Tastes Of Memories

Nostalgia, history, legends and myths combine to salvage the disappearing cuisines of five diaspora communities in India. 

- Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi

 Growing up, my family’s Sunday lunch was always the same: Sindhi kadhi-rice and alu tuk sprinkled with lal mirch and amchur. For my grandmother, Savitri Tikamdas Bajaj, it was an elaborate affair, meant to be a nap-inducing traditional treat for her children, children-in-law and grandchildren. Sometimes she would serve teevan, a typically Sindhi mutton curry. Her recipe called for the meat to be cooked low and slow in ghee, with browned onions and warm spices. By the time it was ready to eat, two inches of fat sat on the surface of the dish. Other weekends, there would be delicate, fine-boned pallo machhli that was, as per myth, Sindhi deity Jhulelal’s vehicle (the Bengalis also have it—they call it ilish). This is stuffed with a paste of tomato, onion, ginger, yoghurt and dried spices.

These are my earliest memories of food, by which time it had been 40 years since my grandmother had left her homeland in Sindh, specifically Karachi and Shikarpur, and adopted Mumbai as her new home. For 45 years more, until she passed away, she took great pride in feeding her family traditional Sindhi food, the kind she’d been taught to cook by her mother. There were kokis laden with anardana, green chillies, onions, coriander and ghee; sai bhaji with bhuga chawar; creamy lobes of goat brain marinated in masala and fried on the tawa or braised in a thick, spicy tomato gravy; jera-bukki (liver and kidneys) cooked in kheema. Her weekday food was also traditionally Sindhi. For breakfast we had seyal bread; for lunch, tidali dal; for dinner, vangun-batata (brinjal and potato stew).