We were going to see Odysseus - with my two boys and the older one’s girlfriend. The only doubt was that the movie is for over 15s and our younger son is ten. Us parents made a quick call on it and decided the ten year old had seen it all - the horror of the orcs in the Lord of the Ring alone would be equivalent, so I thought. And he watches that on loop.

So we went to the cinema, knowing that someone may stop us, but otherwise parental due diligence such as it was, would win out. He is big for his age. And in any case after a few hours of football in the sun, there was a distinct possibility that he would fall asleep in the cinema anyway.

My older son and his girlfriend had made themselves useful and got to the cinema ahead of us and bought enough of the usual salty and sweet treats - popcorn, M&Ms, Malteasers. I decided to get the children milk shakes. The young man behind the counter went away to make them which took longer than expected. As we stood there talking excitedly and waiting for him to come back with the cool milky delights, a more assertive young man walked by and asked if he could help us.

We said no, all good we are just waiting for the milk shakes. And then he stood still. Looked hard at the ten year old. Turned to me - and asked ‘how old is he'?’ I looked at him. He looked at me. Steadily. I said ten. He said sorry you cannot take him in. If you had said 13, or 14 I would have let him in but I have to refund your tickets.

We decided to take two refunds and that the ten year old and dad would go back home. The manager gave us two complimentary tickets to make up for what he clearly saw was a very disappointing turn of events for all of us. The ten year old prepared to head home with dad and a chocolate milk shake.

As we turned away and said our goodbyes, the kids said why didn't you say 12, or 13, mummy? He would have let us in. It was too premeditated and would have been a lie to a direct question under unwavering eye contact - and I couldn’t do it. Sorry guys, I said.

So that’s how I came to watch the movie with my older son and his girlfriend. The story of Odysseus had something much more scary and gruesome than the pillage of Troy, the desolate realness of Hades and Matt Damon tied to the mast of his boat, screaming and straining against the ropes as he hears the song of the sirens. No, there was something much more penetrating and much more frightening in the movie .

As Odysseus is shown to be buffeted by the will of the Gods, and his interpretation of what it meant to lead his men in honour, escaping seething whirlpools, trapped in a dark hole by Cyclops, knowing that his men would die, puny in the orbit of forces larger than them, searching to do the right thing and failing to get back home, unable to remember who had given him that aching pain of love and separation that he felt - the terror is real, and one that makes evident just how contingent, precarious and demanding our puny lives are with its choices under contradictory forces.

For the full 170 minutes I felt the force and terror of being subject to things we do not understand, and the existential apprehension that instils in you. Having kids, child birth, holding down jobs, separating from family, missing people, seeing loved ones move away and pass over, not knowing what to hold on to and what to let go, regret at things that could have been, and our inability to prepare for what is to come - that’s the true horror of being human and totally inappropriate for a ten yr old!

John Duncan (Image from The Evergreen)

My heart sank. The large grey bowl was nearly half full with buttery mash that had been whipped into loveliness by the husband’s strong wrists. I scooped some up with a finger - delicious! I was back home from work at 11pm, everyone had eaten, I was not hungry and the mash was a massive bowl of ‘leftovers’.

Left overs can be lovely things. An unexpected bowl of chana lurking in the back of the fridge, some cold rice perfect for scallion speckled egg fried rice, or the ability to magically make a sandwich filling for a child from unrecognisable things in a bowl that are all the more scrumptious for having been fried the third time - these are unsuspecting blessings.

Managing what does not get eaten first time round, requires cognitive engagement. To make sure they are in the right box or bowl, that they do not crowd the fridge, eating them at the right time and in the right way, making sure each family member gets the kind of left over that speaks to their particular need, to honour the time and effort that went into cooking them - all of these require nimble thought processing, presence in the home, and attention to individual family member needs. Basically you carry the left overs in your head.

So now I was going to bed with a bowl of mash in my head.

My favourite family meals? The ones that are cooked in the 20 mins before dinner time, and get spooned onto four plates leaving nothing in the pots and pans. Clean plates and no left overs.

At least until I learn not to carry mash in my head.

It’s sometimes fun, and in the rare moments when I can get it together - I think this book will brilliant. Other moments I wonder why a paragraph reads so deformed even after the 6th revision. But like a messy relationship, I am committed despite the bad dates. We’ll get there together, limping and tired.

I have learnt a lot about myself in this process - so much so I think I am the project, not the words on the page. Many kind, concerned and generous people have offered me a room, for a week here and a few weeks there so I could bank words in solitude. And the work in progress has been marked by some extraordinary rooms. These rooms to write in, have all, without exception been a blessing - and almost all of them, more than I have photos for - have had wonderful windows.

Fantastical devices that draw your inside out, and the outside in.

