What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?
It took me almost 6 months to visit my parents after I got married. In all the chaos of going to work with my spouse and reaching the office with the housekeeping staff, I was busy playing ‘house’ not realizing what I was missing. I lived in the same city as my parents, they lived in the south of south hometown and I lived in the north end of my north hometown. Initially, I had looked for a place that would be far away from all the horrors of living in south hometown, you see I went to school there, my parents had been based out of there for all of their married life, and I used to go for gymnastics there as well- so I knew a lot of people in south hometown. I was looking for a new location, somewhere where I would not ‘run into’ anyone I knew. Or that was the logic I used initially when my parents were not aware that I was ‘dating’ or was interested in a ‘special someone’. to be honest, I thought the contractual ‘year’ would fly by, in reality, the year dragged on and on and on, so it was almost six months after marriage that I was forced to take a breather and visit my parents. The reason I had to make this visit was to understand how to tell my landlords to stop peeping into my bedroom windows as they passed by every day. I felt like I lived in a gilded cage.
I had taken an independent house on rental and in my eagerness to close the deal, had foolishly taken a house based on the fact that they had big rooms and could accommodate my car inside the compound. This was my first house hunt, and this was my first lesson on what to ‘watch out’ for when you rent a house. To be honest, I did help identify and shortlist the house my parents were living in and had followed their instructions for the most part, but forgot the most important one, never ever take a house where the landlord lives nearby. I had seen the house from the inside and the POV of access for my vehicle and had not bothered to open the windows to check on the view. If I had, this house would not have made the shortlist. The house had a 2 foot compound all around apart from where the car was parked. The car was parked in a caged space and while I could lock the front gate, I was informed that I could not lock the back part of the cage, as the landlords required to access the motor pump switch every morning. The backyard was also enclosed, with rods making it look like a cage. And this space had the window of the outhouse room’s attached bathroom. The bedrooms faced west and were on one side of the compound wall, the dining area windows faced the back and the outhouse bath, the living room windows opened to the car park, and every time the landlord came down to switch on the motor, she was invariably peeping into the house. The house was average at best and I am sure if we had spent an extra week looking we would have been able to shortlist a better option. We moved into this space in September and had an eleven-month lease. By June, I was ready to vacate, but I wanted to understand the details of the contract so, I made time to go and visit my parents.
Driving home was like a trip down memory lane, I drove us through all the lanes inside the city that I used to take while going to work when I lived with my parents. It took us a few extra minutes on account of me wanting to slow down at every food joint I used to frequent with my younger sibling and point it out to my spouse. I would’ve stopped and picked up some food as well, but we had told Mum we would be home for a meal, and I knew she would be excited to see us and would have gone overboard with the cooking, so we just went home. I was excited to see the dogs, and they went ballistic in their excitement to see us. Butch was bouncing off the ceiling, he was levitating so high in every leap. The first thing to hit me was that sense of being “home”, you know, that feeling where your body just relaxes knowing that the journey has finally come to an end. It was like a big boulder got off my shoulder. And the next thing to hit me, was dad’s cigarettes, oh! I missed that smoke. I don’t want to promote smoking or condone it, but Dad always smoked and that was just one of the scents that added to that mysterious “home” atmosphere.
One step into the house, the dogs silently padded in behind us and sat down near the door, aware that this was some extra time they were getting to spend indoors and Mum was distracted and so would not banish them out. Our dogs were mixed-doors dogs, that is, they lived indoors when it rained or if someone was bursting crackers and during summer and most other times, they slept indoors. And finally, it hit me, the smell of dinner. My tummy rumbled involuntarily at all the amazing aromas wafting out of the kitchen. Dad silently placed the plate on the table and invited us to start. We ate like we had just returned starving from the desert. Mum, as usual, had gone overboard, there was a little of everything prepared and she hadn’t forgotten to include my favorite alu poriyal, made by Dad, exactly as I liked it. There was sambar, rasam, beans with coconut and alu poriyal, and curd rice with pickle and there were the leftovers from the morning, pulao, dum aloo, and palak paneer. I was in heaven. Every morsel was a delicious reminder that I no longer lived here. I remembered the times I used to come back home open the fridge and gawk at the food prepared- to hate it all, hoping for a break from it and now, here I was, licking my fingers, licking the plate because I could not eat another bite. And once, dinner was cleared, Mum brought out her specialty, dessert. Mum was known for the Mysore Pak she made and this time she brought out a box of it. I loved the sweet, but R was looking for another of Mum’s specialties- Payasam. Mum waited a beat her eyes twinkling with mischief as she brought out the vessel full of payasam. What a treat that evening was!
As a newlywed, I had no culinary expertise. I started cooking edible food only after my kid was about 4 years old. Until then we juggled between Mum’s cooking, Amma’s generosity when she visited, the cook I had hired, and all the restaurants I had convinced to deliver food to us at home. I remember stocking up on RotiPratas I had picked up from Changi Airport on every return trip from my sibling’s house in Singapore. Or the many times I invited my older sibling to a meal, that she could prepare and bring for me to eat at my house or the times my younger sibling came home for a visit and I made her cook for me. The funny thing is that I was the official taster and live entertainment to the cooks in my house, so I learned to taste and could tell you if a dish had too much salt by smelling it. I find recipes to be complicated and still look for the ‘easiest’ or ‘fastest’ or ‘quickest’ or recipes with the ‘least ingredients’ when I cook.
Coming from my home of famine to Mum’s home of abundance was really like coming in starving from a desert. I have tasted many delicious meals over the years, but nothing compares to that first bite of food prepared by your parents exclusively for you, especially if you have lived on your own for a while. Of course, if you want to increase the complexity, raise the challenge, and heighten the experience, then you should also be blessed with my culinary expertise.
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