A close friend, who lost her mother last year, once told me about an afternoon that undid her without warning. She was simply going about her day — nothing marked it out as significant — when she remembered, quite suddenly, the taste of her mother’s dahi vadas. Not the memory of eating them, but the taste itself, sense-real on her tongue. She broke down, inconsolable, at the realisation that she would never taste that exact flavour again. One might assume it easier at fifty, having lost a parent who had lived a full life. But grief, it turns out, keeps no ledger of age or fairness.
Her words stayed with me longer than I expected, and eventually led me back to my own maternal grandfather, gone two years now — the man from whom I inherited my love of food in the first place. It struck me, quite out of nowhere, that I will never again taste his pinnis, or his gajar ka halwa, made just so, with a heavy hand of ghee he never apologised for. I hadn’t thought of this loss specifically until then. You don’t, in the immediate aftermath. Grief arrives first as absence — a chair, a voice, a habit. It is only later that it particularises itself into flavour, into the small, unglamorous things you never thought to commit to memory because you assumed there would always be time.
During shradh, we cook rasse waale aloo, meetha kaddu and kachori in his remembrance — his favourite meal, the one he would ask for without fail. There is something quietly radical about this: that instead of merely mourning what is gone, we recreate it, however imperfectly, and invite it back to the table.
Which raises a question worth sitting with, especially now: is food chiefly about indulgence, or does it live equally in abstinence? In a few days, the country turns towards festivity — colour, sweets, excess by design. But before that arrives, there is Pitru Paksha, the period of shradh, beginning this weekend, when families pause to remember those no longer with them and to seek their blessings. It is a fortnight of restraint before celebration; the air, in these days, feels layered rather than lightened — longing sitting quite comfortably beside gratitude, as though the two were never really opposites.
What I find most moving is that shradh does not ask us to look away from indulgence, as conventional mourning often does. Instead, it turns indulgence into an offering. Meals are built around the specific, sometimes eccentric, preferences of the departed — a particular sweet, a particular degree of spice — as if to insist that love can still be served at the table, plated and passed around, even in someone’s continued absence.
Flavour, I have come to think, is a more honest carrier of memory than photographs or anecdotes ever are. It arrives uninvited, bypasses language altogether, and returns you — briefly, completely — to a person, a kitchen, a season now over. In the days ahead, as Delhi readies itself for celebration, it is worth remembering that festivals were never only about what is to come. They are also about who has been, and who we go on quietly feeding, in our own ways, at our own tables.