home during summer vacations. She would usually stay for about a month, during which she would cook us her summer-special recipes. These were dishes only my grandmother prepared for us because my mother never dared try them all by herself (the preparation was either too complicated or required another set of hands).
I can almost see my grandmother sitting on our kitchen floor making Phenya. Pheni is a traditional Maharashtrian food item that is quick to eat, but extremely painstaking and time consuming to make. These phenya, when sundried, turn into papad. My grandmother spent the entire day making phenya for us to eat and then made some more to lay them out for sun drying. They had to be constantly monitored, lest the birds ruin them all. Those couple of hours, when the phenya were sun drying, were spent running behind my grandmother and being needlessly excited about the entire activity because in some way, it made our home feel more homely.
LOSS.
Food was my mother’s chosen language of love. She was kind, had eyes that always gleamed with excitement, had a perpetual, enchanting and truthful smile, and was annoyingly great at cooking. Her cooking became a sour memory in her absence over the years because nobody could cook food quite as fulfilling as hers.
I didn’t realize how powerful food memories were until my mother died. Her food was the most comforting aspect of my childhood and what made me fall in love with my mother. I know it’s a strange concept when you think of it — you are inherently supposed to be in love with your mother right? But, when you think hard and long, you will realize there is one thing about your mother that you love more than everything else about her — more so when you think of her in retrospect. For me it was the way she told us how much she loved us — by catering to our whims and fancies when it came to food.
Over the years, I made several attempts to learn cooking. But I was never any good at it. Maybe it was the lack of a good teacher or simply how young I was , but the chapatis never turned out good, the sabzi never edible and let’s not even talk about the more complicated recipes.
More importantly, the entire process of cooking was a constant reminder of my mother’s absence. Daughters mimic their mothers — be it cooking, dressing, makeup, and so much more. Every time I tried my hand in the kitchen, I would bomb spectacularly under the pressure of wanting to be like my mother. But how was I going to be her when she wasn’t here anymore for me to mimic…for me to learn from?
Two times was more than enough for me to resolve the issue of cooking permanently — I was never going to be any good at it and my wish to be like my mother had come to an unceremonious end.
COOKING.
After my first two failed attempts, I rarely ever entered the dreaded kitchen over the years, unless it was to warm up a cup of tea (that my father made). It seemed like a lost cause, since I had already established, I lacked the innate talent of being even passingly good at cooking.
But the year 2020 changed a lot of things for me, like it did for most of us. It was the year I began my love affair with cooking. Learning to cook at 30 has been unexpectedly joyful. While the rest of the world was busy getting their online digital marketing degrees, I was learning the ropes of a more basic life skill — Cooking. A creature of bad eating habits, I had grown quite comfortable consuming hotel-cooked food, Maggi or bread toast on most days. In fact, cooking had become a point of contention between me and my father, who feared I would die of starvation before I learnt to cook.
And then the pandemic happened. Almost 5 months into the pandemic, I was starting to buckle under the pressure of an invisible problem. I wasn’t quite sure what was bothering me. Maybe it was the lack of social interaction, the self-applied pressure to stand out at work, or the transactional conversations in general — the pandemic was starting to get to me.
I could barely focus on anything — the TV wasn’t entertaining enough, there was nothing interesting online and after a short-lived attempt at exercising, I realized I desperately needed to find something to hold onto.
Around this same time, my grandmother decided to take me up on my offer to come and live with me. My MasterChef of a grandmother was my blessing in disguise. I couldn’t feed her Maggi every day and neither could I sit by while my 90-year-old gran cooked for me. With great trepidation, I took it upon myself to cook while my gran passed me instructions.
An incredibly patient teacher with attention to detail, my grandmother can be credited to transforming my life in a matter of one year. In a very Ratatouille fashion, she convinced me ‘anyone can cook’ and egged me on to take up the proverbial as well as the actual ladle. Under my gran’s tutelage, it took me less than a month to make decent chapatis and less than 2 months to get a general sense of other everyday recipes.
As the pandemic raged on and my grandmother returned home, she continued to teach me cooking over the phone. I soon graduated to the more complex recipes like Diwali and Holi delicacies and (at the risk of blowing my own trumpet) nailed them. After about a year of cooking, my grandmother made it official — I was a pretty good cook.
Sure, cooking has been my reprieve during the pandemic and has kept me from descending into madness. But, more importantly, it has brought me closer to getting closure over my mother’s death — 17 years after the fact. It has brought me unbridled joy, not only because all my worries seem to melt away when I am cooking, but also because a number of people have told me that my cooking is the defining proof that I am my mother’s daughter.
Now, the 8 am alarm goes off as per usual and I wake up (after snoozing for an hour that is). Sleepy and tired, I saunter off into the kitchen, open the windows, and warm up a cup of tea (which my father continues to make). Tying my dishevelled hair in a bun and tucking my nightdress at the hip, I place my iPad on the windowsill above the kitchen table. A Netflix show comes on and I begin my day.
