My Thaatha’s favourite English word is “sufficient”. It is almost always uttered around meal-times, when he is inspecting my plate (or on f...
My Thaatha’s favourite English word is “sufficient”. It is almost always uttered around meal-times, when he is inspecting my plate (or on fancy occasions, a banana leaf sprinkled with water). “You have a sufficient quantity of food?” “The salt is sufficient?” “You have sufficient sugar in your tea?”
When Thaatha and I speak on the phone there is inevitably a question about what I ate for breakfast, what I will eat for lunch. My memories of life in Thiruvananthapuram always pivot rhythmically around meals. My days were divided into eating, bursting at the seams post-mealtime, and little windows to digest in between.
It was an odd detail of my life to rediscover in Krupa Ge’s What We Know About Her, but Ge’s book gives space to mealtimes. As the protagonist Yamuna spends more and more time with her family, she feels as though she is always eating. “Our meals together simply punctuated an otherwise aimless day,” she writes.
Yamuna is in conflict with most of her family – she is stealing letters from her Thaatha as she visits him in Benares, and is as determined to keep her ancestral home as her mother is to give it away. The protagonist’s almost obsessive relationship with the house...
