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Input: On Diwali evenings  my mom let me eat as many sweets as I wanted. Sheâd buy jalebees  even though sheâd complain that they werenât as good as the ones she used to get in India. These were too cold  too sticky. But Diwali  the Hindu festival of lights and good conquering evil  is and was a day for eating  so sheâd also make a big vegetarian feast and sweet puris piled high in a metal bowl as a religious offering. After dinner  she and I would sit in front of her makeshift temple and sheâd mutter something about Lakshmi in Hindi. In a clay diya  sheâd make a candle from a cotton ball and ghee  pull smoke from it with her hands  and wrap it around my face  mithai crumbs on my lips. Food is a big part of any Indian holiday  but in my parentsâ home  hearty homemade Indian food was a fixture every day. Nightly  we had mounds of basmati rice  baby eggplants stewed in spices that Iâd hold up to my face like bejeweled earrings  collard greens and turnips (gross  until I grew up). Best of all were the nights where she made Kashmiri rogan josh  a lamb dish sheâd whip together in a pressure cooker that was perennially broken  the whistle propped up with a wooden spoon and screaming every five minutes on a Saturday afternoon.  Mom  cooked   Mom  piled food on your plate and made chutneys from scratch. When you scooped the last of your rice up with a fork   she âd instinctively know and pop up next to  you  with âMore?â holding another cup of steaming rice aloft. (Usually   she âd dump it onto your plate without waiting for an answer.) My brother and my dad and I were all spoiled  but I was the youngest  which means I was the most spoiled. I moved out at 17  but it took a few years before I craved my momâs Kashmiri food. Restaurant Indian food is too oily  too bland  with too much cream and too few of my  mom âs recognizable cooking quirks. I miss things that hardly matter  like how  her  potatoes always ended up crescent-moon shaped  or the way  her  parathas were always triangular and puckered. Instead  as Iâve gotten older Iâve been trying to learn my momâs recipes  myself .  She  got hers from  her  mother  who died more than a decade ago in India  and who used to make the most delicate little pats of paneer. (We called it tsamen  a word I learned is used only in our little corner of North India.) My mom has been cooking for maybe 40 years  probably longer  but  unfortunately  in the five years Iâve been cooking  Iâve learned I have no instincts in the kitchen. I panic if more than one burner is on at a time  and if there isnât a concrete recipe  I canât wing it. Iâve burned through the bottoms of so many pots that my old roommate put a moratorium on me attempting to cook any grains. This past Sunday was another Diwali spent away from my family  sorting through that inexplicable loss you feel when a holiday is happening and thereâs no one to celebrate it with you â not really your cousins who are a trek away  no siblings nearby  no aunties you want to call. I decided Iâd do it myself  and invited two of my favorite (white) people  hoping to not poison them. Diwali isnât our familyâs most exciting holiday  but celebrating it felt important  the same way I try to avoid meat on Shivaratri (when my mom calls to remind me)  or the same reason I send my brother a red thread on Rakhi even though we otherwise never talk. On Diwali  like most days that remind me of Hinduism and India  I miss my mom. Iâve been living away from my parents for nine years  long enough to make a new life in another city  to have friends and a live-in partner. Two of my cousins live a half hour away. But Mom  regardless  refers to me as âalone  out there â like I could starve any minute. When I do come home a few times a year  Mom asks me what I want for dinner and plans meals for my entire stay. She loads food on my plate and freezes the extra so I can take it on a plane with me and defrost it when Iâm homesick. Iâm homesick a lot these days  seemingly the same way my mom was homesick for her parents after she left India. When my mom moved  she took all of her motherâs little secrets with her. My mom had watched my grandmother cook for years  knew her languages  knew how to pleat a sari or mutter a Kashmiri insult (âThratâ) or throw a wedding for her son  25 years after she moved away. I donât have any of these secrets  because I was born in North America and raised around white people in a family that wanted to integrate. So it felt important to at least try to remember how my own mom did things.
