My mum would also make it for me when I was sick. Because that’s what was made for her when she was sick. She told me once of how she learned to make it. My ba had been ill and asked her to make some khichdi for her. Because that’s what my ba’s mother had cooked for her when she was sick. My mum didn’t know how to cook. She was ten. Her hair was in pigtails. She was kept away from things that made fire because she was clumsy. It was expected of her rather than her older brothers, because they were boys and cooking wasn’t for them, to cook for my grandmother. Or so culture dictated forever ago.
My ba lay on the floor of the kitchen, on a mat, and shouted out instructions to Mum. Boil water, cook mustard seeds, add rice, add lentils, add this much turmeric and so on, and miraculously, my mum made a perfect khichdi.
For my ba.
This is the blessing and the curse of khichdi. Each family serves it differently. Some want it plain and stodgy, like pure carbohydrate. Some want it wet. Some want it drier. Some want it with black lentils, some with brown. Some want it with onion and garlic. Some want it with ginger. It is the most versatile dish in Gujarati cooking.
The moment Mum knew how to make khichdi her mother’s way, she started amending the recipe so it catered more towards her own taste buds. My mum liked the khichdi to not be too dry, not like her mother. She liked it spicy. And because her mother insisted she was allergic to onion and garlic, Mum knew exactly what was missing.
I stare at the recipe I’ve just written down. It seems so simple. I go through the motions with your nani. And we add things to the pan and fire up the hob and let it cook and we stir and we smell and it smells nice and it tastes delicious and it doesn’t quite taste like Mum’s khichdi, but it tastes like khichdi nonetheless. And I’m happy as I shovel it into my mouth. And the kitchen is used again and it feels alive and vibrant and perfect.
And then I get home. And I have the recipe. And I want my house to smell like my home. So I think, khichdi, two days in a row, sure, why not?
I’ve taken the big yellow saucepan with me. Brought it home. Your dada won’t be cooking. He was threatening to throw everything out anyway, so, without asking him, I leave with the saucepan tucked under my arm.
In Bristol, away from the watchful eye of your nani, where she would just do it for me and I’d stand over her and watch and nod like, ‘well of course that’s the amount of salt you need right now’, and it looked piss-easy, mate.
The recipe, in my own hand no less, feels indecipherable.
Not being a confident cook, I find the easiest way to get my head around the process is to attack it methodically. I couldn’t work in a kitchen where you have three things on the go and you know the cooking times and processes for each one. Instead it feels entirely mechanical. It’s like driving, which is another thing I don’t do. Whenever I’ve had lessons, I’ve felt like each limb and my instincts and my eyes and my heart are working independently of each other, and my brain has to actively tell each one to perform each task. It feels like a mess, when I drive. I never feel in control.
I look at my contraband saucepan. It’s a faded muted yellow and the bottom is charred with the blackened splat of meals past. I put it to one side.
I take out a box of puy lentils your mum bought from the hippy food shop on the high street and some brown rice. I look at the spice tin. Waiting to be refilled. To breathe life into dishes again.
I head to Bristol Sweet Mart, one of the few places in Bristol you can buy Indian groceries. In the shop, I find a small bag of Tilda basmati rice, white, and a bag of brown lentils. I stare at the spices, worrying that I only know the Indian names for things, like garam masala, jeera, haldi. I look at the guy behind the counter. He looks Indian. I walk up to him. He shakes his head at me and smiles red-stained teeth at me. His choppers have been abused by years of dancing with the red devil, paan.
‘All right, mite?’ he says.
‘All right, mite . . .’ I reply. ‘Haldi?’
He points in the direction of the aisle with spices that I was just in.
‘Which one is it?’ I ask. I shrug. I smile dumbly.
‘The yellow one,’ he says.
I walk back over to the spice aisle. I pick up yellow curry powder and take it back to the counter. He laughs at me. He takes the yellow curry powder out of my hands and walks me back to the spice aisle.
He picks up a bag of turmeric and thrusts it at me.
