My relationship with food is complex but beautiful

Natasha Badhwar

I READ a lot about food, but rarely write about it. Today, I want to change that. My food stories are strange, hilarious, and somewhat tragic. I’m being dramatic, but, yes, sometimes tears are involved.

My complex and beautiful relationship with food is the book I won’t be writing. That will heal things, and probably be useful for others too. I do not intend to do the hard work. I will prioritise fun things. I will learn to eat instead.

Eat in time. Find out what I want to eat and proceed to do the obvious.

I like my barfi plain. I do not get along with people who mix dry fruit in gajar ka halwa. Do not contaminate my chocolate, I beg you. I love raw fruits. Steamed corn on the cob and a packet of salty peanuts are my idea of delicacies. I have low tolerance for masala fried in oil till it forgets its origin story. I really don’t like it hot, spare me the chillies. Please pass me the curd, it heals me.

Thankfully, I married a man who feeds me. He is charmed by my enthusiasm for the small range of tastes and textures that I do crave. He understands my food sensitivities. Once I am fed, I become capable of feeding others. This includes our dogs and the community cats who rely on our home for their nutrition and safe spaces.

I ate my first biryani in my late 20s. Around the same time, I discovered the soft comfort of melt-in-the-mouth gur sandesh available in select sweetshops of Chittaranjan Park in south Delhi. In Dilli Haat, I tasted appam paired with fish in coconut curry. At the Jammu and Kashmir stall, I relished gushtaba with rice. Foodgasm is a neologism which comes out from the combination of the words food and orgasm. I endorse this word.

I remember the taste of mutton curry, with floating half potatoes, that my youngest uncle, Kuckoo Mamu, cooked when I was a child. It was also the first time I had seen a grown man enjoying cooking what he loved to eat. He served portions lovingly to the extended family. The mixed taste of potatoes coated in mutton curry has stayed with me. What seems like the memory of food soon becomes an evocation of a lost time, of relationships that outlive the people in them.

Why do Punjabi Hindus, who relish fried pomfret and tandoori chicken, not cook biryani at home? It is a mystery I am keen to unravel. I love watching the step-by-step process of biryani being prepared and served in my sister-in-law’s home. The delicate art of arranging mutton and rice into layers, both ingredients caressing each other to become one dish.

I dreamt of red tomatoes and green cucumbers in Khodamba, the village where I lived in the year drought struck the tribal belt in Jhabua. “I have never known what hunger feels like before this,” I wrote in my diary. I was a miserable, inept volunteer teacher in the village. I was 20 years old. I remember the exquisite texture of thick wheat and jowar rotis, slow-cooked on a firewood-fuelled mitti ka chulha. Little children would run around with stiff biscuit-like portions of roti, nibbling away as they played. When jamun season came around, I joined them in celebration as we picked up fruit from the ground under the trees and polished it gently before popping it in our mouth. It nourished our souls.

As an adult and a parent, I am privileged enough to always have enough food wherever I am. My body and mind, though, are often not on talking terms with each other. Mind is the vagabond in the equation, forever ignoring messages from the body. Like, “Don’t embarrass me. I’ll feed you later. We can go to the toilet at the next destination.” We can spend a full day immersed in extraordinary activities, without eating or excreting some times. The body runs on adrenalin till we are all exhausted and need to be revived.

This sounds like a behaviour that needs to be unlearnt. It also feels like a superpower. Clearly, it is something that demands moderation from me. As I parent my children, I also re-parent my own inner child. We sometimes stop to buy fresh sugarcane juice from a roadside stall on a summer afternoon on our way back from school. I keep a stock of instant noodles that our teenagers can cook by themselves as they settle down to watch a film together when their schedules match with each other. I dip biscuits in my chai and admire the morning light as it illuminates a new day around me.

As I repair my relationship with food and allow it to comfort me, I know I am learning to slow down and savour moments. The anxieties of everyday life are only too happy to be distracted by the flavour and aroma of small pleasures.

— The writer is a filmmaker & author

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