Late last week  I called my mom to get a refresher on a few of her recipes. I wanted to make rogan josh  aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower)  chicken biryani (chicken and rice)  and paneer with palak (spinach). But my mom  like so many Indian mothers I know  has always avoided giving me complete recipes. Even when I visit home and watch her  she somehow manages to divert my attention by  say  dangling in front of my face a gol gappa  a globe of fried wheat flour filled with chickpeas and potatoes and yogurt. Iâm always missing a spice  a cook time  a stove temperature. Iâm never clear if when she says âgingerâ she means âfresh ginger  about a pinky-size  cut into stripsâ or âginger powder  a teaspoon or two.â Or  if sheâs feeling really casual about a recipe  sheâll say  âAdd the usual spices â a mix of 5 or maybe 10 different spices that might be usual to her but are patently unclear to me. Salt? Does she just mean salt? Worse  her measurements are not based on any contemporary or commonly used metric. A teaspoon  to her  is the size of the white plastic spoon with the snapped-off handle that she uses in all of the containers in her spice drawer that originally came from Dairy Queen when I was 6 or 7 and abandoned a half-eaten Oreo Blizzard. A tablespoon  conversely  is anywhere between two or three of the âteaspoons.â A cup is the cup she uses to scoop basmati rice out of the five-gallon plastic tub in the pantry on the bottom shelf. It is unclear where the cup came from  but it is cloudy and cracked and significantly smaller than an actual cup. Every other measurement she has  then  is specific to her grocery store  to her homemade spice mixtures  to her butcher who hands her a hunk of lamb the size of a small toddler  leaving her to break it down into digestible and cookable pieces. âHow much frozen spinach do I need?â I might ask her  and she will answer  âOne.â One block  she says  as if I can go to a grocery store and say  âONE BLOCK OF YOUR FINEST FROZEN SPINACH  SIR.â I suspect some of this is intentional. Indian women â mothers  in particular â hoard some of their recipes  refusing to give them in full. So long as they are the eldest women in their families  they are the gatekeepers for these particular culinary incarnations that exist only in their kitchens. (A cursory Google search for a good chicken biryani recipe yielded ingredients like chicken stock â my mom literally screamed when I suggested this â or curry paste  something that has never once been in her kitchen.) Iâve started to do this too  refusing to give my boyfriend a complete ingredient list  even when I need help cooking  because I refuse to let him in on a secret I have been scratching at for years. Maybe itâs about making herself needed as a mother  or forcing me into coming home and beg for my favorite lotus root  a recipe specific to Kashmir that Iâve never found at a restaurant. Regional differences are lost  the little things my motherâs motherâs mother did in the kitchen get muddied â unless I ask. And I have been asking  for years  for as long as Iâve been away from home and have been trying to find my mom at the bottom of a 20-quart pot. All of this reduces my cooking to a kind of trial and error. Once  when I tried to make her rogan josh  I ended up adding three times the right amount of cinnamon; my lamb tasted like an angry ginger snap. Two years after that  she casually mentioned that youâre only supposed to use flat cinnamon sticks  and not the rolled up ones  which apparently makes a fucking difference. When I last visited  she sent me back to my home with frozen rogan josh in my suitcase. Later  when I defrosted and ate it  I picked through it  pulling out any identifiable spices I could find. At the bottom of my bowl was a dark ball the texture of soft wood. I cleaned it off and texted it to my mom with my trademark calm: â?!?!?!?!â She gave me the Hindi word for it  leaving me to creative googling to figure out what it was. (I wonât tell you; Iâve invested too much to give it up that easy.) Mom swears that sheâs not actively keeping ingredients from me  that she just forgets because cooking is so second-nature to her. This doesnât explain why sometimes sheâll add an ingredient to her list for me â a year ago  the rogan josh recipe had coriander powder in it â later saying something like  âWhy would I ever tell you to put coriander powder in it? Nothing has coriander powder in it.â Now she says itâs actually garam masala  but not the kind you buy in the store (she says this with her particular brand of derision usually reserved for âwhiteâ grocery stores) but the kind that she makes at home  fistfuls of unidentifiable brown spices hand-ground with a mortar and pestle. âI will give you some when you come home â she always says  but she is a liar  because she never actually has. Food has always been my momâs domain  so maybe it makes sense that she doesnât want to give me her trade secrets just yet.