‘It’s this one, mite.’
‘Sorry.’
‘How did you not know haldi is called turmeric in English, mite?’ he asks. I shrug. ‘I speak better English than you.’ He laughs. ‘I’ve only lived here six years.’ I apologize. ‘You should have used Google.’
I assumed haldi was the same in English. My mum spoke to me in 70 per cent Gujarati with 30 per cent English thrown in for more modern words she didn’t know the Gujarati equivalent for. Vegetables, spices, cooking implements, I only know the Gujarati words for them.
I give the shopkeeper my list and he picks up bags for me of things I need.
‘Where are you from?’ he asks.
‘London,’ I reply.
‘That’s where you live. Where are you really from? Where is your family from?’
‘Gujarat,’ I reply.
‘Me too, mite,’ he says warmly. I hold out my fist for him to daps it as a way of acknowledging his enthusiasm for our shared heritage. ‘Why do you need all this stuff?’
‘For cooking,’ I reply.
I brace myself for him to ask a follow-up question about my family. I don’t want him to ask about my mum. I’ve managed to avoid talking about her in any great detail beyond a few surface memories and a general feeling of missing her. I haven’t spoken to anyone about what lies underneath all that. The raw emptying broken eggshell of love and despair a centimetre underneath the surface of anything I say. You could ask me about the weather and that might set off my ticking time bomb of sadness. If I push it as far down as it can go, maybe I can push it out the other end without ever having to deal with it.
‘If you’re cooking . . .’ the shopkeeper says. ‘Then, mite, you need more than this.’ He picks up a box of dried fenugreek leaves and hands it to me. ‘Methi. You need methi.’ He hands me a small tub called asofoetida. ‘A pinch of this,’ he says. ‘Good for digestion, mite.’
The next morning, I walk into the kitchen to face the big yellow saucepan. I put it in a cabinet under the sink. I clear away the cooking items. I stick the envelope I’ve written the khichdi recipe on in a drawer. I notice the envelope is addressed to my mother.
Dead or alive, people want her to take their dumb Capital One credit card.
The saucepan is bothering me. It contains memories of my mum’s cooking. It has, at the bottom, the charred blackened oil slicks of past meals, meals I would have eaten as a child, as a teenager, as an adult. Anything I make now increases the half-life decay of those remains. The more I use this pan, the more of her I’m taking away.
I’ve already started replacing the scent of her life’s work with my own inept attempts at life. Forcing myself into an impressionist trick where I make a dish she was famous for, in her own pan – it feels like a travesty to me.
Your mum tells me the truth.
‘You’re being an idiot. It’s just a saucepan.’
‘No. It’s not just a saucepan.’
‘I know symbolically it’s not just a saucepan. But it has no magical powers. It is a vessel. That’s not the thing you’re focusing on. The thing you should be focusing on is the khichdi.’
‘I know.’
I get everything out again. I leave the saucepan under the sink for the moment.
I get out some weighing scales and measure out 100g of rice. I pour the rice into a sieve and run it under the tap, watching the water turn from milky to clear in five minutes as the starch is peeled off. I leave it to soak in a bowl while I repeat the cleaning process with the brown dhal. I pick out blackened dhal and grit and put the dhal into the
bowl of water. I leave both to soak for thirty minutes.
‘Mum liked onions and garlic in her khichdi,’ my aunt told me. ‘It’s supposed to be a simple dish you eat quickly or with kadhi. You can put onions and garlic in if you want but that is what every bite will taste like. You won’t get the full impact of the kadhi when you make it.’
I chop up onions and garlic.
If that’s how my mum did it . . .
I get the saucepan out and fire up one of the burners. I put the saucepan on top of it. Your mum asks me what I’m doing.
‘There’s no oil in there,’ she says.
‘The trick is to wait till the pan is hot before adding the oil. It gets hotter quicker and doesn’t burn the bottom.’
‘Look at you, sounding like an expert,’ she replies.