One of the things I miss most from being home in India is the banality of the Gods. Over there, they walk, eat, travel and even sleep amongst us. Of the week I spent in Bangalore looking after and being looked after by various family members, I managed to sneak away a few nights to a small, perfectly formed temple to Ayappa, the celibate, brave boy god whose bestie was an Arab war lord. Every night after a day of worship and receiving prayers, he is put to sleep with a lullaby - 8 stanzas sung with the (electric) lights off, played on a CD player in the singular voice of Jesudas.

Over the eight minutes its takes, the song soothes and washes over those listening as the priest slowly snuffs out the oil lamps in the inner sanctum one by one using a flower, leaving one straight lick of flame burning as the wooden doors are pulled shut.

In the oil lamp lit darkness you are drawn in to the intimacy of this act of settling him in for the night, of caring even as you hope to be cared for. The practiced serenity is a balm, an act of faith in the necessity of rest and the certainty of renewal - even the Gods retreat and rest. And so on those nights I returned back to my room - comforted by the connection between those we supplicate ourselves to and our own lives.

The Lullaby

As friends, colleagues and family narrated in heartfelt ways what he meant to them, it seemed utterly preposterous that he had found time, and grace to do it all. How could he do all the things he did, be all the things he was, to all these people and still reply almost immediately to any email you wrote him?

Serendipitously, that lunch time a younger friend at work called me to sense-check a decision she had to make. She was being offered a prestigious award, she would have to be away from home for three days, and would miss the first day of pre-school for her children. She couldn’t do it, and felt she had to say no.

I took a deep breath before I told her that there are 190 school days in the year. It will be so much fun putting their uniform together, getting school shoes ready and talking to her cuties about what to expect in pre-school on that first day. All of which she can do before she leaves for her trip. And then the following Monday, when she is back, she can walk them to school and it would still be their first day when mummy walked them there.

When we finished speaking, she seemed less sure about rejecting the award. I am not sure, but I hope she makes the decision to go shine at her work.

Every moment of every day is a series of cutting-aways - you go to the gym, you lose the chance to wash your hair. You take that call from your friend, you miss saying good bye to a child off on a play date. You say no to a conference, you miss meeting colleagues who will be there.

We cannot know who we will be at the end of our lives, but we can know who we might be for the next hour, for the day, possibly for this week. It is extraordinary to think that it’s these little decisions, threaded together with a smidgeon of help from the universe, that will add up to a life well-lived or not.

If you have gone anywhere near news related to Kerala in the past week you may have seen a story about a woman who caught a man touching her inappropriately on public transport, a video of which she then made public. The man who was exposed thus, sadly killed himself. An utter shit-show of a political and cultural flashpoint. I am not going to link to the video here.

This kind of casual sexual assault was dime a dozen when I was growing up in Kerala, over 30 years ago and later at University in Bangalore. Some were even funny, some occasions were more serious, and some downright unsafe.

I realise that many many women do not have the privilege of writing about this at a sunny desk while drinking their morning coffee. And what would be the purpose of writing this up anyway? I don’t know - I just feel moved to record and register. So here is a list of three curious incidents of casual assault that I survived.

This one is funny: While at law school, I would move out of college rooms and stay over at a friend’s for a few days so we could study together. We were both very good at waking up at 3 am if needed and had found a way to double up labour to remember all those pesky family law or evidence or criminal law cases we needed to know. We would then get on her scooter for the 40 minutes or so ride to university. While riding pillion I would go over the cases and she would listen while also navigating Bangalore traffic (gulp). The stretches of the road where we went fast was fine. When you had to slow down to get through a snarl of other bikes and cars, you would have to dodge other bikers coming the opposite way, or who would ride alongside us, who would likely reach out to grab our breasts. Incredible high speed, life-in-your-hands game that required you to be on high alert all the time.

We still aced most of our exams. She is now this inspiring judge of a superior court in another country and I could not be more proud of her, and the small part I played in getting her there.

This second instance is more serious. My mother and I ran into a colleague of my father’s on the long bus journey from school — a crowded journey of more than 60 minutes in the heat and humidity. I had a seat on the bus, he was standing right next to me. At our stop, I stood up. He reached out and pinched my breast -a big giant, painful grab enough to wind me. I got off the bus dazed, and told my mother a few days later. We had a family discussion. My brother (and I cannot for the life of me remember if I dreamt this up) - said he knew people in the students union at his college, who knew some people in the fishermen’s union who could take matters into their own hands. If you knew my nerdy brother, you would know why coming from him, this was hilarious!

Eventually my father made an official stink at his place of work and demanded an apology. I later heard that the man in question had cried and expressed remorse of some sort in a social gathering, and that was carried back to us.

