The hearth of the matter

(This article is part of 'Ways of eating': a mini-series on food in Southasia)

Sometimes, when I ask my father about his ancestral home in a small town in Gujarat, he tells me little details about the female spaces that he had hived away in his memory: of kolso (coal) powering the bellows of the kitchen; of his mother, my bapaiji, hunkered down on a wooden patlo tossing rotlis on the flame that was never entirely extinguished (it was kept blanketed by ash that smouldered through the night); of the rotli that was immediately yellowed with butter and sugar for a snack; of fingers of dried boomla (dried fish) charred over coal-smoke until they became crisp as icicles; of smoke-mottled copper vessels, scrubbed and scrubbed clean; of a bowl of ravo (semolina) sown with soft, fat, butter-fried raisins; of a glass of iced orange squash, the ice fresh from a brand new icebox (a novelty!). The borders of the kitchen frayed into other spaces – the window ledge on which doodh na puff (milk-cream) settles into a froth of bubbles chilled by the morning dew; the otlo (raised ground on the front porch), on which my grandmother would chat with neighbours and bargain stridently with knife-grinders and fisherwomen; the fields, in which umbadiyu was made by sealing root vegetables into a clay pot and placed on red hot charcoals, then interred in an underground pit and covered with earth overnight.

I have never seen this home. It is long gone, pulled down and replaced by a moraine of trash. These are all memories gleaned singly from conversations with my father. There is both sweetness and asperity in his telling of the day-long work of my grandmother, in kitchen air that was fuggish with coal and wood smoke. For me, in my city flat, I also think of the shared cosmologies that such a space betokens; of amity and kinship, of widened social spaces.