I Published Her Recipes as Poems
Her handwriting said 'pinch of salt'; my grief heard music.
My mother measured nothing, which is why her recipe cards read like riddles. Butter, enough. Cinnamon till it smells like December. Stir until it forgives you. For forty years those cards lived in a biscuit tin on top of the refrigerator, and for forty years I ignored them, because the woman herself was downstairs, alive, cooking.
Then, one ordinary Tuesday in March, she wasn't.
A stroke, the doctors said, using the gentle voices they keep for the families of people who were fine at breakfast. I remember the hospital corridor smelled like lemon disinfectant and someone's abandoned coffee. I remember a nurse named Priya holding my elbow like I might tip over. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I had never learned how she made the dal.
That thought should embarrass me. My mother died and my first coherent grief was about lentils.
But grief is not dignified. Grief goes straight for the stomach.
Three weeks after the funeral, my sister and I emptied the kitchen. We fought over nothing: a chipped serving spoon, a rolling pin worn smooth in the middle, a jar of lime pickle neither of us would ever open. Then I found the tin. Danish butter cookies on the lid, though it had not held a cookie since 1994. Inside were cards. Dozens of them, soft at the corners, stained with turmeric and oil, all in her looping blue ballpoint.
I read the first one standing up, in her kitchen, still wearing my coat.
Semolina halwa. Ghee, more than you think. Roast slow, slow, slower. When the whole house smells like your childhood, add the sugar. Feed the first spoon to whoever looks saddest.
I read it twice. Then I read it out loud... and my voice did something strange on 'whoever looks saddest,' and I sat down on her kitchen floor and stayed there until the streetlights came on.
Here is what nobody tells you: some handwriting is a voice.
Reading those cards, I could hear her. The impatience in 'slow, slower.' The bossiness in 'more than you think.' The tenderness she never once said out loud, smuggled into instructions for pudding. She was not a woman who wrote letters. She wrote marinades. Turns out they were the same thing.
That night I typed one up. I don't know why I broke the lines where I did. 'Ghee, / more than you think.' On the screen, with air around it, it looked like a poem. It looked, honestly, like a better poem than anything I had written on purpose in fifteen years of trying.
So I typed another. Her biryani card ran two pages and included the sentence 'If the rice is angry, you rushed it,' which is both a cooking instruction and the most accurate description of my mother's entire parenting philosophy that will ever exist.
For two months this was my secret. Work, condolence calls, thank-you notes, and then, at midnight... the tin. I typed forty-one cards. Somewhere around card twenty I stopped calling them recipes and started calling them what they were: her collected works.
My sister caught me at it in June. She had come over to borrow a suitcase and found me at the kitchen table with the cards fanned out like tarot.
'Those are recipes, Arjun,' she said, in the careful tone you use with a man who has arranged pudding instructions by emotional intensity.
'Read this one.'
She read the halwa card. She got to the last line. She put it down, looked at the wall... and said, 'Okay,' in the exact clipped voice Mum used when she was about to cry and refusing to. 'Okay. Do the thing you are obviously going to do.'
The thing I was obviously going to do terrified me for another month. Putting her words in public felt like reading her diary on a stage. But keeping them in a tin felt worse, like burying her twice. A poet friend finally said the sentence that tipped me: for a year I had been writing around the grief, polite elegies that said nothing, and the cards were the first time I had let the grief speak in its own voice. It just happened that its voice was my mother's, and it mostly wanted to talk about ghee.
I posted the halwa poem on a community wall for poets, under the title 'Instructions.' I typed a small apology into the caption, something like 'not sure this counts as a poem,' which is the writer's version of showing your throat.
The responses undid me.
A woman in Glasgow wrote that her nonna's shortbread card just says 'you know how,' and that she has been trying to deserve that sentence for twenty years. A man posted his father's barbecue notes: 'Low heat. Patience. Tell nobody the rub.' Somebody else wrote, simply, 'My mother's biryani was also angry when rushed. I think they knew each other.'
Forty strangers, all holding tins of their own.
People sometimes ask me now about honoring a loved one creatively, as if there is a technique, a checklist, a right way to do it. There isn't. There is only paying attention to what the person actually left behind, instead of what you wish they had left. I wished for letters. I got 'roast slow, slower.' The honoring began the day I stopped seeing that as less.
She never wrote me a letter in her life, but she left me forty-one poems disguised as dinner.
I entered 'Instructions' into a monthly poetry contest on a whim I still cannot fully explain, mostly so the poem would exist somewhere official, somewhere with a date stamp, proof that she had been a writer all along. It did not win. A judge left a comment saying the last line 'reads like it was found, not written.' I printed that comment. It was the truest review my mother ever received.
The forty-one poems live in a slim book now, spiral bound from the print shop near my flat, titled 'Enough, More Than You Think.' I made nine copies. One for my sister, one for each aunt, one for Priya the nurse, who cried and then asked, very seriously, for the actual halwa recipe. The rest sit in the biscuit tin, where her canon belongs.
On her birthday in November, I finally cooked the halwa myself. I roasted the semolina slow, then slower... stirring with her worn spoon until the whole flat smelled like being eight years old with wet hair on a Sunday. I added the sugar. I plated the first spoonful and stood there in my quiet kitchen, holding it... looking around for the saddest person in the room.
It was me. It was obviously me.
So I followed her instructions, the way I should have done all my life. I fed the first spoon to whoever looked saddest, and for one warm mouthful, in a kitchen she never saw, my mother cooked for me again.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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