The third, was the first time I realised boys who know you and are supposed to protect you would also, given a chance take advantage of you. We were at a family wedding - happy, long summer days filled with excitement with a large group of cousins and second cousins. I was sleeping one afternoon in a room with others and woke to hear an older cousin telling a younger cousin, while casually running his hands on my chest - ‘They don’t realise it when they are asleep’. I didn’t wake up and confront him - I kept pretending to sleep, slightly paralysed by what I had just heard.

The fourth - I know I said I would write three, but there is so much more to choose from! I played basketball in school and absolutely loved it. Unusually for the school I went to we actually had a coach, someone who knew what he was doing. One of the training exercises was the drop-step, in and out dribble, face-up maneouver- where you would try to take a shot while working your way out from under the defence. You had to grip the ball firmly right against your chest while stepping, while the defence would try to tap the ball away. The coach was always defence.

Yep - every time he reached for the ball, he would also slap your chest. We all knew and we never said anything until something worse happened and he got found out. I felt relatively safe because I knew I was younger, a tomboy and nowhere as beautiful as some of the older school girls on the team. (I am ashamed to admit now that this thought may have crossed my mind). He coached us for years, and we travelled with him on trains and mini buses to play in far away places - some of my happiest memories are travelling to play. I didn’t want to stop so I never said anything at home.

I write these not to condone or normalise, but to say that growing up female was truly a bloodsport, that we also took in our stride and factored into what we did.

I don’t have a perfect solution but if I could, I would allow youngsters to date each other as they become teenagers. For them to have a safe space to understand that consensual touching can be fun and parent-approved, that there is no need for this guerrilla-warfare plague of non-consensual and inappropriate touching. But I am also sure you cannot layer something so complex on existing structural inequality between the sexes. It would need years of educational campaigns, and policy measures - but this is a long game and we are playing it terribly.

.

Since then man-child has been rotating beautiful sheets hung up in his door way. He can hear us when I call him downstairs for dinner. I like knowing that his window is open to air out his sports kit and socks when I see the sheet gently shifting in the wind with it open. The door? It’s leaning against my office wall, obscuring a map of the world. I sense that he is OK with losing it, the resoluteness has brought something that was between us, down.

Lately things have been a little tense, and one particular issue has made communicating with him very difficult. The desire to hold his ground, insist, not back down has been something of a shock. We have tried to look him in the eye and speak. But what he hears is not the same as the words we carefully put out. It’s difficult to be patient.

This morning when I saw him for breakfast I kissed his forehead. Not an easy task - he is tall now and I can barely reach his forehead when he is seated at the breakfast bar. And then there is a mass of curly hair he has nursed for six months, which makes finding his forehead a bit of a challenge.

But I managed to land a juicy one. He looked surprised, relieved, and a little less inflated as I moved to put the kettle on.

He now knows that a heated argument won’t stop me from kissing him.

And I am left thinking about doors. Why we put them up, how we can take some down, and what it means to walk through others. Doors create thresholds, non-places that are neither in nor out; transient but also necessary. I feel we will be stopping at this particular threshold for a few more years - a figurative boundary at the edge of man-child’s growth, and parental fortitude.

So, I cried on January 1st. Streaming hot tears - not sadness, nor joy but something else. Tears of recognition, of familiarity and maybe a tiny bit of hope trying to wriggle out from under layers of cynicism.

I first heard of Mira Nair, Zohran Mamdani’s mother as a 12 year old in Calicut. I was reading a review of her movie, ‘Salaam Bombay’ in the Illustrated Weekly of India a magazine we subscribed to at home, and called out from the living room to my mother who was in the kitchen. ‘Amma, what does brothel mean?’.

I don’t think I have ever had anything snatched from my hands at that speed before or since then! My mother scolded me for reading stuff not meant for me, and no, she did not tell me what a brothel was. And there were others - ‘Mississippi Masala’ and ‘Kama Sutra’ that came out when I was at University - still no way of seeing Mira Nair’s movies without feeling like we were dealing in contraband. Her lush imagery is entwined with my own coming of age - ‘Monsoon Wedding’ coincided with a best friend’s wedding in Bangalore; the ‘Reluctant Fundamentalist’ unspooled an altogether different degree of racism even as I came to understand that I may not go home to live in India again.

Zohran Mamdani’s inaugural speech on becoming NYC’s youngest, and first muslim mayor was like a potluck table spread for a street party in a non-posh part of town - references to cricket, to biriyani, to bodegas, people watching his speech on ‘phones propped up in parked cabs in La Guardia’, to ‘family from Kampala to Dilli’ - tropes and references that visitors and residents of NYC alike would recognise.

And then the long beautiful sentences - unashamedly ambitious. ‘I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical... What's radical is a system which gives so much to so few and denies so many people the basic necessities of life.’

By 2050 nearly 70% of all humanity will live concentrated lives in urban spaces. NYC’s gamble on Mamdani is a test of where progressive politics can go, and I will be watching through fingers over my eyes.

