My Grandmother Reviews My Cooking Like a Critic
Two stars for the dal, one raised eyebrow for the rice.
My grandmother rates my cooking on a scale she has never explained to anyone. There are numbers, sometimes. There are eyebrows, always. And there is a small sound she makes with her tongue against her teeth, a soft tch, that I have come to fear more than anything a professional critic could print in any newspaper in any city on earth.
Last Tuesday, my dal received two stars. I know this because she held up two fingers, examined me the way you examine a child who has drawn on a freshly painted wall, and said, "Two. And I am being generous because you are my blood."
The rice did not receive a number. The rice received an eyebrow.
I moved back into her house in January, after her cataract surgery, telling everyone I was going there to help. Cooking for grandparents sounds noble when you say it at parties, and people nod at you like you are personally building a hospital.
What it actually means is standing in a kitchen you learned to walk in while an eighty-four-year-old woman supervises from a plastic chair she has positioned, strategically, so that she can see both the stove and your mistakes.
She ran that kitchen for sixty years. She fed a husband, four children, eleven grandchildren, and one persistent milkman who she still insists lingered only for her chai.
Then her eyes clouded over, the doctor said no open flames for six weeks, and suddenly I was the one holding the ladle and she was the one holding court.
"Who taught you to cut onions like that?" she asked on the first morning.
"YouTube," I said.
"Hm," she said... I heard a funeral in it.
The scale, as far as I have been able to reconstruct it, works like this. Five stars is theoretical, reserved for her own mother, who died in 1974 and whose rotis apparently achieved a softness that modern science cannot repeat. Four stars went once, in 1989, to a wedding caterer she still mentions the way other women mention old flames.
Three stars means the food could be served to guests you dislike. Two means I am her blood and she is being generous. One is a tragedy. Zero exists but has never been spoken aloud because, in her words, some things you do not say in a house where people have to sleep at night.
I tried everything. I roasted cumin until the whole building smelled like a wedding. I soaked rajma overnight like a man performing a religious rite. I called my mother in another city and begged for exact measurements, and my mother laughed and said, "Andaza, beta. Estimate." Which is how our family measures everything, including affection.
The best I ever scored was three and a half, for aloo parathas on a cold Sunday in February. I had rested the dough. I had grated the potatoes instead of mashing them, a trick I will take to my grave rather than credit the internet in her presence. She ate two entire parathas in silence, finished her chai, set the cup down, and said, "Three and a half. Your grandfather would have said four, but he was a flatterer, and look where it got him."
I floated on that half star for a week.
Then, in March, I found the notebook.
I was hunting for tamarind paste in the tin cupboard above the fridge, the one nobody opens because the hinge screams, and there it was under a stack of old calendars: a school exercise book with a brown paper cover, her slanted handwriting inside, every page dated. It was a ledger of every meal I had cooked since January.
"Tuesday. Dal. Two stars. Less salt than last week. He is learning." "Friday. Khichdi. Two stars. He stood beside the pot the whole time it cooked. Nobody ever taught this boy that rice does not need a bodyguard." "Sunday. Kadhi. His grandfather's favorite. He does not know that. Three stars. I could not finish my bowl. It was not the food's fault."
I stood in the kitchen holding that notebook for a long time... I had made the kadhi that Sunday on a whim, off a recipe I half remembered, and she had eaten it slowly, said three, and turned on her serial like it was any other evening. She had gone to her room early that night. I had assumed it was her eyes.
This is the thing about my grandmother's generation that took me thirty years to understand.
They do not say the soft things. They keep records instead.
Every criticism was an entry, every entry was proof that she had been paying attention, and attention, in her kitchen, is the entire currency of love.
She criticized my food the way other people say I love you: constantly, loudly, and with her whole chest.
I did what any sentimental fool with a notebook full of feelings does. I wrote about her. A poem about her hands, actually, and the steel ladle worn smooth on one side from sixty years of stirring in the same direction. I had been reading through poems about family for weeks, trying to work out why mine kept coming out polite, and hers was the first one that did not. I posted it on a community wall for poets, and then, in a fit of courage I still cannot fully account for, I entered it into a monthly contest.
When I read it to her, translating as I went, stumbling through the Hindi, she listened with her eyes shut. I finished... The ceiling fan ticked.
Then she said, "The poem is a four."
The highest rating she has ever given a living person. I did not push my luck by asking what kept it from five.
Her eyes are healed now. The doctor says she can cook again, and sometimes she does, but mostly she stays in the plastic chair, because she says a critic must maintain professional distance. Last week I attempted the impossible: her mother's masoor dal, from a recipe written in the back pages of that same notebook, in handwriting older than my mother.
She tasted it. She put the spoon down. She was quiet for so long... I started drafting my apology.
"One star," she said.
"One?"
"It tastes exactly like mine," she said. "And mine was never good. My mother's was good. Mine, your grandfather praised for fifty years because he was a liar and I let him be one. Sit down. Eat. It is terrible. We are going to finish all of it."
And we did. Both of us, down to the last terrible spoonful, while the notebook lay open on the table between us and the eyebrow, for one whole evening, stayed down.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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