In the beginning, there is always the stomach. It growls, it remembers, it insists. Long before nations defined themselves by borders or flags, they distinguished themselves by what they ate. And so, to understand civilisation, one does not need a textbook or a temple—a plate of local food will do.
Which is how I ended up in Tokyo recently. The city moved with the grace of a Swiss watch. I, meanwhile, moved out of the hotel with the urgency of a man who’s just been told his hotel minibar charges $12 for peanuts.
I stumbled into Sushi Ten, a place so discreet it was practically in hiding. It was in Ginza, a district where the street signs twinkle with such polite capitalism, even the billboards seem to apologise for interrupting your serenity. The ritual began. A chef with the poise of a priest stood behind a wooden altar, and raw fish was laid out before me, not served, but presented, reverently like a temple offering. I watched as he sculpted each slice with a kind of monastic care. In the West, this would have been performance. In Tokyo, it was merely an expensive dinner.
The food arrived in minimalist whispers: seaweed, octopus, the occasional fish. When the bill came, it was so low I assumed it was an error. The server bowed so deeply as though I had conferred on her some national award. She said she was observing me while I was eating and billed me for what I enjoyed, not what I had ordered. I’d done nothing but eat what I could and leave a tip that wouldn’t cover parking in Delhi.
That night, as I stood on the pavement outside a vending machine selling cold tea and hot noodles, I was struck by the thought that food is still the last honest language left to us. It carries no passports, only memory. A Bengali migrant in Manhattan clings to his hilsa not for taste, but for nostalgia. A Syrian in Berlin seeks shawarma as one might seek a homeland.
Even here in Kozhikode, where I now live and teach, I have learned to make peace with food cooked in coconut oil—strictly a haircare solution back home in Bengal. I have tasted puttu, avial, and other dishes that speak of lands I did not inherit, but now inhabit.
Civilisation, we are told, advances through conquest, through trade, through empire. But real progress happens through our digestive tract. The British came, saw, and took our spices—along with a lifetime of indigestion. They turned curry into something creamy, confused, and available at Heathrow for £14.99. India digests everything. Empires, religions, railway delays. What remains is a chutney of contradictions—a flavourful, suspiciously sweet and sour melting pot.
In the end, food isn’t about hunger. It’s about memory. Identity. The soft ache of once belonging, the louder growl of still trying. Food is how we remember who we are and who we once were.