But there is another image of Mamdani that was even more resonant for me - a sunny picture of him eating rice with his hands. Parts of American media received this with disgust, they were offended, it made him ‘scum’, he was ‘impure’, even immoral for eating with his hands. The backlash, the political din that followed reeked of the civilising mission; but also of the many ways in which we still collude with the asphyxiation of trying to make black and brown people ‘behave’, ‘integrate’ - ‘become one of us’.

When my brother was shortlisted for the Rhodes interview in India in 1995, to become one of 2-3 students who would go to Oxford University fully-funded - this outrageously brilliant young doctor was nervous of one thing. And that was the dinner after the interviews which would take place in ‘Dilli’. My father went to Ramanattukara - a tiny town 8 kms from where we lived, to look for a fork and knife so my brother could practice using table cutlery.

Eating with your hands makes feeding yourself sensuous, and connecting with your mouth, a whole body experience.

Licking the tiniest bit of ginger pickle off a well positioned finger, or offering a soft morsel of buttery curd rice to a toddler from the tip of your hand - these are habits shared in so many parts of the world that are not New York, and so Mamdani’s rice eating habit becomes a kind of intimate civilisational flashpoint.

And explains the tears at the start of the what I hope will truly be a new year.

My basket of fruits and flowers travelled to my grandmother, my amamma, in 2022 a few hours before she passed in Chennai. She told everyone she saw that day - her carer, the cook, a neighbour - how her granddaughter had sent fruits from London. I like to think that she enjoyed the fact that I still remember her as loving her tea-time snacks, her fruits, her sweets; rather than someone who was frustrated to be too weak to chew, to eat.

When my mother who was attending on her realised she had lost consciousness it was coming up to the hours before midnight. It would be hard to find a doctor or an ambulance that could traverse the busy city streets, with its honking cars and new year’s eve revellers.

I was alone in London working on something critical that needed to be finished by early January. I reached out to better-connected friends from law school who organised a paramedic, and stayed on the phone with my mother as the new year broke.

I never attended any of my grandma’s rites and rituals, the grief came instead in dribs and drabs in the year preceding when she got more ill, when cousins shared some old, forgotten photo newly scanned for WhatsApp.

Her pride in me was palpable, and alive - she said I had the best nose of all her granddaughters, and loved the wedge hair cut I sported in my 20s. She kept a large matriculation photo of me from Oxford in her living room ‘showcase’. I was always excited to see her, there was unique comfort and homecoming in her presence.

She was married at 14, to a handsome 18 year old railway clerk who would go on to become office superintendent of the southern railways in Chennai. She spent time in Peshawar, Pakistan before independence as her father was in the Indian army, such as it was.

She had her firstborn, my mother at 15 in 1948. She would read the newspaper everyday, and ensured three of her four children went to University. Her purple Kanchivaram saree is the one I am wearing in the 1998 formal middle common room group photo at Exeter College, Oxford.

Because my mother as an unborn daughter, carried the ova that would become me, you could say that my amamma also carried me and my sons in her - a mind-blowing cellular lineage that honours daughters over sons.

My amamma is the vessel that wraps around us, the stretched hand across time and geography - and that is how I feel held by her memory.

I wonder how long the flower shop’s automated system will keep sending me their reminder.

Mrs Shanti Sri Ramulu

When human embryos develop there is a point at which each cell can still grow into a full human being, just before they start to differentiate. We spend the rest of our lives expending the ‘totipotency’ of this moment. Occasionally you meet someone you only knew in a mildly remembered totipotent stage, who did not know you as you busily differentiated and became the individuated entity you are now.

I was lucky or unlucky enough to have left a friend behind 30 years ago - who I could reconnect with, minus the trappings of my current life. A controlled experiment, an infinitesimal chance to meet out of two lives lived on different continents and on different planes. They talk about thin places, this was a thin moment, an icy plunge after a bone- warming sauna, a startling derma-peel of years of life dust.

Perhaps we never leave the people we were behind, the unformed personalities, the half-remembered fledgling desires and wishes, we carry them with us, jostling inside for crumbs of space and attention. Occasionally something happens and you remember.

I used to think looking forward was the brave way, the only way ahead but it turns out sometimes life shows itself to be cyclical, and we may need to walk backwards to see the sunrise.

She got excited. Absurdly so. She remembered a friend of hers from way back, who had shown her how to put popcorn in tomato soup. I was intrigued. I set a pan on and soon had a unruly scattering of popped corn from an overflowing pan. We gave ourselves little bowls of soup and added the corn on top.

Revelatory. The kind of delicious that blows cobwebs. I ate the last of the soup by topping popcorn with a coating of soup.

A dear friend once described an incident that seemed to set the parameters of her friendships in Canada, her adopted country. Invited for dinner for the first time to a colleague’s house, she stood up to help and opened a kitchen cabinet to reach for plates. She felt the air around her freeze as she realised she had broken some unspoken bounds of too-much familiarity, too-soon. When she recounted the dinner to me, we laughed at this little detail.

