Essay: Her Narrow Plate-  What Restrictions Taught Us To Cook

Debi Mukherjee shares a personal essay reminiscing her Thamma, as she takes us through her kitchen and shares some amazing recipes.

My Thamma’s kitchen was soundless. By that, I do not mean that there was no noise at all. A low hiss of mustard oil emanated from the hot wok as I sat over the empty rice tin by the iron-barred window. Green paint had peeled off from the iron bars, leaving them rusty. My attention was drawn to the dull thud of a vegetable knife. There was no urgency. The kitchen moved at her pace. I remember very little of my Thamma. She passed away over three decades ago at the age of seventy. But she lived as a widow for over three decades too. When my Thakurda passed away, in the late sixties, my father was still in high school leaving my Thamma to deal with the complexities of the rapidly evolving world with her growing children. By the time India entered the decades after Independence, the life of a widowed woman had not changed as radically as the new nation promised. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, widowhood continued to exist in a space suspended between law and lived reality. Legal reforms had long granted widows rights, like inheritance, remarriage, or to live with dignity, but the social reality did not live up to it. The latter was still governed by habit and patriarchal expectations.