Leftovers for the Future
Recipes, rituals, and rotis that refuse to end when the meal does.
My Nani never counted.
Not the rotis, not the bites.
She sat cross-legged on the divan, just off the dining room where the adults ate. The kids sat here. Kids both twenty years older and much younger than me, all lumped into the same orbit. One large plate with rotis and channa, all mashed together in the most flavourful perfect bite. A circle of us kids orbiting like restless planets.
She pressed the roti-channa into little balls, dipped them in the gravy, and dropped them into our waiting mouths. None of us ever got the same portion, but no one kept track. She just knew. Wordlessly, somehow, she knew when to stop.
It was the most detached and the most open way to be loved: to be fed without tally.
Food was and has never been just food.
It was people.
My masi’s rajma, another’s gajar matar, unfailingly made if I visited in the winters. An uncle’s Rogan Josh still spoken of years later, cooked with experimentation and so much devotion. Journeys that built themselves around the promise of dishes waiting at the other end of the country. Family love announced in recipes, carried in dabbas, tucked into your plate before you asked.
Around it all, sound.
The scrape of spoons against steel. Cousins yelling over one another. A hand reaching for the last piece of marrow of the yakhni, only to be smacked away. Eating wasn’t only food. It was a headcount. A way of saying: you are here, you are seen.
I grew up with other inheritances too. Tappes, Punjabi folk songs at weddings, sung loudly enough to drown out the bride’s tears. Some were mischievous, teasing the groom, or needling the new in-laws. Others were heartbreak in slow motion. Madhaniyan was one of them. Sung from the bride’s perspective, she calls out to each of her loved ones, verse by verse.
At its core: do I belong where I was raised, or where I am destined?
Even as a child, I felt its ache. Though mostly I was distracted by the scene around it, aunties teasing each other mid-song, someone starting on the wrong beat, the spoon hitting the dholak slightly off tune. That was the beauty of those songs: they weren’t meant to be polished. They were raw, communal, as if the whole room was conspiring to carry something larger than itself. Women, mostly, holding a bride steady as she crossed into a life she didn’t yet know.
Now meals and memories arrive differently. A bowl eaten alone in front of a glowing screen. Dinner paused for a photo, the plate more carefully lit than the conversation. Mangoes in November, flown in and served in antiseptic cubes. The fruit is sweet, yes. But memory doesn’t do it’s thing.
A mango in November is just fruit.
A mango in June is the whole season: the clouds building, the air heavy with stickiness, summer holidays, juice running down your arm while someone yells not to stain your clothes. The pimples that suddenly appeared, blamed on “too many mangoes.” Mangoes stored in ice buckets. Mangoes eaten one after the other, until summer itself tasted like them.
And yet food resists forgetting. The faintest whiff of ghee still pulls me back into a childhood kitchen. The smell of momo places me at a cousin’s table in Secunderabad, recovering from Chicken Pox, lathered in Lacto Calamine, sulking, but still greedy for more.
Recipes are archives disguised as instructions, the body instinctively remembering the people who once fed it.
The other night, over dinner, someone revealed their life’s obsession: curating the perfect first bite. Sauce, spice, crunch, softness, each stacked carefully like they were auditioning for a talent show on the fork. Then, before I could protest, they leaned over and fed it to me. Apparently, if the first bite sings, the rest of the meal can wander, crash, even flop, and it won’t matter. The opener carries it.
It was strangely convincing. They do this for a living - cook, feed, coax joy out of the most unfriendly vegetables, so maybe they are right. But I keep circling the thought.
Who needs forever when a single forkful can carry you through a week?
Just little arrangements that land. Just scraps, really. A bite passed across the table. Someone laughing so hard they choke on water. A recipe card written like the ink was running out, oil smudge shaped like a small continent. Things that sound flimsy, but end up carrying you through, the way fridge magnets hold up an entire childhood on scraps of paper.
And then I wonder what happens when even that first bite gets outsourced. Already there are menus written by data, apps predicting what you might crave on a Wednesday at 6:23 a.m. Imagine an algorithm plating your “perfect” mouthful, down to the exact ratio of chilli to salt. The bite would be flawless. Sterile. Like kissing through glass.
