I entered my sixties last year. And it wasn’t going too well. Knee pains were regular. A ligament sprain almost crippled me for a month. Backaches were a painful reality. Sudden, unexplained, ankle twists after waking up in the morning made me wonder what was going on? I had to stop it. I had to stop binge eating. I was quite the foodie but it had started to show in ways that didn’t make me too proud of myself. I reached the mid-sixties real fast and that’s when I realised, I had to stop — I had to stop the kilos from piling on me like an overflowing garbage bin. So, a month ago, I decided to change everything. My eating habits. My lifestyle. I didn’t follow any particular diet regime, but I did what I could and what I believed would work for me. No sugar, no gluten — those were the beasts that controlled me and I had to fight them. I didn’t observe cheat days, which is very common with regular dieters and it paid off. It has worked wonders for my health. But things changed last week. I had a weak moment. My mom baked a cake after aeons. Growing up, the only cake I knew was the one that my mom baked at home — come birthdays, come anniversaries, that cake recipe would be out, and the same cake would be baked in different avatars. Sometimes circular, sometimes heart-shaped, sometimes covered in coloured icing. Every other piece of cake I ate outside would be compared to that flawless piece of sheer delight. And love. I vividly remember how the kitchen counter would be strewn with tins of Drinking Chocolate, Milkmaid, cocoa powder and other baking ingredients. My mom worked with basic equipment but she would experiment endlessly to make the eggless sponge cake as soft and porous as possible. She baked the cake in an unassuming aluminium oven that looked more like a big electric pan. The wonderful aroma of the cake, infused with a tinge of vanilla essence, would dissipate through the kitchen walls right into our nostrils. It was a heady experience. My sisters and I always ensured that we had nothing better to do when the batter was being wildly whisked. “Just a little more. You will see how soft the cake turns out,” my mom would say. We would wait patiently for her to finish making the batter and empty it in a tin mould, ready for the oven. That’s it. The party would start soon thereafter. We were three and there was only one bowl. One of us took the bowl, another the whisk, the third, the spatula. We licked everything that was left of that silky, chocolatey liquid gold clean before putting the vessels in the sink. If the batter was so good, who wouldn’t want the real deal? With sticky hands and chocolate-stained mouths, we would wait for the red light on the oven to go off. Then patience, patience, and some more patience till the cake cooled down and was cut into neat squares, followed by a period of complete silence as the cake sang on our tongues and our blood was replaced with chocolate. That day, as mom stood before me, holding those very pieces of cake, nostalgia struck like lightning. I felt weak. But I refused. I was on a mission to reclaim my lost confidence, determined more than ever to shed the kilos — the dreaded sixties. Mom, of course, knew how much I loved that cake. “A piece won’t hurt. I have added walnuts and raisins, too, something different from what I’ve been baking all these years,” she said. I stood there, unwavering, like that stubborn rock that sits by the beach, weathering all sorts of waves. When I saw the cake, I only saw sugar and gluten. Mom saw it in my eyes and did not pursue it further. When I was leaving, she handed me a small box with the cake. “If you change your mind,” she said. I went home, feeling guilty for turning her down. The fact that I refused it weighed on me more than my own weight. What’s it about memories associated with food? Childhood memories are, more often than not, associated with meals shared together — meals that were cooked at home. The shared bar of Dairy Milk, every square piece accounted for, that one big bowl of bhel from which all of us pigged out, mum's date-and-tamarind chutney singing through every bite. The hand-crafted, tightly rolled, soft, thin sheets of khandvi sprinkled with the right amount of crunchy grated coconut and coriander that we would simply slide in our mouths — a simple dish yet so easy to get it wrong. But mom is a master at it! The homemade pizzas and how every triangular slice, absolutely un-Italian, would be knocked out in no time, our little hands begging for more. The kaju katli, gulab jamun, rasgullas, shrikhand that my grandmother and mother would painstakingly make a week before Diwali, along with big jars of fried snacks is a different story altogether! I thought of all those meals and moments and realised that food was central, yet, only incidental to the whole experience. It was the joy of cooking, serving and sharing that made those experiences alive decades later. I looked at the box of cake and picked up the phone. “I have changed my mind,” I told her, and hung up. I’m sure she knew what I meant, for that cake was a perfect expression of completely tacit love between a mother and her child. How could I deny it? How could I treat it like a mix of gluten and sugar? Sometimes, I wonder if mom baked only so we could share and laugh together and savour the moments in times to come. After all, love tastes best when it’s baked.