My friends unexpected visit connected us to her popcorn-in-tomato-soup-loving friend from her youth in the US. This wasn’t just about the soup and corn though. This was about feeling at home, with the people who give you what you need without having to ask for it.

Who are you a friend to that could do with a gratitude inspiring visit today.

Yesterday I wandered the streets of Oxford reminiscing with my 9 year old about places and people I knew when I lived there. The Covered Market is a favourite haunt. As a student I spent a lot of time in its cosy confines - it was intimate, protective and I learnt a lot. I have always loved markets - we spent my 40th in Rialto market with a 5 month old and a 7 year old. In a before life, I would ogle at the sellers and their wares at the market in Vijaynagar in Bangalore, taking in the heady, wet smell of just-cut greens.

Traversing the market in Oxford during the day time the store shop windows was my own Netflix, a persistent and ever-changing presence. Studying the ‘oldest cheese shop in the UK’, the unfamiliar butchers shop, my uncomprehending gaze settling on sausages and steaks, the woollen goods, the thickness of the yarn, all taught me more about my new life in the UK than any other source. The flower stall showcasing colours of the season, the cake shop marking significant dates and days, the bored sales-lady with the extra long platinum blond hair, the boisterousness of the market stallers - these transfixed me and kept me from work in that first heady year at Oxford.

In those times between tutorials and lectures I was mostly in flight from the course I had come to do in Oxford, from feeling that I was not ready to start another intense period of study having just finished a 5 year residential degree that was also a brutal coming of age in Bangalore. I did not know then that I would go on to stay for 6 years, meet my husband and make yet another trip back with a bored son 27 years later, to walk through the same rows of stalls and shops.

This time I was taken aback to see that the celebrations cake shop - a place with large square windows ideally positioned to see skilled hands make unique cake toppers and beautiful cakes - has been painted over. To stop thieves dipping into the bags of those who stand to watch. My own wedding cake topper was made here and carried gingerly on the train to Scotland for a reception organised by my mother-in-law who hoped, agonisingly that it would not rain on that autumnal day. It rained of course, but I did not have the heart to tell her that in India when it rains for weddings it’s auspicious - a sign of renewal and divine favour. The clouding over of the window seemed to be a warning - what other aspects of my history had my memory covered up.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a jolly evening with girlfriends I have known since my teens and early twenties. We looked back at those times and lamented the fact that we did not appreciate just how beautiful we each were. At 17 and at 23 we worried about being fat, not having the right hair - curly, straight, whatever, and not being the right kind of cool to be attractive. It was a mild lament, not on the receding of that first blush of youth but on the absurd preoccupations that kept us seeing how precious each of us were. I am better these days - I catch myself in a shop window and see a meaningful face look back at me.

My face is my history and my memory - a complicated history, split as it is between two lifetimes. And it’s a bit of a blood sport to stay true to your history even as your memory of it evolves and morphs into other versions of yourself.

(Photo credit to a dear friend, Meghna Abraham)

Just as well. All morning I had a feeling of what I now recognise as ‘too- muchness’ - overwhelming feelings of inadequacy, of there never being enough time. Not in any tragic way, but with a crystal-clear view of all of life and your inability to complete everything in that moment. You can either chug on forwards or you can freeze in the headlights of that realisation. I froze. The hot chocolate prodded me back to earth and I experienced touchdown.

Luckily I have a few weeks to spend in this University town finishing a long piece of writing. But it also means being away from people I love and who need me, reading and thinking and writing in relative seclusion as I have wanted to for years. University towns are not unfamiliar to me - I grew up in one and spent the best part of my ‘wild’ 20s in another. There is much earnest familiarity in the faces around me, in the conversations I catch on the wind and in the way the afternoon light bounces off the stone walls of colleges. In many ways I am in my literal and metaphorical happy place.

So why the too-muchness? From another writer you may recognise - “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become….What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

I choose the hot chocolate!

My preteen son was grumpy and would not do it, so I set about it with gusto. I managed to find the right material so she would look floaty rather than rigid, and I gave her a green heart to appreciate all the volunteers that look after the park. She was first used on the tree when children from local schools hung up wishes written on tags as ornaments. So our tree fairy holds a pink star wand, and bestows wishes if you ask in the right way.

What I love most about her though is for me, she represents my friendship and shared understanding with Beth, who could have easily bought a wonderful tree topper. Or indeed replaced her in the years in between with a shiny new thing. Instead, our tree fairy this year has weathered Covid and many winter storms, enters her 5th tour of duty today; and against all odds is still fairying.

For the last ten days, Beth has waited for me to get over a cold, and then some stressful events at work so I can find time to fix the tree fairy. I sense so much honour in the effort to save her for another year’s service that I feel strangely moved.

