Tonight, I made some of my great grandmother's tomato chutney. Every few months, she would spend hours cooking down tomatoes till all that was left was a concentrated sweet-tart blend of flavours, mingled with turmeric and ground coriander seeds. This concoction would be tempered

...with mustard seeds, urad dal and a few broken red chillies in hot oil, mixed in till the mixture became thick and a rich red. Then repurposed Kissan marmalade jars would be filled to the brim and dispatched across the city to me. My mum and I would fight over it, each craving

...another spoon, mixed with hot rice, slathered on toast or just as is. It's been almost a decade since I've had it, since my mum doesn't like cooking, and my dad makes his own recipe with onions and green chillies. I wasn't sure if my mum had the recipe either. Kamala...

...or Kamali Amma as I knew her, didn't share all her recipes with her grandchildren. A few years ago, I reverse engineered her Kanjeevaram idlis, which no one in the family knew how to make. But this one, my mum had a recipe for. She didn't know if it was the right one. Amma had

...a vast repertoire that fed her family through the food insecurity of the Bengal Famine in the 1940s, and endlessly experimented with tastes and ingredients. So when I asked my mother for the recipe a few weeks ago, she sent me a voice note. Blend tomatoes, add spices, boil and

temper. Less than a minute long. I couldn't believe that it was this simple, or that it was what I was looking for. But tonight proved me wrong in the happiest of ways. As the chutney came together, I was drawn back to my childhood— watching an old woman who could smell salt

...in food, and loved with all her heart. My diminutive Amma in a nine-yard saree, who smiled and lit up a room with her presence. And I wept— the first time since she passed in 2008, because here was something that was hers, a recipe shared across generations.

My granduncles in the Bay area recently unearthed a small packet of coconut podi that she'd made just a few weeks before her death. Frozen and preserved for 12 years, potentially a cause of food poisoning— the rest of us laughed. And they ate every bit, remembering their mother

...just as I remember her today. I'm not sure why I typed this thread. Perhaps it's a sort of catharsis when I miss home and family so very much. Or perhaps it's just so that I remember this when I'm old and in need of succour.