Sometimes, you are what you eat. More often though, you are what you read.

A bite of rasam and rice can make me lose track of time and space, transporting me to a different world, like exploring a new city or losing myself in a good book.  Reading about rasam and rice in a book by a South Indian author takes me to the kitchen where I gravitate between using Al Adil’s rasam pre-mix, or making it from scratch like Sobha Narayan taught me in the pages of “Monsoon Diaries”

Indian food — in literature and in life — is a love letter to belonging. It’s the comfort of a mother’s dal (preferably, black masoor), shared laughter over a plate of steaming samosas, and the warmth of community gathered around a mutton biryani. It’s the taste of home, wherever that may be, reliably found simmering on a stove.  

The role of food in Indian literature acts as a powerful language that speaks of emotions, memories, and cultural identities. Each dish becomes a character, each spice a plot device, and every meal a chapter of the nation’s vibrant tapestry: poverty and affluence, caste and culture.

One of my favourite meals is dinner with Salman Rushdie. Reading Midnight’s Children is not unlike attending a lavish feast. At times I stuff myself to the point of sickness. Other times, I sit back, letting it all settle and digest before continuing.  

The novel  contains snapshots of Saleem Sinai’s life. Full of stories, dreams, truths and memories, preserved with care.

Upon a second reading, Midnight’s Children reveals its true depth and complexity. Like a fine wine, or a pickled cucumber, these stories demand attention and patience.  

“Twenty-six pickle-jars stand gravely on a shelf; twenty-six special blends, each with its identifying label, neatly inscribed with familiar phrases: “Movements Performed by Pepperpots,” for instance, or “Alpha and Omega,” or “Commander Sabarmati’s Baton.” Twenty-six rattle eloquently when local trains go yellow and browning past; on my desk, five empty jars tinkle urgently, reminding me of my uncompleted task. But now I cannot linger over empty pickle-jars; the night is for words, and green chutney must wait its turn.” 

 —  p. 443

My love for books filled with descriptions of exotic foods was intertwined with a deeper connection to my own identity. Indian writers, like Jhumpa Lahiri, showed me how food can be more than just provisions on a plate. 

In The Namesake, Lahiri uses a simple dish of Rice Krispies, peanuts, onions, salt, lemon juice, and green chillies to evoke Ashima’s reluctant Americanization and nostalgia for Calcutta. This simple recipe became a symbol of the complex interplay between identity, culture, and memory.

Till date, when I feel awkward in my skin, and look around a city that isn’t mine through the eyes of a stranger, I buy a mini-pack of Rice Krispies. The rest of the ingredients are aways available in my kitchen. It tastes just like Ashima’s homesick breakfast.

I envy people who get to read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy for the first time, a pleasure like no other.

Like Larry McCaslin seeing Rahel for the first time, I remember thinking: there goes a jazz tune. Reading it felt as good as all the best feelings stirred into one irresistible cocktail: aamras puri for breakfast, a Chinese Bhel dosa outside a Mumbai university, a greasy brown paper bag of coconut-jaggery candy, tomato crumbs of Peppy Chips licked right off my fingers, a box of my mother-in-law’s potato chops, waking up to the smell of Dad’s favourite Blue Tokai blend, sipping Nescafé with Mama on the A-63 balcony, to the backdrop of the dialogue of Mumbai’s rain; saying something only those who love it can understand.

Like Rushdie, Roy uses pickle bottles as a metaphor, the idea of preservation linked to strict ideals and traditions preserved by Kerala society. Apart from pickles, squashes, jams, curry powders and canned pineapples, the Paradise Pickles and Preserves factory also made an illegal banana jam which was,

“too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said… Looking back now, to Rahel it seemed as though this difficulty that their family had with classification ran much deeper than the jam-jelly question… They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmother’s grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.”

It further symbolises a freezing of time, a preservation of memory that is meant to live forever. Like the best meal you’ve ever had served in a corner of your mind, on a perfectly set table, lingering over dessert and decaf.