I fixed her today. Here she is now and on her first tour of duty. Isn’t she gorgeous?! My tree fairy of friendship, with the green heart.

Over the last few months a dinner cooked with care and attention to detail has become a provocation for all sorts of stresses of the day to spill out. And when those around the table include a particularly teenagey teen, a needy eight year old and a mother who is working too much and carrying far too much guilt about being absent - its a recipe for unhappy times. The eight year old had gotten into trouble at school (again!) for allowing a friend to wind him up. A plastic fork may have been used, and a swear word may or may not have been heard. One of a growing number of evenings that feel like an epic parenting failure, for reasons you don’t quite understand.

This morning I was moved when reading Meera Sodha’s piece in the Guardian about losing the will to cook. A burnt-out, exhausted Sodha loses the ability to taste anything, or derive any joy from cooking. And because cooking is the way her mother showed her love, Sodha is defeated by her inability to do the same for her family where she once loved to cook. Until months into her fatigue, her husband who is coping with the fallout of her burnout, simply says ‘“I would just really love it if you could cook a meal for me,”. Sodha then says ‘ It was a simple request; but the emotional equivalent of him saying: “Help me, love me, take care of me.”

Hearing someone I love admit that they were struggling caused an automatic shift. As a kneejerk reaction, I stepped back into the kitchen, grabbing a pan and looking in the store cupboard. I intuitively picked up the red lentils. I found an onion, some coconut milk, and lemongrass and lime leaves in the freezer. Hugh ran out to a local Pakistani shop to pick up fresh naans, and I began to cook again; a simple Malaysian dal, similar to one we had eaten together in the markets in Singapore.

We ate this dal in relative silence, but we both knew it was a special moment. I could see how much it meant to him, just doing this one thing. He had been starved of everything – love, care, attention and food. By this simple gesture, I was beginning to resurface.

I have always known that my relationship with food is a barometer for all sorts of things. I have done some crazy things around food - time a dinner with friends so that I could bring ingredients (fresh curry leaves!) from Bangalore; hire an Air BNB so I could have a kitchen to cook in peace for my father in laws birthday in Aberdeen; I own a paella pan that a toddler can fit into comfortably; and I will walk for miles in an unfamiliar city to eat in a hole-in-the-wall place that has rave reviews. And I have in the past found it hard to connect with people who don’t take a similarly ceremonious view of food and cooking for other people.

My mother was, is, a terrible cook. Oh, her food was tasty enough and we never complained, but she cooks for survival rather than for pleasure. Never for pleasure. I disliked watching her cook even in my twenties because I could see how exhausted she would get. In Indian mythology - the good cooks are strongmen - Bhima, the strongest of the Pandavas and King Nala, the lover of Damayanti known for his skill with horses and gambling. My mother would say - cooking is hard labour. And without a dishwasher, food processor, fresh supermarkets, a freezer or any other kind of kitchen aid I am amazed that she raised two well-fed and grateful children.

My grandmother, on the other hand showed her love, her care, her all through cooking and feeding. My mother and her siblings describe endless dosas she would make while standing in a hot, windowless kitchen until four hungry children had their fill; oil bought on pay-day used to make delicious deep fried puris as a treat. I am yet to match the taste of her goat biriyani or prawn with tomatoes and onions - flavourful long, long after she herself became a vegetarian and could not literally stand the sight of the curly uncooked prawns that she would de-vein and clean herself. She would stay alert to hear the call of the street-vendor on our street in Chennai where we spent our summers, who would be heard before he was seen, pushing a cart with freshly made mini samosas to accompany a late evening cup of tea; she would send us out with coins to buy just-baked, warm, butter biscuits. She would make my grandfather take us out to eat Kaal pulusu - a soupy broth made from goat feet - a collagen filled, creamy flavour bomb - when she could no longer wake up early to cook it for hours herself. When my husband (she called him Janardanan - she preferred it to Jonathan..) visited she would insist he eat and eat and eat some more. I don’t remember her once expecting even in tone or body language to be thanked, or seeing what she was doing as anything other than routine, normal, everyday loving.

But she was very wary of cooking for visitors - she cooked for family, not for friends. She did not grow up around a culture of food as entertainment. It was a generosity of love that instinctively extended scarce resources to her family, a way to keep them safe, happy, healthy with what was available. We know now that eating habits are transmitted from parents to children over generations in various ways - emotional, educational, environmental and social. On our tables, and our plates sit generational traumas and pleasurable memories. So next time you sit down to eat with those you love, know that you are sitting down with the chef’s history, geography, migration, and more. Meera Sodha’s narrative voice is both personal, intimate, and global.

I am not sure if I am cooking again tonight - I might stay away and give us all a break!

Cooking up a storm for family in Aberdeen.

