You’re standing at the stove with the recipe in your head, and you’re also seven years old at a table that no longer exists, in a kitchen you could not find again on any map. Just waiting.
The smell arrives first, the way it always does. Mustard seeds hit the hot oil with that small violent crackle. Then curry leaves, and for a second the whole kitchen has a pulse.
Spice meeting oil at exactly the right temperature opens a door you didn’t know was still there, and for a few seconds you’re not here at all.
You’re somewhere with louder tiles and a TV playing a film song you can hum but can’t name, a pressure cooker counting down its whistles on the back burner, and a window open onto a street you can’t quite place anymore. Behind you, the person who made this dish is moving around, doing nine things at once the way they always did. Never measuring anything. Cooking the way people cook when they’ve made a thing so many times that the recipe has left the head and gone to live in the hands.
You wrote it down once. Sat with a pen while they talked it through, trying to turn a ‘handful of this’ and ‘a pinch of that’ into numbers you could carry home. You watched them frown at the question, because how DO you measure a thing your fingers have simply always known? And it works. You’ve made it a dozen times and it works every single time. People eat it and tell you it’s wonderful. You believe them, and you’re even a little proud. But it’s not the same.
It will never be the same.
You taste it and the flavour stretches toward something, almost touches it, then falls short by a distance. And you stand there, spoon halfway to your mouth, understanding that the thing you’re chasing has very little to do with food. Because the dish was never ‘just the dish.’ It was the light in that particular room and that ache of being hungry just as someone was about to feed you. It was the feeling of being small enough that the whole world fit inside one kitchen and one table and the one person who knew what you needed before you did. None of that goes in a pot or a kadai. There’s no recipe that can define this.
I’ve done most of my growing up in pieces, across different cities and countries. And in every one of those places, there were people who loved me by feeding me, which is a particularly hard kind of love to misread. Somewhere along the way the food and the people fused into a single memory. I couldn’t pull them apart now if I tried. Remembering what someone cooked is the fastest road I’ve ever found back to the person who cooked it.
My wife makes payasam and I hover. A grown man with responsibilities, hovering too close to the pot, waiting for the spoon so I can scrape the warm condensed milk off before it sets. My son has started doing it too, crowding in beside me at the same pot, and I have neither the heart nor the standing to tell him to move. And while I’m there, I’m also somewhere else entirely. Decades back, over my mother’s pot, in precisely this shameless way, the AC losing badly to forty-five degrees of Middle East summer, sweat settling at the back of my neck. But none of it registered, because in that moment, there was payasam and it was the single best thing that had ever happened to anyone.
Two kitchens then, and now a third. The same spoon. The same boy, more or less, three times over. My wife says I haven’t changed a bit, and she’s right.
What she doesn’t quite know is that when she hands me that spoon, she’s handing it to me across thirty years and two countries, from a kitchen she has never stood in and I can no longer find.
My sister cooks, and every time I visit, the same faintly embarrassing thing happens. The best part is that I can feel it coming, yet I do nothing to stop it. I just walk in already remembering the last time. Within the hour I’ve slipped back to roughly the age of her son, who is a good deal younger than me, the two of us hovering at the edge of her kitchen with the identical expression of small animals who have worked out that food is imminent. Reduced to the same one-word question. When? Neither of us is much good at saying the soft things out loud, so she feeds me instead and I eat far too much on purpose, and somewhere in that exchange the whole thing gets said. And I know it will happen again next visit, and the one after that, and inside that knowing sits the closest thing I own to proof that some things hold.
I think about my in-law who has never once accepted “no, thank you” as a complete sentence. She treats an empty plate as a wound to be dressed, and she has fed me, over the years, well past the point any doctor would countersign, in the serene conviction that ‘one more dosa or idli’ never harmed a living soul.
Then, there are the people who never cooked for me at all, where the friendship was the table itself. You know the ones. The person you go to a particular place with and only ever with them, because they order the way you like to order. Too much, and slightly wrong on purpose. The ones worked out long ago that the food was never really the point, just the thing you all agreed to meet around. I keep a small, fiercely guarded list of people I’d cross a city for. Not strictly to see them, but to eat something in their company that means nothing to anyone else and everything to us.
A mate from university here in the UK ruined biriyani for me permanently. He set the bar so impossibly high, so early, that every plate since has been a polite disappointment. Which is somehow one of the warmest things anyone has done to me.
And then there’s the largest group. The cruel middle, I call them. People still out there, still reachable, who somehow keep getting further away.
There’s a friend I met in Bangalore who became family somewhere along the line.
I used to fall into her home without knocking, repeatedly, always around the hour food happened, a coincidence neither of us ever insulted by naming.
She set a place for me every time without making me ask. She’s in one country now and I’m in another, and we still talk. We still reminisce. Every few months one of us says it’s been too long, and we mean it, and we’re right, and somehow the ticket never gets booked. Nothing broke. We just slid into the quiet accumulation of reasons you don’t get on the plane. Then a smell finds me on an ordinary day and drags her straight back, and for a second she’s across the table again, mid-sentence, and then she isn’t.
You’ll have your own version of all this. The kitchen, the person, the dish you keep cooking toward and never quite reaching. We all do.
Because, and this took me the longest to understand, the person was never the thing I was missing. It was the ‘setup.’ That heat, that age, that particular hunger, that exact evening, the version of me that was small and certain and waiting to be fed. You can’t dial a number and bring any of that back.
That’s what food does that nothing else manages. It keeps people, whether or not they’ve gone anywhere, whether they’re an ocean away or just a few years out of reach. You cook something and someone is briefly, impossibly in the room, the voice and the face and the specific warmth of them. Then you swallow, and they’re not. And you cook it again the week after anyway, because ten seconds of that is worth whatever it costs.
My son had “the spoon” a few weeks ago. He scraped the condensed milk off the back of it exactly the way I do, with no idea he was holding three kitchens at once.
He’ll understand one day. By then this kitchen will be gone too, the way they all go, and his payasam will reach toward something and fall just short, and he won’t be able to name what.
I hope he makes it anyway. I hope he hovers.
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