‘I read it online this morning,’ I confess.
‘Where?’
‘On some random’s blog,’ I say, and realize how ridiculous that sounds, entrusting my cooking tips to the opinions of people with internet connections.
The pan heats up and I add a thick gloop of sunflower oil.
‘That’s too much,’ your mum warns.
‘It’s fine, backseat driver.’
She holds her hands up as if to say, fine, and leaves the kitchen.
When the oil is hot, I give it thirty seconds, I add mustard seeds and cover them with a lid while they pop. I throw in the onions and stir them round. They sizzle satisfyingly.
‘Smells nice,’ your mum shouts from the other room.
I boil a kettle of water.
I breathe in the smell.
This smell is everything. The smell of frying onions, and garlic, and burnt mustard seeds. That’s the smell of my childhood. That’s the smell that I lived above as a child. That’s the smell that made me feel at home. Wherever I am, if I get that whiff, I’m transported somewhere, I’m transported home.
What happens to our sense of home when we’re not teenagers anymore? When where we call ‘home’ changes? It’s a big moment when we rename our childhood homes in our phone contacts to read ‘mum and dad’. When we call where we live now ‘home’.
Now I have created this smell in my own kitchen in my new home, in Bristol, one hundred-odd miles away from my entire family and sense of self, this place finally smells like my home.
The onions are yellow. I add turmeric, a quarter of a teaspoon of chilli powder, then another quarter for good luck, remembering your mum’s word of warning from earlier, that ‘this is extra hot chilli powder, you don’t need as much’. I stir this into the onions and add the lump of soggy lentils and rice. I mix the spices into their dry, brittle stasis, hoping to wake them up. When the rice is slick with yellow haldi and oil, I measure two parts boiling water and add it to the mixture, stirring round and round till everything is in a whirlpool, off the bottom and swimming in spice.
I close the lid and watch.
I had a difficult relationship with my mum. After years of running away, trying to get away from where I grew up, where they built their community, I was on my way back to my mum when she was taken from me. We had just moved to the right side of London for her, up in North London, rather than Brixton, and that meant it was easier for me to visit.
In the early years when your mum and I met we moved to South London then to Kenya and it was in those years I barely saw my mum. She never missed an opportunity to tell me whenever I saw her. If I missed our Sunday morning call, on the bus to play football, she’d send me a terse message saying I was being distant.
Whenever I’d visit, she’d insist on driving me home, along the North Circular, just so we’d have an intense forty minutes together where we’d gossip, talk about television. I’d tell her about my life, she’d show an interest in what I was doing and validate my career choices, because life hadn’t turned out the way she had expected it to and she had adjusted the sails of her wishes to something more realistic.
Things don’t always pan out the way you expect them to. I spent my teenage years working with your dada and bapuji every weekend in their warehouse, desperate to get away and be my own person. Decades later, I would find your dada a job where I worked because the warehouse had closed for business. In a way, I was glad. It freed my mum and your dada up. The business was so consuming it involved my mum and your nani’s full-time attention as well. He had been in his last job for twenty years, and wanting to go back to a simpler time when his job was something he did and not something he lived, he was struggling to find something easy to do. There were too many young bucks with strong degrees and youthful enthusiasm to contend with. As someone who had run his own company until three years from retirement, when the economy took a turn for the worse and his small business was folded, he was un-hireable. I got him a job where I worked. And this, coupled with my mum’s rides back home, a warm plastic container of leftovers in my lap, was how I started to come home to my mum and your dada.
And then she was diagnosed with cancer. When they realized it was terminal, she was sent home from hospital and managed just two weeks at home before dying. It was cruel. It was swift. There was no time to have a big final conciliatory moment. The last time we spoke, it was to have an argument. And there is our relationship, frozen in a dis agreement. Everything I do is almost to seek forgiveness for upsetting her.
I’m staring at my mum’s saucepan, hoping it’ll perform some transformation on the ingredients I have inexpertly thrown in, hoping they taste like something approximating to those plastic containers of food that stain my memories.
