Primalsoup

[Representative Image generated using AI]

Put two Indians together, and it won’t take much to get them worked up on the all-important question – who makes the best biryani. Which region reigns supreme, which one is the one biryani to rule them all – is it Lucknowi, Hyderabadi, Kolkata, or any another? Each has its ardent followers, who are willing to die on that hill. Each region has its own distinct flavour, and more importantly, its own carefully guarded secret. But for me, there was never any contest. My Ma’s biryani was the best. Always. No one could convince me otherwise. The chicken was tender, the rice perfectly fluffy, each spice meticulously balanced. It was more than just food. It was memory, comfort, and home all wrapped into one dish.

I opened my recipe notebook and traced the ingredients with my finger one more time: rice, lentils, chicken, vegetables, garlic, ghee, salt, sugar, cream, dahi, mustard, curry leaves, cumin, cloves, cardamom, black pepper, star anise, cinnamon, and assorted fresh herbs.
Yes, they were all there.

This was my Ma’s recipe for biryani, as my children like to say, the OG, or the GOAT. This was not any ordinary biryani, it was the stuff of urban legends – the one that made Ma famous among neighbours, friends, and even those who had tasted it once at weddings or funerals. What truly set it apart was her inspired use of spices, an intricate dance of flavour—never overpowering, yet deeply layered. And always a little bit of a secret.

I must admit though, as a child, I didn’t understand the fuss about the biryani. It was too heavy, and one would encounter vegetables one didn’t like, and whole spices poked uncomfortably in my mouth. I had to pick out the parts of the biryani that I wanted to eat and the parts I didn’t. It seemed as much work to eat it as it was probably for my Ma to make it. As a teenager, my disdain only deepened.
“No, Ma. I’ll just have dahi,” I’d say, pushing the biryani aside. She would look at me with something like hurt in her eyes but say nothing. My refusal, I see now, wasn’t about the food. It was a rejection of her love, her care, carefully spiced and simmered over hours. But at that time, I couldn’t see it, because let’s face it, like most teenagers, I was a bit of, how do I say this nicely – an idiot.

The biryani had a history, almost like an heirloom. It was passed down from her mother-in-law, but over time, my Ma made it her own. Each Sunday, like clockwork, it appeared at the centre of our round dining table, as if it were the sun around which our family orbited. Even my father, with his fragile stomach and strict diet of plain curries, would allow himself this indulgence once a week.
“This biryani is fit for maharajas,” he would say, pride thick in his voice. And if you knew how economical my father was with praise, this was almost hyperbole. Ma would preen.

But then one Sunday, when I was eighteen, everything changed.
That morning, my father left. There was no fight, no angry slamming of doors—he just left, quietly. A succinct note on the dining table was the only concession he made for us: I cannot anymore.

It was cryptic, and I spent years trying to decipher it. What couldn’t he do? Was it us? Was it life? Was it the weight of the facade of family he could no longer uphold? The note was like a wound, never quite healing, just enough mystery left to keep us guessing, to keep us searching. He left without explanation, and we were left to piece together his absence.

For months, we made attempts to find and recover him. There were sightings. Once, an uncle thought he saw him at a temple, another time at a train station. Each time, hope would surface, only to be extinguished when the trail ran cold. I, too, had my moment of doubt. Once, years later, I was on a bus, headed home. It was an uncomfortable ride, the sun heavy in the sky, and the bus was packed with strangers pressed close together. Suddenly, I saw him. A man with a likeness to my father. An older and gaunt face, but the eyes, those eyes—they were the same. We made eye contact, and I could hear my heart so loudly even amidst the cacophony of public transport. I stood up, expertly jostling through the sea of people, determined to reach him. But just as I was about to tap his shoulder, he disappeared into the crowd. Gone, like he had been all those years ago.