The move my parents made in 1978 was a dramatic one - to a hot, fetid tropical jungle like environment where raincoats undisturbed for a whole season could well turn up a coiled Cobra. And at times, we would be woken up by a mongoose living in the roof space peeing on our beds at night, and on us! I don’t want to think of the biological hazard that must have been. We lived in a large ‘Professors quarters’ - with five bedrooms, a servant quarter and a study. But the nights were so dark, and thunder storms so frequent that my brother and I mostly all slept huddled in my parents bed. School holidays meant being dropped off at the University library (now called the CH Mohammed Koya Library, named after an Education Minister in Kerala). We grazed and lolled without a care in the world, in the Periodicals room and the Stack room - gorging on anything and everything we could read. Large American Life magazine, newspapers spread out on wooden angled boards, Sociology periodicals, romantic novels (totally age inappropriate), Yeats, Indian folktales, anything and everything was read and devoured. And occasionally we would venture up to the reference rooms upstairs. No one was looking after us, and yet everyone had an eye on us.

Given that my parents moved here from hip, salubrious Bangalore, it was a consciousness shift and a shock to the system. As a family of four, we had tremendous adventures, more fun now in hindsight than at the time.

But the main reason I wanted to write today was a video I saw of the Chair of the philosophy department at Emory University being arrested at a pro-Palestinian demonstration on Campus. She has lovely shoes on, totally inappropriate for being arrested. A student who is video-ing her arrest, apologises, follows her as she is lead away and asks repeatedly if he can do anything for her. She asks him to call the office of the Philosophy Department and tell them she has been arrested. And the student says ‘I got you!’.

That phrase just floored me. You keep it together through the cruellest videos and then something banal just gets you. There is something utterly singular about belonging to a University campus, the best experience of collective, shared endeavours that physical, material space can bring. And the solidarity and empathy the student showed to his teacher - the quality of that interaction as ephemeral as it is, is the best parts of what keeps us together.

Over the years I have experienced many a university campus, first following my parents around, then as a student and an itinerant academic. Whether Kuppam University, NLSIU, Oxford, Cambridge, LSE Emory, IISC - they hum and throb with a purpose, reflection, of quiet moments spent together and in solitude, of writing, of perceiving others engaged as you are, of the struggle to learn and to become. They are today quickly becoming sites of a larger fight, one that we are all involved in whether we know it or not.

May we all have such places that hold meaning and a sense of purpose, to remember and to return to.

Scientific scales of the kind I slept next to.

The Calicut University Library

Its my first time in California, I came to be part of a gathering of people celebrating the life of an absolute superstar academic in my field. 48 hours before we were to meet he passed away, in a week where he also submitted his final paper on patent law and semiotics. During the day we had four panels of speakers on his works on the internet, patent law, gender and sociology showing how widely he wrote. I heard he had seen the list of people who were coming to the event and was surprised that so many would come from so far away at short notice, and that to me more than justified the round trip.

The people who spoke were a mix of his contemporaries, mid-level and junior scholars. What felt so extraordinary was that apart from his stellar writing (and I do not mean that in a gratuitous way), people seemed to really know him as a full spectrum human being, feminist and as one of my panellist said - a real mensch. We talked in different ways about what motivated him, how much he read, what family meant to him, how he treated other scholars, his steadfast friendships, his strong sense of community, and his very low tolerance for academic preening and performance. This is relatively rare to non-existent in British academia. (why, will have to be another post).

I feel grateful and humbled to be invited in to this group. I had something I had wanted to say to him. On my panel, we went in alphabetic order so was scheduled to speak after his best friend and equally or more super-star academic - a George Clooney to his Tom Cruise stature. His talk was moving, emotional and beautifully stated. I found it hard to speak after that but delivered what I had prepared in an imperfect way knowing the day wasn’t really about me.

At the reception after, I had just spoken to his bereaved wife when I saw her gesture towards a passing tray of food and take something of it to eat. I went over and asked if I could make her a plate of food, to which she said OK. So I put some watermelon, some cheese and some empanadas on a plate and she sat down to eat it. Strangely and only in the aftermath of that moment, did I feel I had brought all of myself to the commemoration.

I learnt many things about the value of knowing and appreciating your place in the world this day - one of a handful of life-defining days whose memory I will hold very close.

A California sunset.

My relationship with rice is a kind of epistemological flashpoint that brings together different ways of knowing - emotion, memory, experience, knowledge. It also holds my unique neuroses with respect to life and love and family and the ways in which they have changed as I moved between continents. I believe I feel withdrawal symptoms if I cannot eat it for a few days, and there is nothing, nothing like the smell of rice in boiling water, just going opaque as it gets cooked. It’s the petrichor of my muddled immigrant consciousness that can cut through any dark imaginings.

