Nikesh Shukla - Salt In The Sugar Jar

 

 

Hi. In 2010, I get a phone call from my cousin to tell me that my mum has died. And it comes as a bit of a shock, because two weeks ago, she had been perfectly healthy and then she got diagnosed with cancer and she passed away quite quickly. Grief is a funny thing, because me and my mum, we had a very difficult relationship. We both loved each other intensely, and the only way that we could really show our love for each other was by bickering all the time about really small things. 

 

do what a lot of people do when they're faced with problems, and I move to another city. [audience laughter] I leave London, where I've grown up, and I move to Bristol to make a new home. London feels dead to me at this point, because my mum is no longer there. Something has changed. Something either within me or within my family. I just can't be here anymore. 

 

The first time I walk into my new house in Bristol, the first thing I notice, is that it stinks. [audience laughter] It'd been occupied by some hippie students, because it is Bristol. And so, between growing pulses by the kitchen sink and burning incense and lots of lots of cats, it smells like it's a house that belongs to someone else. It definitely doesn't smell like my house. I don't feel like I'm at home. I'm caught in this in between. I'm mourning for my mum every single day. It feels like this heavy thing on top of me. 

 

I moved cities and I don't know anyone and I just cannot wash the cat shit out of the carpet. [audience laughter] I go home to visit my dad. It's been a year since my mum died and there's one weekend where I go to visit him. Maybe it's because I've moved into a new space that I suddenly look at my childhood home with fresh eyes, but the moment I walk into my childhood home, it feels so familiar and yet it feels different. Because in the year since my mum has died, the house has been locked in stasis. There's still laundry in the basket left over from when she was alive. Her dirty clothes are still in the laundry basket. Her handbag is still at the bottom of the stairs. While it looks like my childhood home, it also looks very clean, like nothing has been used. It feels like a museum. Like, say, there was a recreation of our house in the Tate Modern or Tate Britain, which would be a weird thing to see. It feels like a museum to how things used to be. 

 

The kitchen looks unused. The only place that has any life is the lounge area where my dad sits and listens to Bollywood songs really loudly. I go upstairs, and I'm lying on my childhood bed and something feels different this time, because when I grew up, my bedroom was on top of the kitchen. And so, I grew up with the sounds of Bollywood music and I grew up with the sounds of the pressure cooker and I grew up with the smell of onions and cumin and garlic and ginger and chilies in the air. 

 

My mum was a firm believer in me and my sister removing our school uniforms every time we came home from school, because she didn't want our clothes to smell like the food that she was cooking. She said, “Don't give the white people ammunition. Just wear house clothes.” And we respected that. But I was lying there and everything felt stale. It didn't feel like my home. I'm already feeling unstuck, because Bristol doesn't feel like my home. And here I am on my childhood bed in my childhood home, and this doesn't feel like my home. 

 

I'm hungry, and so I go downstairs and I look in the fridge and it's empty, except for cans of Fosters and ketchup, because my dad is now a singleton and his fridge reflects that. I open up the freezer, hoping for some inspiration. I see some Tupperware boxes of my mum's food in there, and I think, oh, my God, here is my mum's food. So, I take out a Tupperware box. It's got Handvo in it, which is this really delicious savory pancake. I put it in the microwave to defrost. I'm standing there waiting for it to heat up, and something happens to that really stale, sterile room. It starts to smell like my mom's kitchen again. The spices are making the air come alive and it feels like my home. 

 

I eat the Handvo and it's delicious as it always was. I think I need to learn how to make this Handvo. I'm disappointed in myself, because every-- I had years and years of my mum trying to teach me how to cook like her. When I left home, she tried to get me to learn how to make basic chana masala and paneer and stuff like that. And I was just like, “Well, I'll just come home and get leftovers. It'll be fine.” And she was like, “No, I won't always be around.” I was an idiot and I never learned. I know that she was disappointed in that. And here I am now ruing those decisions. And I really want to know how to make Handvo. 

 

I remember that my mum told me she got the recipe from Sala Masi. I haven't seen Sala Masi since my mum's funeral. So, knowing that my mum's handbag is at the bottom of the stairs, I go, I look through the handbag to find her address book, so I can phone Sala Masi and say, “Hey, Sala Masi, can you teach me how to make Handvo?” I find a stack of papers in my mum's handbag, and I open one of them and it's a shopping list. It has things like Weetabix and onions and cumin powder and chili and cheese and really mundane things that you get for the big shop [unintelligible 00:21:35].

 

But there's something about seeing my mum's handwriting that makes me crumble and makes me feel the heaviness crash over me again. Because seeing that ink on the page, that ink came from a pen that was connected to her fingers, that was connected to our arms, that arm that was connected to her brain, and seeing her handwriting and the smell of her food still lingering in the air, it feels like she's a real person. When someone dies and you romanticize them, they become the really good things and the really, really bad things that used to wind you up, and you forget about the really mundane things like when they wrote shopping lists or when they made Handvo. 

 

I take one of those shopping lists home. I phoned Sala Masi, I get the recipe. When I get back to Bristol, I decide I'm going to do this shop. I'm going to do my mum's big shop, which is silly, because we already have cheese and we already have Weetabix, but I feel like I need to do this. So, I go to the shop and I buy all the things that are on the list, making sure that I also add in things that I need to make Handvo, and I go home. I'm looking at Sala Masi's instructions to make Handvo and I think, God, I really wish I knew how to cook. [audience laughter] Okay, let's do this. It just says mix all this stuff up in a bowl. I can do that. 

 

So, I get everything out, because that's how I cook. You cook when you don't know how to cook, you get everything out so you can stare at it. [audience laughter] I put everything in a bowl and I'm following the instructions very robotically. And the last thing you have to do is temper some sesame seeds, and mustard seeds and cumin seeds together. So, I googled temper. [audience laughter] I then google temper cooking. [audience laughter] And for some reason, I decide to get a big frying pan out to temper these sesame seeds and mustard seeds and cumin seeds. And so, I put the pan on and I light the hob and let it do what it's doing. 

 

I get distracted putting the mixture out into a baking tray. I don't notice that I've been tempering a bit too long. The pan is smoking. The smoke alarm starts to go off and I panic. I don't know what to do. Do I turn the hob off? What do I do? So, I grab a tea towel and I'm between the smoke alarm, trying to wave the smoke away from the smoke alarm, and trying to wave the smoke away from the hob. And the tea towel catches fire, because I'm an idiot. [audience laughter] 

 

Now, I've got a tea towel on fire, the smoke alarm's going off, the pan is still smoking because I still haven't taken it off the hob. So, I open the back door, because that seems like a sensible thing to do. I open the back door. I throw the tea towel out into the garden. I turn off the hob, and I take the pan off the hob and I run outside and I leave it on the ground outside, making sure I don't stand on the smoldering tea towel, then find another tea towel and I try and wave the smoke away from the smoke alarm. 

 

Just a year and a bit's grief just suddenly crashes over me. My mum is gone. She won't be able to show me how to cook this stuff. I can't follow simple recipes, and she's gone and her food is gone and I'm not sure how I'm going to honor her in this new home. And so, I sit down on the middle of the kitchen floor and I cry. The smoke alarm is still going on. I look up, because there's a smell in the air. And somewhere amidst the smell of smoke and burnt sesame seeds and mustard seeds and cumin seeds, there is also the smell of onions and garlic and ginger and chili. And my house smells like my mum's kitchen. And for a second, just for a second, it starts to feel like home. Thank you.