Short Story: The Feast of Absence

Susmita Mukherjee’s story explores food as memory, heritage, and ritual, interweaving the smells and textures of Bengali cuisine with themes of solitude, absence, and cultural belonging.

The smell of mustard oil always made Rupa’s chest tighten with hunger and grief. It was the one scent that carried her across time and place, to the crowded kitchen of her grandmother’s home in Barisal, to the smoky afternoons when hilsa fish was fried crisp, and to the evenings when the family gathered on woven mats, plates of steaming rice before them. But now, in her small one-bedroom flat in Kolkata, the sharp tang of mustard oil rose from a single pan on the stove, and there was no one to feed but herself.

She was making ‘shorshe maach’. Hilsa cooked in mustard paste was more than just a dish to her; it was a memory made edible, a ritual of belonging that her grandmother had passed down through her mother, and now to her. Rupa ground the mustard seeds herself, even though packets of ready-made paste lined the shelves of modern markets. Grinding by hand was tedious, yes, but in the scraping sound of the sil batta she heard echoes of her mother’s bangles clinking as she worked, heard the rustle of saris, the distant gossip of neighbours.

The apartment was quiet. Only the pop of mustard seeds in oil punctured the silence.