Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 8, Number 2. November 2025. ISSN: 2581-7094
Flavours
of a Vanished Hand
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Surabhi Jha
They
say food tastes different when it is fed by a mother’s hand. Softer somehow.
Warmer. As if compassion itself were a spice, mixed quietly into every bite.
Before school, she would feed me rice with mashed potato, aloo sheddho gently
blended with chopped onion, salt, and a swirl of mustard oil. A full spoon of
ghee, always from Malda’s famous Radharani shop, would melt into boiled masoor
dal made without turmeric. Sometimes there would be a boiled egg tucked in,
sometimes not. No garnish, no careful plating. Just care, steady and unspoken,
pressed into every grain by her fingers. In those moments, compassion was not a
word or an idea. It was something I tasted. Something that held me, one handful
at a time, and made the world feel less sharp.
On
May 19, 2023, over the phone, Ma and I were planning a meal. She always loved
the way my house help, Jyotshna Di, cooked. “When I come to your place,” she
said, “ask Jyotshna to make chhotomachherchorchori. I’ll eat extra rice
that day.” I remember her voice, playful, already tasting it in her mind. Jyotsna
Di tempers mustard oil with green chillies and kalo jeera (black cumin).
Into that, she fries small pieces of potato and brinjal, then adds chopped
tomato and ground cumin, letting it cook down slowly. After that, she pours in
a little water and drops the fried mourola fish. Finally, she finishes
the dish with a drizzle of mustard oil, slit green chillies, and a handful of
chopped coriander leaves before taking it off the flame. Ma loved nothing more
than having this dish with rice.
The
next day, she was gone. A simple craving turned into her last wish—one I will
never be able to fulfil.Since then, I haven’t been able to touch that dish.
Some foods don’t just feed; they undo you. And I’ve learned that weakness is a
luxury not all of us can afford. Grief asks to be felt, but life demands you
carry on like a machine.
During
some of the worst phases—under the pressure of studies, through the quiet ache
of familiar and unfamiliar struggles—her food was the remedy. It wasn’t about
patriarchy or expectation. I wasn’t someone who believed it was only a mother’s
role to cook. My father cooked too—his signature was dal, rice, and potatoes
boiled together in a single pressure cooker. Simple. Satisfying. I loved it.
But
Ma’s cooking was different. It wasn’t out of duty—it was out of delight. She
loved experimenting, trying new things, offering food as language. My father
never demanded a tableful of dishes; he was content with aloo sheddho,
green chillies, and salt. He never asked for more.
But
Ma gave more anyway. She wanted to. I used to tell her, “Start a business, sell
your pickles, your sweets.” But she had spent too long in a village where known
faces bought on credit and debts lasted months. So, she couldn’t.And maybe
that’s why I’m trying now. Trying with everything I have to be independent. Not
because she asked me to follow her path, but because she quietly asked me not
to live the life she had to live. This effort—it’s hers too. Every part of it.
She
may not be here, but her recipes keep showing up—through the steam, the smells,
the quiet rituals of my kitchen. Every time I cook what she once made, it feels
like she’s standing beside me, gently guiding my hand.
She
lives in flavours. In every dish I recreate, even imperfectly, there’s something
of her—an echo, a fingerprint. Hilsa fish in mustard gravy, ghugni, dhoka’rdalna,mochar
chopmatardal with tomato and fresh coriander, aloo posto, begun
bharta tempered with mustard seeds and softened tomatoes, or the simple alu
bhaja with a dusting of poppy seeds—each one carries her imprint. Even her
ice cream had a signature taste. I can still tell, without a doubt, when a dish
is hers—even now, even in memory. And her desserts—those were quiet acts of
invention. Payesh, the classic Bengali sweet made with milk and rice,
became her canvas. She made it with rasgullas, with rose water, once
even with pasta, another time with chocolate. Each variation, somehow, just
worked.
And
yet, I never thought to write any of it down. Back then, I was allergic to
cooking—impatient, disinterested, always elsewhere. I didn’t archive her
recipes. I thought I had time.
There
was a sweet she made with rava. My messmates would fight over the
leftovers whenever she sent a box. But the recipe I will carry forward, the one
I feel most protective of, is her papad curry. People still blink when I
say I had papad curry and rice for lunch—like it’s a joke. But for me, it’s
memory layered in mustard oil. She made it with black cumin and green chillies,
let the potatoes soften, added tomatoes and cumin, a touch of turmeric, salt,
and hot water just before dropping in the fried, round big papads. She’d cover
the pot with a plate and let it all simmer for five quiet minutes. A pinch of garam
masala, a drop of ghee, sometimes a little sugar if she was in a generous
mood. That was it. Nothing extravagant. But even now, when I try to recreate
it, it feels like conjuring her—one sizzling papad at a time.
