Day 3: That Which Changes and Remains the Same

If you had told me a decade ago that I would be making ghee and jalebi at home, I’d have stared at you. Not in your wildest dreams, I’d have said.

So, did I become someone else, shedding who I was? I don’t think so. The core of who I am, always has, and always will be the same.

I have always been a lover of words.
I have always been deeply spiritual.
And, I have always loved food.

My soul lights up as I focus on these three aspects of my life.

It is only in this last decade of my life that the third began to sprout in the form of me cooking. It is in the last two years that I find myself becoming more and more confident in being able to cook anything and everything that catches my interest.

Strangely enough, a part of this gain in my confidence has come from thinking about my paternal grandparents who were food connoisseurs of their time. I find myself invoking my daadi, and daadu whenever I embark on cooking adventures new to me. “Dadui, be with me, as I try to fry this jalebi,” I find myself saying. Not only them but also my aunt and uncle who were great cooks and transitioned from their physical selves into their non-physical selves a few years ago—I like to think they are all cooking right along with me.

A tray full of jalebi

Jalebi, for anyone reading this and unfamiliar with them, hail from South Asia, and are fried whorls of fermented dough soaked in sugar syrup. My twist on these delicious squiggles was to use a 1:1 ratio of whole wheat pastry flour and all-purpose flour and to use my sourdough starter to ferment the batter which also gave the finished product this phenomenal sour undernote that paired so well with the floral sugary syrup. I couldn’t be more pleased with myself because the actual jalebis tasted exactly like the ones I grew up eating. I like to think that my non-physical cohort had something to do with that.

To say I’m not the same person I was a decade ago is inaccurate. But with each passing year, I blossom into these bits of my-self that would have been hard to imagine a while ago. Lying dormant, the seed of that which blossoms is not always perceivable till the conditions become ripe for it to germinate, grow, and poke its head out of the soil.

What brings about those favorable conditions? The living of my life. Nothing more, nothing less.