Growing up, during the summer holidays, dinner would often mean balls of the day’s rice mixed with whatever was going - pappu or rasam or buttermilk kneaded and mixed, and rolled with the fingers on one hand, doled out by my grandmother to little stretched hands as me and my cousins sat in a half circle around her on the floor of the house in Chennai. There might be a small piece of something tasty rolled into it - vegetable, meat or fish, and if not perhaps a touch of lime or mango pickle. We would eat, slurping, licking fingers, a whole body experience; oblivious to how the perfect proportions and taste was something we would each chase in our adult lives.

My father would hunt for the oldest rice in the shop/ market. You see, the older the rice, the drier it is, giving more chances to achieve the prized separateness of everyday rice - not atomistic and flakey like pulao rice, and not overly sticky like gruel rice. He would take a single grain of rice and bite down between his front teeth to see how well it cracks under pressure. A faint memory now given the rice monism I live with. Basmati would not stand a chance against the myriad heady smelling rices of my childhood.

I refuse to use a rice cooker, it feels wrong. I want to be involved with how my rice cooks to know that I got the level of water and heat right. Well-cooked white rice does not need much - a little something salty or sharp is sufficient to make a delicious morsel. And when I sip the drained water in which hard to find par boiled red rice has been cooked, with a tiny smidgeon of salt, it feels like a hot, familiar hug.

And yet the starch content in white rice, and the insulin resistance many of South Asian descent suffer from, has also made rice a joy to be consumed in small quantities. Insulin resistance is associated with early life famine exposure, and metabolic signalling can get messed up for generations following famine. It’s mind-boggling to think that my body remembers through space and time, periods when there was not much carbohydrate to metabolise. My plate of rice connects me inextricably to those who did not have any.

On the bright side I have not burnt the rice for many months now!

Happy plates!

I have that feeling, an amalgam of physiological and emotional - that I experience when preparing for a flight away from my mother or my kids. The sensation of heart strings literally and figuratively being stretched, stretched, but with surprising give and length.

I am leaving horizon-busting St Ives tomorrow. I have no connection to the place that any census recorder would recognise. I am one of countless people who come here to drink the views, smell the air, fight the seagulls for chips and carry the cushiony white sand between my toes.

There is raw permanence in the big sky, ocean and bay views, reminding me that all attempts to be indispensable, to make a mark, to record our existence in the lives of the people we love is trumped by the bay and the grains of sand; even the watermark of the high tide on the rocks has been around for longer than I have. Sometimes it’s the mellow iridescence that bathes everything in a cloak of dewy light. Maybe it’s the knowing looks of recognition people give each other on the shore. Or its nothing more than the fish and chips which always seem a better idea before you eat it than after!

There is a thinness to this place, in amidst the salty air and the stone walls - its the sort of place you can meld into and disappear, if you wanted to.

This poem by Ella Frears is like a sharp intake of breath in its easy capture of the affection I feel for it - its painted on the wall at the Tate St Ives just outside the cafe. I leave you with her words and the purring ocean.

That wintry evening, the pink man in the boucle jumper walked me back to my college. He seemed very intense, and as interesting as he was interested in me. We quickly got into a heated conversation about God and Neale Donald Walsh (!), which continued over the next two evenings.

I had arrived two months ago at Oxford, and signed up to learn meditation because that was the one commitment my father had insisted I make before I left India. Seven Years later when I married the man with the quiff, and my father refused to come to the wedding or permit us to get married in India, I never doubted once that the path we had chosen was right for us. Partly because my father had inexorably set me on that path. In my world-view (and later, in my husband’s) we could scarcely have planned a more auspicious way to meet.

Our relationship in the early years was tumultuous - un-understandings abounded, cultural differences put us in mad and painful situations, we did not even have a shared notion of what it meant to be in a relationship. His love such as it was, and my infatuation, pretzled me into a lover, a wife and a mother.

At a particularly difficult phase of our relationship, unable to keep away from each other, we gave ourselves a four-hour rule. Anything beyond four-hours to hang out was a no-no. The rule worked well for us, until the children arrived and the spaces between us collapsed.

Tonight I am not with my husband. I am away, on a two-week family pass to salvage some writing time, to bank hours on my academic work before the chaos of the Christmas holidays set in. The family unit gives me time away from them and the paraphernalia of our life together every now and then. I start by taking 2-3 days to detox and clear my mind, they eat a lot of pizza.

Being a mother, and what’sapp groups’ first responder, is to experience a constant dissolving of one-self, much like when you experience the kind of love that captures you and won’t let you go without pummelling and transforming you. In this maelstrom, the spaces between us define our relationship.

These spaces and time away allow me to remember who I am when I am not with the people who live under my skin, to think, perhaps even write a little. It’s the spaces between us that make being together bearable, and for those spaces I am eternally grateful.

A favourite bench where I took a few moments yesterday to be thankful.