Idli, Vada, & Christmas Cake

Growing up in a multicultural family has its pros and cons, but one thing I can say for sure is this: food is never just one thing. It is never only breakfast, or Christmas cake, or something made because people were hungry. Food becomes memory, proof, habit, inheritance. It becomes the thing that tells you where you come from, even when your family history is scattered across places, languages, and people who had to leave home to build one elsewhere.

It also gives you a very long list of comfort foods!

Mum, Paati, Bhai, and I right after Bhai was born.

While reading Anastasia Miari’s Mediterranea: Life-perfected Recipes from Grandmothers of the Mediterranean, I kept thinking of my own Paati. Tall, gentle, and firm-willed in the way many women of her generation were. Not loud about what they had endured, or sentimental about what they had done, but steady, present, capable.

I don’t know a lot about her before she became my Paati. I know she was raised at the Dohnavur Fellowship. I know she worked very hard to provide for her family. I know that, in doing so, she had to be away from her children.

Maybe that is why I understand Pa when he keeps stressing the importance of keeping mother and baby close during the foundational years. It isn’t an abstract belief for him. It comes from somewhere. From a real absence. From something he knows cannot be replaced. Nothing can fully substitute the nurturing a mother gives her child. And yet, I also know that Paati spent the rest of her life nurturing people in the ways she could. With her, care was rarely announced, it was done. It was cooked, packed, stitched, remembered, and handed over. It showed up in ordinary, practical ways, and maybe that is why it stayed with me.

For the longest time, Christmas meant travelling to Delhi, no matter where Pa was posted. Delhi was the place we returned to. We would all end up in that living-dining room, which was less a formal room and more the centre of the house. Tahtah would be listening to the morning radio. Paati would be in the kitchen making breakfast. The Christmas star would hang in the verandah. A small Christmas tree would stand in the corner next to the dining table, doing its best.

Pa, Mum, and I at Tahtah & Paati's Delhi House

Of all those Christmases, there is one I remember more clearly than the others. I must have been old enough to be useful, or at least old enough to accompany her without getting in the way. That evening, I went with Paati from one neighbour’s house to another, carrying hot parcels of idli, vada, sambar, coconut chutney, and Christmas cake.

I remember the warmth of the parcels. I remember standing beside her at each doorway, the neighbours opening their doors with such happiness that it felt like they had been waiting for her.

That food was not just an evening snack. It was part of their Christmas too. You could see it in the way they received it. The way their faces changed when they saw her. The way they spoke to her. Her care had become familiar to them. Expected, yes, but not taken for granted. It had become one of those small annual rituals that holds a neighbourhood together without anyone making a big statement about community or generosity.

By the end of that evening, I remember feeling full from something other than food. Full from watching love move both ways. From her hands to their homes, and from their smiles back to her. The next morning, of course, I wanted idli, vada, and sambar for myself because Paati made the best idlis and vadas. Her idlis were soft and had just enough structure to hold themselves together, and just enough porousness to soak up the sambar properly. The vadas were golden brown outside and soft inside, the kind you break open while still hot because waiting makes no sense!

I remember standing outside her small kitchen, watching her work. She would mix the batter, set the idlis to steam, and fry the vadas with the calm of someone who had done this hundreds of times.

And if you were lucky, there would be dosa too. Hot, crisp at the edges, softening as you reached the centre. Chutney and sambar doing exactly what chutney and sambar are meant to do. If you were even luckier, there would be leftover sambar later in the day, eaten with hot rice and a little mango or lemon pickle. That meal is still one of my clearest ideas of comfort.

But not all care came from the kitchen. Some of it came from remembering what a child had asked for. Mum says that when I was very little, Paati once asked me what I wanted from the vegetable market. Apparently, all I wanted was oranges. That checks out. I have always been obsessed with oranges. Nagpur oranges, kinnows, mosambis — any amount of them has never been enough. I could eat them at breakfast, lunch, snack time, and dinner without getting tired. That day, Paati returned from the market, saw me through the mesh door, and suddenly remembered that she had forgotten the oranges. So she went back just to get them for me.

Very upset me after the oranges I ate were over!

It is such a small story, but I think small stories often tell the truth better than big ones. Because this is what care looks like most of the time: someone turning around and going back to the market because a child had asked for oranges.

And once I think of that, I think of the other things she made and did quietly, before I was old enough to understand them. She knitted sweaters for me. She made dresses. She sewed cotton frocks for me when I was a baby. I don’t remember most of this, but there are photographs. And sometimes photographs have to stand in for memory. They tell you what your body cannot remember on its own: you were held, dressed, fed, fussed over. Someone spent time making things for you before you even knew how to receive them. Still, I don’t want to remember Paati only through what she gave everyone else.

Paati loved mangoes. She also loved those little Parle Mango Bites. That was her treat. She would keep a bag of them and pull one out after lunch or dinner. I remember that clearly. The wrapper, the smallness of it, the quiet enjoyment. Not everything she loved had to be grand or homemade or deeply meaningful. Sometimes it was just a mango bite after a meal. And that too feels important to remember.

There were also the things she kept carefully, the things that made her house feel like hers. I remember her china and crockery, neatly arranged in glass cabinets and wooden cupboards in the room next to the kitchen. Plates, cups, serving dishes, bowls, all kept carefully, all belonging to a system only she fully understood. Some of that crockery was passed down to my parents, and now some of it is with me. I have changed where I keep it. I have made it part of my own kitchen, my own shelves, my own way of hosting.

But it still carries her.

That is the strange thing about inherited objects. They become yours, but not entirely. You use them in a different house, for different people, in a different life. Still, something of the old room remains. The glass cabinets. The wooden cupboards. The kitchen next door. The woman who knew where everything was.

Maybe that is why every Christmas, I hope Mum and Pa are making our Christmas cake. I hope there is a tree somewhere in the house. I hope there is enough food to send someone home with.

And maybe that is also why I keep thinking about the kind of table I want to build for myself.

Someday, I hope I will be able to send out little parcels of my own recipes to friends, family, and neighbours because I have seen what food can do when it is made with that kind of care. I have seen a woman carry idlis, vadas, sambar, chutney, and cake door to door, and I have seen people receive it as more than food. I have seen how a child remembers oranges because someone went back for them, how crockery can outlive the kitchen it came from. I have seen how recipes survive because someone keeps making them, and how love often looks like the same thing being done again and again, without needing applause.

So when I think of grandmothers and food, I don’t only think of recipes. I think of labour, absence, of women who did what had to be done, the small treats they kept for themselves. I think of the things they passed down without making a lesson out of it. And I think of Paati in her kitchen. At Christmas. At the market. At the cupboard. At the door. Always carrying something warm.