When I first lived away from home, I started a box. Not some elegant keepsake, just a plain wooden dabba that looked like it should hold socks. Into it I slipped recipes from anyone whose food I loved. My mother’s dahi waale aloo. An ex lover’s parippu manga curry, written on office stationery with a coffee ring in the corner. A friend’s chilli chutney that she perfected by experimenting across half of Delhi’s momo stalls, annotated with arrows and “add more salt if you’re feeling it, ok?”
Over time, the box got heavy. It spilled over with scraps from people I still speak to and people I probably won’t ever see again. I don’t cook most of them. I don’t even try. But the dabba sits there like a strange time capsule, its contents proof that belonging can be written down in smudged ink, folded into paper like debts, IOUs, or secrets you meant to return but never did. The algorithm’s bite might be perfect, but it’s the messy, garlic-smudged ones that actually stay with you.
Because that is what food teaches you, in the end. That we are always receiving. A plate nudged your way. A bite someone insists you try. A song hummed off-key into the air long after the wedding season has packed up its shamiyanas.
To belong is not only to hold, but to be fed, fed beyond counting, fed past refusal, until it seeps into you like ghee into warm phulkas, filling even the hairline cracks.
I think again of Madhaniyan. The bride’s question stretching across time: where do I belong? Raised here, destined there. Today the question feels slipperier. Do we belong in the kitchens we inherit, the cultures we pass through, or the glowing rectangles that now serve up recipes, reels, even reminders to drink water like some stern neighbour?
I’ve tried, more than once, to mash roti and channa the way my Nani did, soft, savoury, pressed into little balls and dropped into open mouths. But it never tastes the same. I don’t even enjoy it anymore. It’s as if the flavour went with her.
I don’t know how many weddings I’ll still end up in, how many songs I’ll mumble through, how many recipes I’ll actually bother to pass on. I don’t know which flavours will manage to stick through the scramble, or who will ever dig through my dabba of scraps. I guess I’ll never know. Maybe no one will. And maybe that’s the recipe’s joke on me.
Like a song that stops mid-verse. No one sure why. A couple of aunties glance at each other, then look down. Someone fiddles with their bangles, someone else pours water into a steel glass too loudly. The dholak just sits there, useless. For a second it feels like the whole room forgot its lines. And yet the tune won’t leave, still hovering in my head long after, like it’s waiting for someone to pick up the spoon again.
So maybe this piece was about food. Or memory. Or just the ways I (shamelessly) keep sneaking bites off plates of people I love.
Or maybe it was just me setting the table, hoping someone would sit down. If you’ve made it here, I hope you feel well fed.
A tiny glossary for the italicised words.
Because, words, like spices, need their own masala dabba. This is mine.
Nani: maternal grandmother, also unofficial boss of the house. Knows exactly how much you’ve eaten without looking.
Divan: low wooden couch/bed, the true VIP lounge for kids’ dinners and illicit naps.
Roti: flatbread, round-ish on good days, abstract art on others, especially when made by me.
Channa: chickpeas, but always more exciting when squished into masala.
Rajma: kidney beans that taste like every single Sunday afternoon. Needs rice, or cold bread, otherwise what’s the point.
Gajar Matar: carrots and peas, winter on a plate.
Rogan Josh: Kashmiri mutton in red chilli gravy. The best of feasts.
Dabbas: tiffin boxes. Mysteriously multiply in every desi kitchen. Reason, unknown.
Yakhni: broth that pretends to be light, but is secretly so indulgent.
Tappe: Punjabi wedding folk songs: part roast, part lament, part inside joke.
Dholak: hand drum. The moment it comes out, you know things are about to get real.
Momo: dumplings, cousins of dim sum, but spicier, messier, and more fun.
Lacto Calamine: pink lotion that tried to fix every 90s skin crisis. (Did it work? Debatable.)
Dahi waale aloo: potatoes in yoghurt gravy. Tangy hug in a bowl.
Parippu Manga Curry: Dal found in the kitchens of Kerala with raw mango (and sometimes I have prawns sneaking in). Sour, spicy, unforgettable.
Shamiyanas: wedding tents, entire universes stitched out of canvas and fairy lights. Always, overnight.
Phulkas: puffed rotis, have a habit of quickly disappearing.
Loved it 💛💛