A memoir that feeds the soul

A warm, unguarded journey through craft, family, longing and fierce honesty

- SRINATH SRIDHARAN

IF YOU SING honestly, people will tell it. If you don’t, they will know: Music teacher Shankar Dasgupta’s simple counsel to a young Suvir Saran was meant for music, but it became the tuning fork of his life. It is also the clearest key with which to read Tell My Mother I Like Boys.

Every page carries the sound of someone determined to live, and write without disguise.

To read this book is to recognise that Suvir lives by the principle of giving not just fully, but excessively, even when the personal cost is steep. He has long understood what excellence demands: unreasonable commitment, steeled self-scrutiny, and a willingness to walk into the fire again and again until the craft—whether cooking or writing or singing—becomes honest enough to stand on its own. That intensity has shaped his culinary reputation, including Devi, the first Indian restaurant in North America to earn a Michelin star. It also shapes the voice on these pages, for it is poetic, sharp, unafraid, and incapable of half measures.