The Poem Hidden in My Mother's Recipe Book
Between the pickle and the kheer, four lines in her young handwriting.
I was looking for a kheer recipe when I found my mother's other life.
It was four lines long and fifty-six years old.
The recipe book is a fat, swollen thing, an old accounts ledger she repurposed as a bride, held together by a rubber band and the family's collective terror of losing it. Every important dish of my childhood lives in there in her tilting Hindi hand: the mango pickle that takes three weeks and one argument, the dal reserved for fevers, the kheer she makes every birthday, thickened over two hours, almonds on top, patience all the way through.
When I moved six hundred kilometers away last year, she finally allowed me to photograph the pages. 'Photograph, not take,' she said, holding the ledger against her chest like a passport in a long queue.
I was photographing my way through the middle section on a Sunday afternoon when I turned from the pickle page to the kheer page and found, in the gutter between them, four lines that were not food.
The handwriting was hers but younger, rounder, the letters leaning forward as if they were in a hurry to be somewhere. There was a date in the corner: March 1969. Two years before her wedding. Under the lines there was no signature, only a single letter, the first letter of her own name, as though she had signed it to herself.
I will not translate it well, but it said, more or less: the courtyard bird knows the exact size of the sky. It is the size of the courtyard. Even so, every morning, listen to her, singing about the whole thing.
I sat down on my kitchen floor, six hundred kilometers from her, holding the photograph on my phone, and read it maybe thirty times.
My mother, whom I had never once seen read a poem, let alone write one. My mother, whose inner life I had assumed, with a child's easy arrogance, consisted entirely of us.
I called her that evening and did what a coward does: I asked about the kheer. Full cream milk, she said, no shortcuts, and don't stir it like you're angry at it. Then I said, 'Ma, on the kheer page, in the margin, there's some writing.' The line went so quiet... I checked twice whether the call had dropped.
'That's nothing,' she said. 'Some old scribble... Make the kheer.'
It took three more calls across two weeks, and in the end it was not my persistence that opened her. It was her insomnia, a cordless phone, and eleven forty at night. She called me, which she never does after nine, and without any greeting she said, 'There were more... Do you want to hear one?'
And then my mother, seventy-one years old, standing in her dark kitchen so as not to wake my father, recited a poem from memory that she had written before the moon landing.
Not read. Recited.
Sixteen lines, no hesitation, the meter landing like a skipping rope turned by expert hands. When she finished she was breathing as if she had carried something heavy up a flight of stairs, and I suppose she had: fifty-odd years of it, up all those decades, alone.
'Why are you telling me now?' I asked. 'Because you found one,' she said. 'A thing stays a secret until someone finds one corner of it. After that it is just waiting.'
The story came out in pieces over that call and the ones that followed. A schoolteacher in her town who read the girls Mahadevi Varma. A notebook. A wedding arranged in a fortnight. The notebook, she told me flatly, did not survive the move; her mother burned it with the general household rubbish, not out of cruelty, just tidiness, which she said was worse.
In her new house there was no paper on earth that belonged to her except one book: the ledger her mother-in-law handed over for recipes. So the poems went where no man in that family would ever look.
She hid her poems in the one place no man in that house would ever open: between the pickle and the kheer, in plain sight, in the only book that was entirely hers.
Once I knew what I was looking for, I found the others. Margins, gutters, the backs of turmeric-stained pages. Under a recipe for winter laddoos, six lines about her father's shawl. Beside the fever dal, a couplet about a fever of another kind, which I chose not to ask about. Fourteen poems in all, disguised as marginalia, a whole shadow book of memory threaded through the family cookbook, hidden the way women of her generation hid money: folded small, sewn into the everyday.
I asked her why she never told anyone. She laughed the way she laughs at the television news. 'Told them what? That the kheer comes with a side of poetry? Who was asking?'
Nobody was asking.
That is the whole story of a certain kind of woman's life, and I refuse to let it be the end of this one.
With her permission, which took a month and one long argument about her name, I typed up the courtyard bird poem and posted it on a community wall for poets. She would allow only her first initial, the same one from the kheer page. I read her the comments over the phone. A stranger in another country wrote that the bird was his grandmother. A student wrote asking whether there were more poems by this poet. My mother made me read that one four times. 'By this poet,' she repeated slowly, trying the words on like bangles.
Since then I have spent whole evenings reading profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I keep thinking how narrowly she missed being one of them, or being heard at all. A fortnight... one match... one tidy grandmother.
That is how close a voice comes to vanishing, and nobody rings a bell when it happens.
Last month a parcel arrived at my flat. Inside, wrapped in an old cotton sari, was the ledger. No note. I called her in a mild panic, and she said, 'You're the kheer maker now. Everything on those pages is yours.' Then, just before hanging up, in the voice she uses for instructions: 'Leave room in the margins.'
On my first attempt the kheer burned, because I was crying into a fifty-year-old book and stirring like I was angry at it. On the second attempt it came out right, thick and slow and patient, exactly as written. And on the kheer page now, under her four young lines, there is a date in my handwriting, and next to it, arriving slowly, four lines of my own.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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