The kitchens we carry

To most of our friends, we are simply a South Indian couple. We move easily between Telugu and Tamil, slipping from one language to another without thinking about it. Over time, we have stopped noticing where one ends and the other begins. Food, though, has its own way of staying separate.All South Indian food looks deceptively similar from a distance. Idli, dosa, rice, chutney, rasam, sambar. But zoom in, and the differences reveal themselves slowly. A dry guntur chilli in one kitchen, a gundu milagai in another. Onions move between ullipayi and chinna vengayam (the big and small versions). Tamarind is sharper here, softer there. Even turmeric seems to behave differently.Over the years, our kitchen developed its own rhythm. Some things remained stubbornly Telugu. Others stayed firmly Tamil. Between them emerged a third version — not really shaped by intention but more by repetition and adjustment. Chutneys shift texture depending on who is making them. Even dal changes quietly, depending on what tempers it, what is added first. Our children have grown up inside this arrangement and accepted it without question, because to them, this is simply how food tastes.Then, every once in a while, the balance shifts. His mother comes to stay. Sometimes mine. And with them arrives a kitchen that has been waiting quietly in memory.Whose version is correct?Before the front door is fully open, you can already tell whose mother is visiting. Some days, the house carries the deeper smell of slow-cooked kara kozhambu (a spicy, tamarind-based gravy). On other days there is the sharper pull of hing, curry leaves and chillies hitting hot oil.Different vegetables begin appearing at the table. When his mother visits, vazhaipoo (banana flower) appears one afternoon, vazhaithandu (banana stem) another. Manathakkali (black nightshade) and sundaikkai (turkey berry) quietly find their way back into the kitchen.When mine visits, gongura (roselle leaves) lingers longer on the counter. Dosakaya (yellow cucumber) and chukka koora (green sorrel) appear more often at the table. Gravies thicken or loosen depending on who is standing nearby. The same vada appears, but slightly different: one version slimmer and crispier, the other softer and more forgiving.At first, the children find all this amusing. Their father, who has lived quite happily with our version of things, suddenly begins remembering dishes he has not mentioned in a very long time. He remembers exactly how something is supposed to taste. At the table, he takes a bite, pauses for a brief second, and nods almost unconsciously, while his mother watches with a satisfaction that is not entirely subtle. There is always a brief discussion about whether something is “correct”, though nobody quite agrees on what that means.Flavours that we inheritI understand that moment more than I admit. Because I have felt it too. That first mouthful that brings back not just flavour, but a slice of time, the kitchen it came from, the hand that made it.The children tease him about these rediscoveries, watching with fascination as he becomes, for a few days, far more particular than they have ever known him to be.And slowly, they begin to understand it too — that it is not just taste, but rather a recognition, shaped by what we have grown up eating, by the quiet ways food becomes a part of who we are. Outside the home, food has begun to taste strangely identical everywhere. But inside homes, differences survive, in memory, in the way someone reaches automatically for one ingredient instead of another. We do not just inherit recipes. We inherit what we recognise as food.Once our mothers leave, the kitchen settles back into itself and familiar rhythms return. Things begin to taste like themselves again.One day, the children will leave and build kitchens of their own. They will not recreate either version exactly. Instead, they will carry fragments, a smell, a texture. Years later, it will return to them unexpectedly. Perhaps, without quite knowing why, they too will say, “It’s been so long since I’ve had it like this.”The writer is a commissioner of Income Tax and presently posted as spokesperson, Central Board of Direct Taxes.