Nostalgia: Trapped In A Bottle

I am chatting with Amma on the phone, my hands moving out of force of habit. I pull the heavy bottomed sauté pan, turn the gas stove on, tap the rim every few seconds to test how hot the pan is. Even as I do this on auto pilot, my brain is thinking of the ingredients needed for this homemade spice mix that is equal parts filial duty and nostalgia. Amma tells me yet again the proportion of dhania, kadala paruppu, vendhayam and, sigappu molaga to roast. I file it mentally, switching to the morbid topic of a colleague dying a day before.

Our conversation meanders while I heft the pan, swirling the hollow seeds as they toast and turn a lovely brown. The aroma is to die for. I toast all of my ingredients in quick succession, transferring each to a bowl to cool before I move to the next one. Amma exclaims that my sister is calling her. I let go, handing off metaphorically to my sister whilst I continue my work in the kitchen. The sambar is bubbling, the pumpkin pieces and the cluster bean seeds swirling hypnotically. The mound of cut ivy gourd calls for attention.

The phone rings again. It is my brother. We commiserate the loss of our colleague. I hang up and test if my spice mix is ready to be ground. The phone rings again. It is my cousin from Texas. We chat, I stir the sambar, test for taste and lower the flame to let it simmer. I wash the rice, talking all the while about her mom and my other mother. She hangs up and I take a moment to scroll through Twitter where a friend laments the loss of our food heritage. I hit like and move on.

The mixie whirs and I watch the seeds, pulses, red chillies crush, crumble and come together in a coarse mixture. I open the jar, give the contents a quick mix before setting it back on the base and turning the pulse mode on. The smell from the crushed mix traps me in the late 90s. A time when I was discovering the fun in cooking. It takes me back in time to the visits home when the food Amma made felt extra aromatic and extra tasty. It harks back to a time when I was coming into my own as a person. Trapped in the smells of that time are the seeds of change.

I open the jar, mix it all again and let it cool before I transfer the contents to a glass jar for storage. I add a little water to the mixie jar, turn it around a couple of times and pour the mix into my still simmering sambar. For a moment, I wonder what smells my newly minted young adults will carry with them. I wonder about the imprints they carry in their head that will unlock portals for them decades in the future. I wonder if any of them will feature this legacy of dhania and vendhayam at all.

I am wistful.