Kadhi has always been more than a way of remembrance of good times for the women of my family.

My nani would send my mother some flour at the end of my summer vacation. The railway station where we would take the train to my city, Kanpur, was five kilometres away from my maternal village. We would arrive at the station first and after a while, my maternal uncle would come on his cycle carrier, carrying a white plastic gunny bag filled with besan, black chana, moong daal, urad daal, freshly pickled mango pickles, and sometimes, a can of freshly extracted mustard oil. On reaching home, my mother would empty the bag and put the items into the allotted steel jars. The next day she would ask my father to bring some curd, preferably ‘sapreta dahi’, sour curd bereft of cream, produced from non-fat milk. She would use this to make kadhi. Watching her I learned that the trick to a successful kadhi lies in the constant yet gentle stirring of the pot. If you let it boil, the milk solids will separate and ruin the recipe. My mother would keep stirring the pot until the pale-yellow concentric circles would appear on the surface. Then she would add salt. If you add salt before the boil comes, the recipe will be ruined. While she stirred the pot, she would also shed a tear or two. Coming back from her childhood home was never easy on her. She always struggled the day following the return trip, but cooking her favorite meal with the ingredients her mother sent, helped cheer her up.

Time went on and COVID virus devoured many people, including my mother. Grief became the prominent ingredient of all my dishes, much like besan. After my mother’s demise, the sour smell wafting from the iron kadhai has become a way of marinating my heart with all the good times I lived with her.

Besan isn’t just beloved in my family, but is one of the threads of the great tapestry that is India. There is not a single sweetshop in North India where I cannot find the Gujarati delicacy khaman, widely known as dhokla in the North. In sinuous Howrah, you cannot miss the smell of beguni, fried eggplant sliced and dipped in besan batter, wafting from every snack shop. Having spent two years in Chennai, I gathered that any victory is incomplete without crumbly-yet-melt-in-your-mouth Mysore pak. And who can miss pedas and mohan thal from Mathura and Vrindavan? Rajasthani thalis are incomplete without gatta curry, so are Gujarati evenings without khandavi, Maharashtrian snack platters without batata vadas, and Sindhi breakfasts without besan koki.

Whether it is a new city, a new country, or a new phase in life, what embraces us first is the food we eat. And if the food we eat has something like besan, which can embrace anyone and anything without interfering and judging too much, life becomes a little easier. That’s what we want amidst all the uncertainties and chaos of life, something easy and comfortable, is it not?