I never told anyone except Ma and Shilpa, my older sister. When I did, they shrugged, not saying much. But in the silence, I understood—we all believed he was dead. None of us wanted to say it out loud, to be the first to admit it, to make his absence permanent. So we left it unsaid, clinging to the possibility that he might still be out there, somewhere, choosing not to come back. Was it better to think he had abandoned us, over the idea that he was dead? I am not sure, but we did not want to embrace the idea of his mortality.

Therefore, for years, we clung to that hope, though we never spoke of it directly. When Ma fell ill, Shilpa and I, deep down, believed he might return. In our more whimsical moments, we imagined a Bollywood reunion scene: he would arrive at the hospital, repentant, full of regret, and we would sit together, the four of us, over biryani and a song or twenty, like the dramas we watched as children. He would meet our spouses, our children, who were now almost the same age as Shilpa and I were when he abandoned us. We whispered about it at night, half in jest, half in longing. But as the days went by, no shadow of my father darkened the doorway. No letter came. No apology either. Sadly for us, we did not get the happy Bollywood cliché after all.

When she died, we were faced with a question that neither of us had ever considered that we would face: what should be the process of her cremation—as a widow, or as a bride? Hinduism has some very specific rules, in life and then beyond. The rituals vary depending on whether a woman is a widow or if her husband is still alive. Even in death, a woman is often seen only in the context of a man—husband, son, father, or even brother. We had no official word of our father’s death—no certificate, no body. Just the weight of his absence.
“What should we do?” Shilpa asked. Neither of us had an answer.

In the end, we cremated her as a bride. She was draped in a beautiful Banarasi sari, royal blue, a gift from my father from when I was born. It had always been her favourite, the deep, regal colour accentuating her grace, and every time she wore it, she glowed. That day, even in death, the sari seemed to envelop her with the dignity and beauty that had always been uniquely hers.

I remembered how stunning she always looked in it, the colour becoming her like no other. And that smile—dazzling, warm, like a burst of sunshine in the kitchen while she cooked, even on the dullest of days. There was also a fragrance that lingered around her, one that I’d always associated with her presence: a strange and beautiful blend of rose and sandalwood soap, and maybe even a hint of cardamom. Like a signature, it followed her everywhere, lingering in the folds of her clothes, on the pillows, in all the spaces she left behind. I hadn’t realised until then, but she also smelled like biryani—a subtle undercurrent of cloves and cumin, spices that had seeped into her very being over the years. 

But in the end, my Ma didn’t want to be defined by the biryani, like so many women before and after her. She didn’t want her legacy to be reduced to the value of domestic labour, the careful art of cooking that society expected from her. To her daughters, she perhaps wished to leave a different message. Don’t be limited by this, she seemed to say. Don’t let the world define you by what you do in the kitchen, or what you give to others. You are more than the sum of tasks that you perform. You are human. Full of thoughts and feelings, not just instructions and expectations.

Shilpa liked to think this was my Ma’s revenge, her one selfish moment, to not part with the recipe fully. Perhaps, in her final act, she was asserting her autonomy, choosing to hold something back. Maybe it was her way of showing us that she, too, was more than her biryani.

But I like to think it was her way of letting us live fuller lives, to remind us that we shouldn’t be defined by just one thing. It wasn’t about denying us the recipe, but about giving us permission to lead our own lives, as whole human beings—not just as a list of ingredients or a series of step-by-step instructions.

Yet, every Sunday, I still try to emulate her biryani. It’s like a ritual now, a trial and error, an attempt to bring back a piece of her. I don’t want to be defined by conventional roles of womanhood, and yet I can’t help but want to go back in time, just once, to have that biryani again—the perfect one, the way she made it. Today, I tossed a bowl of mint and dahi chutney into the pot. Let’s see if I crack the code after all.

Will I leave this recipe for my daughter? If she wants it, then yes. Though, at this point, she’s reached that age where carbs are her enemy, just like another precocious teenager a few decades ago.
And maybe, that’s the point.