My Mother’s Recipes
One of my earliest memories of South Dakota is navigating our tiny apartment with a bowl of arur ki daal and chawal—yellow lentils and rice. This was my daily habit, the one meal I’d never turn away. My mother would hand me a bowl, and I would devour it while looking out the window, or while wandering around the rooms, making up silly words in my head. Occasionally, my mother would break the silence to teach me spellings and prepare me for school. Her spelling was spectacular, but her pronunciation was off. I would nod along half-listening, “m-i-l-k, milk, h-o-n-e-y, honey.”
In the second grade, they had us fill out questionnaires to post on the walls of the hallways. Favorite food? I didn’t think twice before scribbling down “arur ki daal and chawal.“ Later, I asked my friends if they ate bhindi at home, and when they didn’t understand, I asked my mother for the right words to convey what I meant. “O-k-r-a,” I practiced, ready to go to school and proclaim that I loved okra, just like everyone else. But no one knew what okra was, either. I was embarrassed, but mostly, I was frustrated. Elaichi, cardamom, haldi, turmeric, bhindi, okra, it made no difference. Translating to English was useless when I couldn’t translate the tastes and experiences themselves.
At home, I struggled similarly in the opposite direction, trying to explain the difference between stew and chowder, and the reasons why garam masala couldn’t replace ancho chili powder. Straddling seven oceans of taste, I saw flickers of potential and belonging in every ingredient and dish. My parents, however, held to their reservations: we rarely ate at Italian restaurants because my father hated the smell of cheese, and pepperoni made my mother’s nose curl. Still, I ate their food and stomached their dismissals, hoping one day they’d be willing to try on my perspective. My ingredients were measured in volumes and weights, and my mother’s in impressions and durations. “Pass the al-mends,” she would say. “All-munds,” I would reply.
A-l-m-o-n-d-s, we thought to ourselves, silently.
At college, I heard about other people’s parents. They counted down the days until they’d go fly-fishing together, or eagerly await driving back for Thanksgiving dinner. They’d talk about family recipes: this is my father’s trout, this is my mother’s challah. And then there was me, trying to convey multifaceted experiences with incomplete vocabularies. What could I say? Yellow lentils keep me up at night. They remind me of a taste I miss so much, and a mother I hardly miss at all. They remind my teeth and my tongue that they were not designed for dreams and fears, but for food, and food alone.
It was from my parents that I inherited the subtlest of translingual burdens—the fact that they spoke in English every day, but couldn’t feel in English for a single moment. I wasted years thinking they’d one day have a interest in the things I wanted to tell them. They were too busy stirring the sabji.
So to whom then can I explain the ache of humility in my chest, when for two years of my illness, my mother gave up chawal and fasted constantly as a prayer for my health? And how can I tell my father that I want him to cook elephant and tiger-shaped rotis on the griddle again, just as he did before I began to disappoint? Where is the biography of my mother’s beloved (but covert) mithai and chocolate stashes, tucked away behind Christmas ornaments in the dresser drawers, as reminders that she, too, should be forgiven for her appetite and her absences? And what now can reply to the way I hungered for a place in conversation at the dinner table after school, glancing between their faces and a steel cup of haldi-milk like Balraj Sahni in 1955’s black-and-white Seema, singing “Teri ek boond ke pyaase hum” (I thirst for but a drop of your love)?
For those that asked: my mother never taught me how to make sabji, how to remove the bone from a chicken, how to season a kadhai, how to slice a-l-m-o-n-d-s, how to fry a tadka, or how to maintain an emulsion. The only recipe book she ever gave me was a dictionary that lacked words like “fallibility” and “forgiveness.”
But these days, her voicemails make me feel differently.
My father often travels for work now, and I can tell from her voice that she is home alone tonight, that she’s thinking about other people and that there is no one there to hear her. I don’t return the calls. I too am silent in my apartment: just as isolated, and a little more than guilty. It feels like there’s no point in picking up—we are both trapped in our language. Maybe she is shredding lassoon right now, looking exasperated as she does it. I imagine her furrowed brow and the stiff movements of her bony shoulders as she draws against the grater. Does she remember the times that I pushed my plate away? Does she think of my thanklessness, even when I’m not around? She is probably making arur ki daal—something simple, delicious, and familiar. As I watch the phone vibrate, I mince my shallots and stir blitzed peppers into the beef broth. She would hate the smell of this. I can imagine her saying, “Iss mein kya khaas hai?”—What good is this? Or, if I’m lucky, it’ll be sardonic: “Accha, aur logh ki liye khana banatein, lekein hamare liye nahin.”—Oh, so you’ll make food for other people, but you never cook for us. Even that would be disingenuous, though... what she implies is that I’m wasting my time.
And yet, hearing her static-laced voice, it occurs to me that we have more in common. We take to the knife and the pressure-cooker for the same reason: a penance of sorts, to satiate others in lieu of speaking to them, since everything we say always comes out wrong. Perhaps that’s the destiny of these vegetables, tonight: redemption. Or, perhaps I’ll scrap the whole effort instead, and then hunt for chocolates in the backs of dresser drawers. Perhaps I won’t eat from sunrise to sundown, and then wish for a bowl of her daal.
And maybe, I hate thinking about that. Maybe this is why I, too, look exasperated as I mince shallots and stir peppers, wondering if I will ever make a meal that's good enough for both of us. And maybe you’re thinking the same, mother. Maybe this is why my hands are always covered in vital wheat gluten when you call, and why you always look down at your plate when I need you to hear me. Maybe this is why we will both eat alone tonight. Maybe this is how you taught me to cook. Maybe this is what makes me your son.