The Nostalgic Value Of Spices

Not in the beginning. You do miss the familiarity and ease of being home in the first few days but then you settle in, a new set of things become familiar and you no longer miss home. You might even detest it after a point.

Then some months go by, you’re living life and when you least expect it, when you’re at your most vulnerable on a solitary Sunday morning, with very little chaos around you, it all hits you. The feeling of being away from home. It hit me too. In the form of a gut wrenching nostalgia. And for some reason, it was food. I woke up really hungry and all I could think of was the absolutely delicious chicken curry my mother used to make on Sunday mornings. Oh that yummy gooey spicy dish of absolutely delectable quality. My entire childhood and all its memories have lived through the taste of that chicken curry. And I started craving it really really hard. 

That’s when I decided, I just had to go ahead and make it myself. So that’s it. I pushed myself out of bed, got up and started to figure what I needed to make it happen. Surfing 15 websites, 27 videos, and 16 calls to friends later, it finally dawned upon me that I should ask the master herself. There was literally no point in meandering around this like it’s some science I needed to figure by myself.

So there I was. On a video call, with my mother who insisted I keep talking to her while I head to the grocery store under my building. What was supposed to be a call to understand a recipe became a catch up conversation. I was hit with questions about my life choices in the middle of looking for the spices she said I needed to pick up. And then, right when I was standing next to the shelf of keema masala, was I hit with the unavoidable question on my matrimony, about what I had been absconding that conversation for the longest time. 

I couldn’t pull an angry face, no. She knows by now that I love her too much for that anger to mean anything at all. I couldn’t reason with them because well if you have had parents born in the 50s you would know. And I couldn’t tug an emotional cord either. I had exhausted all my choices. Now all I could do is wait it out or hope to have a good enough distraction really soon.

Thank god that distraction came when I was picking up a rather large packet of coarse ground spices. That’s when I was schooled on how I literally would need only 3 spoons of that and neither she nor my inner conscience expected me to cook this dish more than twice in the coming three years. So I leaned in to pick up the smaller packed, tossed it in the shopping cart and moved to the billing counter as mom and I chatted about her healing knee and the new friends she had made on her now regular evening walks after dinner. 

I finally reached home, as we continued talking and mom was there all along over video call helping me with exactly when to put in the mustard seeds, how to marinate the chicken, when to add the keema masala, when to put in the coarse ground spices, and exactly how long to cook it for. Finally, after 4 hours of hard work and a really long, uncomfortably comfortable conversation with my mother, I had the chicken curry ready to eat. I didn’t need rotis, or rice. I just lapped it up with my bare fingers, and cherished memories.