Is there a point when you stop needing your mom? I want to know if it will happen before she dies  or if sheâll go and Iâll be left figuring out how to contend without her. My dad talks about dying with typically alarming frequency â a few weeks ago  he answered the phone and said  âMy body will never be what it once was â and then passed the handset over to  my mom â  but itâs my mom whose death Iâm more concerned about. In terms of being needed  my mom will never get a break. My dad sometimes wonât eat unless my mom is home to prepare food for him; even something as simple as a sandwich requires supervision. My brother and sister-in-law and their daughter come over every Sunday and my mom piles Kashmiri food on their plates like she does for anyone who comes to dinner. Sheâll sit next to my niece and watch her eat  her half-white  blue-eyed granddaughter licking daal off a teaspoon. I started cooking this past Sunday around 3:30 p.m.  peeling the potatoes and cutting the cauliflower into florets and quietly muttered âson of a bitchâ when I realized I had forgotten to buy rosewater. I called my mom first at 4 p.m.  to confirm that cumin seeds and fennel seeds are different (DONâT @ ME). Once she finished laughing at me  I put the aloo gobi in the oven and marinated the chicken in star anise and âthe spices from that box.â I called her again when my palak looked electric-green and tasted canned (âWell  obviously you forgot to add the haldi â she said  as if I had called to ask a question as simple as âWhy canât I breathe when I place a brick on my own throat?â) While I pan-fried the rogan josh  she called me back and asked  âHowâs it going?â I could hear her smiling  and it almost felt like a taunt. I told her I was sure something was missing  a spice that she considers too routine to even mention  or one that sheâs actively hiding from me. But by then my kitchen smelled like my momâs  a clash of turmeric and paprika and chili powder and cumin (whole and ground) and the scent that comes from fresh meat when itâs being slowly cooked in different pots at the same time. I loaded serving bowls with the food I made  called everyone into the kitchen. The chicken tasted right  the rogan josh looked reddish-brown  the paneer had turned yellow and was easily cut with the side of a fork. It had the markings of my momâs food  but of course it wasnât as good as hers. It wasnât as good because my food  as surprisingly palatable as it was  didnât include my mom hovering over me with a wooden spoon. (Was she going to give me more rice? Was she going to hit me a little bit for eating too fast? Itâs a journey.) It wasnât as good  because it couldnât be. I canât replicate the things my mom does; I can only build on top of them. But still  I made sure everyone had seconds  preferably thirds.
I didnât poison anyone on Saturday. I made six  maybe seven times the amount of food intended  but Iâm content with that being my biggest mistake. (I did use a pressure cooker for the first time and screamed every time it screamed  and I forgot to add the almonds to the biryani but  you know what  fuck nuts.) After my guests left my house  I sent a photo of my spread to  Mom   and  she  called me later that night. âThe color was right â  she  said  paying me the highest compliment  she  could give me from 1 500 miles away. âSo  I guess you can do it yourself.â More frequently than I think is normal  I imagine what weâre all going to do when my mom dies. My dad will be completely incapable of taking care of himself (he once asked me to put his jalapeÃ±o potato chips in the oven to âcrisp them up some moreâ). My brother and I only call each other now and then  because  Mom  begs us to  so who knows how far we can drift. Iâll lose  her  as a tether.  Mom  doesnât talk about death; itâs too macabre for our pleasant chats. But I canât help thinking about it  an anxiety that started to ramp up in my early twenties when I noticed how little I am capable of doing on my own. I still call  her  to consult on how to appropriately wash a lace bra  and  she  still buys me leggings if theyâre on sale  and  she  gets this rare herb shipped in from India that I have no idea where else to get outside of  her  pantry. These gaps in my knowledge are terrifying enough  but what about all the things I donât know that I donât know? Sheer chai  for example  is the most disgusting product  her  home country has ever produced â but will I one day wish I knew how to make it? When you emigrate  you end up the last person to touch a lot of your family history. Somewhere along the line  weâll forget my momâs maiden name. Weâll forget what her actual name was before she changed it when she moved. Weâll lose language and the way to make a candle from ghee and a cotton ball. I canât pull all of this information out of her  and I canât carry all of it after sheâs gone  and I panic when I think about how impossible it feels to one day not need her. But at least I can try to cook. My momâs own mother died in India  seemingly suddenly  from a combination of declining health and crummy care.  Mom  was with  her  when it happened  but near the end my grandmother was confused and didnât seem to register that  her  daughter had flown all that way just to see her off. When I imagine my momâs death  I picture her perched on her proverbial deathbed  lucid but weak  about to die. Sheâll raise one arthritic finger toward me  motioning for me to come closer to her. âYes  mother â I will say  and kneel down so her face is close to mine  glistening with tears. âCloser â she will say  and I will press forward  taking her hand. âWhat is it?â I will ask. And with one final rasp  the death rattle of a long life winding down  my mom will wheeze out her final words  releasing me from a lifetime of trying to keep her as close to me as possible: âIt was just salt.â â

Thereâs No Recipe For Growing Up