Food in books can transport you somewhere. Where cupboards are curated with nostalgia and are built for a kitchen witch, brewing the cure to homesickness, heartbreak and ache.

Rushdie, Roy and Lahiri have all sent me to the kitchen. To make Rushdie’s korma, “if just once I catch you in here, whatsitsname, I’ll push your head into it, add some dahi, and make, whatsitsname, a korma”, Roy’s red fish curry cooked with tamarind, “the best fish curry, according to Estha, in the whole world”, and Lahiri’s fish stew with the vinegar discovered from the “Blessed House.”

Despite my love of them – Alphonso for the win – mangoes have been overwritten by Indian and Pakistani authors, specifically the immigrant novel. I prefer my mangoes carefully cut either in my kitchen or my mother’s – no fuss or frills, just a mess – rather than the mango as a metaphor for South Asian authenticity in the Western world.

The mango has become “exotic”, perpetuating themes of otherness, and I dare you to find fiction on Indian shelves that don’t boast at least one mention of mango in the title. The term “mango diaspora poetry” has emerged in literary corners of the Internet and deserves the disdain it rightfully receives. While the place and importance of the mango in our culture is real, it has become an easy and lazy stereotype, weaving a tapestry of our heritage and food, even when it’s frayed at the edges.

I wait for mango season every year, and like Non-Resident Indians around the world, I see it as a luxury, very much worth the wait and the cost. It tastes like taste should, like Van Gogh saw yellow, pure animalistic and instinctive joy, vibrant flavour bursting from the wafer-thin fibers which linger in our mouths for hours. My husband and I eat them by the crate, driving down to the Indian supermarket as soon as we spot the Indian airline cargo van parked outside.

However, I do not believe my love for it, is proof of my identity as an Indian. Neither do I believe it is a symbol of being Indian living in a city that is not theirs, a common idiom of immigrant life. Anyone can love and taste an Alfonso the way I do, overwhelmed by flavour, its intensity unmatched by literary description.

I feast on mangoes in the summer, taken straight from the fridge, but skip it in fiction.

Most food writing by our most recognized authors are for the affluent, for readers broadening their minds as armchair gourmets, with easy access to a well-stocked kitchen and specialty grocery stores. Aspirants to good life and great tastes.

But millions in India’s have tasted hunger – not the literary kind but the kind that hurts and doesn’t spare its punches – and the food and literature I take for granted is a stranger to over a million of my own people who see dal and rice with reverence akin to worship. To them, the writing I feast on is meaningless and tasteless.

Privilege has tastes of its own. To eat– both in imagination and reality — is a luxury that doesn’t always taste as bitter or reflective as it should. Gluttony and greed are sins, we are taught. But if it’s not ignorance, some sins are worth indulging in, even if it comes at a cost to your conscience and a tendency to keep you awake. Pleasure, even if simple, should be acknowledged, and thanked for, to whichever God or philosophy you believe in.

I worship at the altar of The God of Fictional Feasts who believes in many things. Good biscuits, always. Kept in bags for stray dogs and in office drawers to be dunked into chai. Coffee from Chikmanglur estates, measured in wooden spoons. Black pepper, and Mother’s Recipe mango pickle. An MTR Podi packet always in a cupboard, ready to be mixed with ghee and hot rice. Green coconuts with the top cut off, and a plastic straw squeezed in. Eating with your hands.

It believes that broken eggs make the omelettes of dreams with onions and leftover potato sabzi. That Bengali fish curry can leap from pages to make your stomach twist and churn in longing. Fiction and food share a key characteristic; they keep you warm in the winter. Love and loss can seep from story to sense of self, like tea from a teabag.

It writes down recipes from novels in an orange book with a bunny on the cover and likes to visit the neighbour’s house for their cookbook collection. It never makes mango desserts, but eats the fruit whole, slurped from pulp to seed. It can transport you across the world in minutes, but will also insist you sit down and eat, eat and eat some more, preferably a 3-course meal.

Its favourite plate is rasam and rice, served with fried potato, papad, buttermilk and Rushdie’s latest.