When
I was in school, she made sure my tiffin was filled with things I loved—egg rolls,
muglai paratha, chowmein, luchitarkari—all carefully packed so I
wouldn’t be tempted to eat from the street stalls during recess. But I rarely
ate them. I handed my tiffin over to friends who waited, wide-eyed, for a taste
of her cooking. I, instead, would run to buy patties, churmur, or
ghugni from the vendors near the school gate. One day, she found out.
The very next morning, she came straight to my school, walked from one shop to
the next, pointing at me and asking them not to sell me anything. The
shopkeepers smiled, nodded. She wasn’t angry—just panicked. Some relatives had
suffered from appendicitis, and she feared I’d fall sick too. It was love that
made her overprotective, not control. I didn’t understand it then.
Now,
I’m free to eat whatever I want from the streets. But I don’t crave churmuror
chowmein anymore. I crave her food. And there’s no freedom in the world
that tastes better than that.
During
the pandemic, I turned to YouTube to learn how to cook—not for myself, but for
her. Dhokla, cakes, rasgullas, chicken curry, cabbage Manchurian,
phuchka—I tried everything I thought she might enjoy. She loved my
cooking, said so with the same softness she once reserved for her own meals. It
became our new rhythm: I cooked, she tasted, we shared the silence between
bites. Now, when I try something new—when the kitchen smells just right, or the
gravy thickens perfectly—I catch myself staring at her photo. Sometimes I speak
to it. Sometimes I can’t. My eyes fill without warning. Breathing becomes something
I have to remember to do.
These
days, waking up feels less like living and more like duty. I do it because I
have to—because people depend on me. But ever since she left, the mornings have
lost their reason. Waking up means missing her tea, always with bakery biscuits
on the side. I’ve replaced them with chia water, flax seeds, all the things
that look like discipline. But some emotional crises don’t disappear—they just
go underground, hiding behind healthy habits.
Sometimes,
I open the fridge to cook something and find myself frozen. She used to love
seeing how neatly I kept it—fruits stacked by colour, chicken and fish in
sealed containers, eggs and curd in their shelves, sauces in their place. After
every grocery run, she would say, “Send me a picture of your fridge.” It made
her smile, that small demand in a chaotic world.
Now
I still keep everything in its place. Still clean. Still labelled. But no one’s
waiting for the photo. No one is waiting at all.
Since
her departure, I haven’t been able to touch Rosokodombo—Malda’s famed
sweet she adored so much. I’ve always had an endless appetite for sweets, the
kind of affection that made me believe I could devour an entire shop if given
the chance. I realise now that this craving, this unspoken indulgence, must
have come from her.
Now,
she is gone. And I am trying to let go of sugar, too. Trying to train my body
not to reach for sweetness, because every bite tastes like her absence. The
sweets don’t comfort anymore—they taste like endings.
Cooking,
now, is something I do with quiet care—for the rest of my family. I find joy in
it. But I still miss her taste—the taste only she could bring, the way
food transformed when fed from her hand. I miss being her little girl, wrapped
in the safety of her lap, eating from her fingers. I can still remember the
scent of her sari, the smell of her food filling the house before lunchtime.
Her recipes, her laughter, the way her eyebrows would lift in delighted
surprise after tasting something I’d made—all of it lives with me. And it
always will. Even when the memory softens, even when the grief quiets, her
flavour remains. I will carry it with me until my last breath.
Grief
doesn’t always arrive in silence. Sometimes, it simmers. Sometimes, it sizzles
in mustard oil. Sometimes, it waits inside the fridge in a glass bowl you can’t
bring yourself to open. My mother may no longer be here, but she continues to
live in my kitchen—in the way I slice a brinjal, in the steam rising from
masoor dal, in the scent of ghee melting into hot rice. She lives in the
rituals, in the tenderness, in the leftovers I now eat alone.
This
isn’t just about food. It’s about presence. It’s about the invisible threads
that bind us across time and distance, smell and memory, hunger and love. I
cook now not to impress, not even always to nourish, but to remember. To keep
her close. To honour the woman who taught me that care can be folded into a
roti, that love can be ladled into a bowl, and that a kitchen can hold more
than recipes—it can hold the shape of a life.
This
is not just about food. It is about presence. About the quiet compassion that
moves through touch and memory, through hunger and care, through the ordinary
acts we repeat without noticing their weight. I cook now not to impress, not
even always to nourish, but to remember. To keep her close. To honour the woman
who taught me that care can be folded into a roti, that love can be ladled into
a bowl, and that a kitchen can hold more than recipes. It can hold the shape of
a life.
And
so I stir, and I serve, and I taste. Not just for survival, but for
remembrance. Not just to feed the body, but to keep her with me, one meal at a
time.
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Bio:
Dr. Surabhi Jha
is an ICSSR Postdoctoral Researcher at Aliah University, West Bengal, India.
Her Doctoral Research focused on feminist perspectives in Holocaust literature.
She has published several scholarly articles in National and International
journals. Her monograph, Repression and Resistance: A Feminist
Interpretation of Select Holocaust Novels, hasbeen published by Peter Lang,
Switzerland, in December 2025.
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