The day I made my first dalma away from home

It somehow, all so suddenly came over me in a single, unbridled moment: how far these palmfuls of variegated lentils had travelled to arrive in my kitchen—miles of them—tied together by fate yet so forlorn in the long nomadic journey of being sown into the same cake of dirt and grubs, ripening with seasons, soaking in the slow patience of their stalks being cut, their grains loosened, threshed, winnowed, and carried across lakes and borders.

Soon came into picture my father’s tired face, and his grocery bag of jute again, heavy with their small weight. I saw the grains, then, picked and washed by my mother’s scabrous finger tips, always oddly colder than the December’s chilly limbs slowly gathering in the making of the soreness along my nape. Her fingers move through with the authority of someone who never announces what she knows. The very ones that once tapped my shoulder to taste, to adjust, to learn without calling it learning.

Here, nothing behaved the way her kitchen did. The vegetables sat differently on the cutting board. The mustard oil bloomed faster than I expected. The curry leaves refused to soften until the very end, as if they were testing my resolve. I kept stirring, unsure of the exact moment the dish wanted to turn toward itself. At home, dalma was the beginning of things—it was the mother of all lentil-based dishes. As though every other broth that existed seemed to spring from her broad, forgiving torso. A quiet centre. A kind of grammar. You ate it and felt held without being told so. That was her magic.