The recipe your nani has given me instructs me to stir once, after ten minutes. If I have enough water, nothing will stick to the bottom. If I have enough water. I’m staring so hard at the saucepan, I let ten minutes pass me by. In my mind’s eye, I’m watching my mum cook. I’m seeing her waddle about our tiny kitchen, hands full of okra or aubergine or potato, her thin lips turned downwards in tired concentration. She held conflicting views. On the one hand, she’d have loved nothing more than for my dad and me to be able to cook so she didn’t have to spend hours after work preparing things for her family, like it was a patriarchal society and this was her job as woman, mother and wife. On the other hand, she loved that she could do this for us. We loved her cooking without question. It was what made us us. She didn’t want to have that power taken away from her. She didn’t want to ever give us a reason to not need her at any point. That’s the thing that I only begin to understand now. We always would have needed her. We were just rubbish at showing her this.
Fifteen minutes later, your mum wanders back in to see how I’m doing.
It breaks my stare and I notice the pan lid is skittering about in its grooves with thick steam erupting underneath it.
‘Is that done?’
‘I. Know. What. I’m. Doing.’ I spit.
Your mum holds her hands up as if to say, fine, whatever, but this free pass to be rude to her because I’m in mourning won’t last forever. She leaves the room. I turn back to the skittering lid and pull it off. A blast of steam burns my hand, I swear and drop the pan lid. It clatters off the side of the saucepan and onto the floor, grazing my foot, making me jump.
‘Shit, shit, shit, shit,’ I whisper as I stare at the red vapours creasing up my forearm.
‘Everything all right?’ your mum asks with concern from the other room.
‘All good,’ I shout back, not wanting to admit I’m out of my league. I don’t look at the contents of the saucepan. I leap over to the sink and turn on the cold water tap. I place my burnt forearm underneath it and, quivering, shivering, slightly, from the shock and the pain, with my left hand rummage loudly for a small bottle of lavender. Your mum swears by it.
The smoke alarm DEE-DEE-DEE-DEE goes off. DEE-DEE-DEE-DEE. It screams like a banshee testing its highest octave. I drop the lavender DEE-DEE-DEE-DEE on the floor and slip on DEE-DEE-DEE-DEE it as I rush back over to the hob to switch it off. My hand DEE-DEE-DEE-DEE clashes with your mum, who has run back i
n. I push her hand DEE-DEE-DEE-DEE away.
‘I can do it,’ I bellow and I turn the hob off. DEE-DEE-DEE-DEE.
Your mum opens the window and waves the smoke away with a tea towel. Defeated, I sit on the floor with my back against a kitchen cabinet. When the smoke alarm has switched off, she sits down next to me and holds my hand. She looks at my forearm. It’s inflamed, but fine. I look at her and laugh. She smiles back. She reaches up with both hands and brings my mum’s saucepan down for us to look at it. It’s burnt. Rice and lentils are soldered to the bottom. The pan is ruined.
‘This was supposed to be the easiest dish,’ I say. ‘I am officially useless.’
Your mum pinches some khichdi into her hand and swallows it.
‘Mmm,’ she says, even though she doesn’t really think it. I taste some.
‘It tastes like burnt popcorn. It’s pure carbon,’ I say.
‘Smell it though,’ your mum says. I do.
The kitchen smells of (fading) smoke and cumin and burnt mustard seeds and garlic and onions and for a second, just for a second, I feel like I’m at home again.
‘I don’t want any sugar today,’ you tell me. ‘Chocolate cake has a lot of sugar in it.’
You’re sitting at the table, waiting for breakfast, chin on fists, elbows firmly planted.
You’ve been mentioning sugar a lot and healthy eating even more. We ensure that your diet is healthy and filled with vegetables and different tastes and dishes from around the world but with the occasional ketchup meal. Much as I try to tell you that moderation is key, I forget that you’re a child and there is no middle ground for you.
Brown Baby Page 10
