When the kitchen turned into a time machine: Bonding with my mom, a decade late and 900 km away

By 11 am, she had already been at work for an hour. At 2 pm, it was lunchtime, and by 2.30 pm, she was back at the cash counter, greeting a serpentine queue of ill-at-ease customers. Around 5 pm, she would shut the door to any more transactions on a light day and get busy tallying the accounts. If you had to call her, it was best to be strategic and avoid rush hours.

Returning from school, I would mostly find my elder sister and my grandparents at home. On Sundays, when aai (mother in Marathi) had some time on her hands, I wasn’t sure what to discuss with her because I was used to seeing her always busy working. I didn’t know how to be with her when she wasn’t busy.

Over the years, a quiet change came over in my relationship with my mother. As I grew younger and she older, I felt a gnawing need to take care of her. She was strong-minded; I just wished she wouldn’t have to keep proving it through life’s trials and tribulations. Even while booking a cab, I hoped and prayed that the driver was a decent fellow because I wanted aai to have a peaceful ride.

When my grandparents passed away and my sister was to be wed, my mother and I put together our combined energies into projects, happy and sad. We talked about the things that mattered and discussed the serious stuff. The change in our dynamic was subtle and nuanced. I was still her child, and getting her to apply oil to my hair remained a cherished time whenever I went back home or she came over to my city. I also enjoyed telling her about the latest in geopolitics and talking to her about her day during our daily calls. But, and this happened gradually, she started seeking my opinion on certain decisions she was making. She also depended on me to recharge her mobile phone and help her switch between the front and the back cameras, while on a video call.

When I moved to Noida to start my first job, I shared an apartment with three other people. Everything here seemed different — the food, the air, the people. And the food, with its pronounced mustard oil flavour, was too aggressive for my palate. Then, just as I was starting to settle in, the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

The cook and the nearby eateries vanished, and it was for the four of us sharing the apartment to prepare meals. My lack of experience and a paralysing fear of failure meant I put off cooking till I had antagonised every flatmate. Then I called aai.

The first meal I cooked left me in sweat and tears. It didn’t taste anything like my expectations. My mother cajoled me to walk back in and try adding some salt. That did the trick. But cooking still felt very onerous.

Over many hours-long calls day after day, aai taught me chopping onions and tomatoes, repurposing a day-old bowl of rice into a breakfast delicacy and making pulao. I made pulao so many times that I lost count. I also went out and bought myself a bottle of groundnut oil. And I tried out many Maharashtrian dishes that I had come to associate with home.

My entry into the kitchen, at least a decade late, wasn’t a radical act. It was necessitated by survival instincts. But as the world returned to a post-pandemic cycle of life, I went back into the kitchen to cook for myself. I watched YouTube videos of middle-aged women guiding people through a dish they had probably made thousands of times over their lifetime. And I called aai, switching on the video to get her approval on the level of oil I had poured and the size of the potato cubes.

Then one day, years after that first panic-stricken end-of-the-world call made in desperation, I called aai to ask her about making dahi-pohe. A comfort food, it was introduced to our family by a relative and became a cherished breakfast staple in the summers. You soak a bowl of pohe (flattened rice) in sour dahi (curd). You add salt, a dash of sugar, fried groundnut, some grated coconut, chopped chillies and season it with mustard seeds and curry leaves and mix it. Then, just as you are about to eat, you add some chopped onion, crushed papad and chopped coriander.

The legendary dahi pohe mentioned above (Photo by Swapnil Joglekar)

I had moved to a new house where the kitchen window opened into an open space. Aai was looking at me through the phone, which was perched at a height. “Put the raw onion after you season it,” she reminded me, her voice coming in from 900 kilometres away and with a hint of Vividh Bharati playing over our radio in the other room. “Yes,” I replied, “so that it maintains its rawness, right?” I checked. “Yeah,” she said, smiling. As I served the dahi-pohe into a plate for myself, I realised something. Through these phone calls, at odd hours, and always when I was on the verge of hunger, I was greeted by aai. And just like that, as she guided me through these steps of the recipe she had gathered from her mother and from so many others who had walked on this earth before her, I found my mom from 20 years ago guiding the small boy. One step at a time, making me aware of the risks and how to avoid them, and telling me that it was okay to be content in life’s small joys when the Instagram algorithm was questioning my peace of mind.

My entry into the kitchen was inescapable; my choice to stay back was pure self-interest. I had discovered a time machine that satisfied what the stomach craved and the heart desired. I had found aai.