A taste of memory

Illustration/Uday Mohite

For quite some time in my childhood, I was under the impression that kande batate ki bhaji, blooming with garlic, creamy chawal ki kheer and puris were holy pooja food, because they were made twice a year and my mom would light a lamp before we could eat it. I came to understand that this was my late uncle Pradeep's favourite meal and was cooked on his birth and death anniversaries. As if in continuity, when my father died, it became a kind of ritual in my family to eat ice cream or dark chocolate cake on his death and birth anniversaries.

Food is an intimate part of death rituals in most cultures and communities. The foods are metaphors for life - grain, fish and meat - or death as stripping sensory life from the spirit - vegetables without spice, mashed rice. Some feasts are offerings of thanks, because we inherit our very beings from our ancestors, whom we believe partake, for instance, as crows. Others face death squarely, even cheerfully, like sugar candy skulls on Mexico's Day of the Dead. In Japan, bones are picked from the ashes with chopsticks, and passed on from person to person before being placed in an urn, as if saying we ourselves are food, for the gods, or for nature.

In my family though, our traditional moorings are highly loosened through migration, inter-marriages, separations, re-marriages and the presence of a few facetious folks (like me). As a result, our rituals are more often rooted in personal histories.

My father started to eat ice cream often while living alone in a small town where he was working. A neat man, who might have missed us, but not our messy, indisciplined ways, I feel like the ice cream was both a treat to make up for our absence and perhaps a pleasurable celebration of his solitude. My dad believed in treats: in a rationed middle-class life, they were a way to introduce a note of abundance, especially for young people, whom he treated with love. I like to think he was also treating his young self, the young man who lost his own father at an early age, and that, in a post-Partition family. Ice-cream and cake, childlike joys, are the opposite of loss. I am glad we use these to commemorate losing him, while celebrating that we had him.

My uncle, an impossibly handsome, apparently flamboyant charmer, died in a plane crash soon after he became an Air Force pilot. He was only 22 and my grandmother could scarcely carry the grief. She began to visit a medium, to talk to her dead son's spirit. My mother told me, "One day his spirit told Nani that he really wants to eat this particular meal. Spirits can't eat, but at least he would smell it and know." That's how it became a tradition.

Stories of spirits are often about how much they miss us, how they circle the world to staunch their loss. But perhaps it is us, isn't it, who are the ghosts made up of longing for the ones we have lost? We eat to live, we eat because we live, we eat perhaps also to taste life as it was with them here, for a few minutes; to taste our yearnings and lost pleasures, in their lost pleasures; to feed our lonely souls.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com