Pushed by a vague feeling of “I must be elsewhere” – common to many youngsters from India’s Northeast – propelled by the sense that employment and higher education opportunities lay “outside”, or as we say in Khasi “sha the”. There. Not here.
I left for Delhi University, and lived in a girl’s hostel where, for two years, we ate the most unexciting of vegetarian food. I remember rajma, chole, roti and rice, and I don’t think the menu varied in all the time we were there. It was a shock in so many ways. The flavours of the food, the flavours of the city. Harsh, unfamiliar, barely accommodating. If we wanted our own “home” food, we needed to trek for miles, from North Campus to South Delhi, and eat at a Naga stall in Dilli Haat. Unlike now, where neighbourhoods like Humayanpur burgeon with “Northeast restaurants”, the early 2000s offered few options if any. Our only respite was cooking at a friend’s flat – a friend who wasn’t living in a hostel but on their own, usually a group of boys from the Northeast – and many Sundays were spent preparing and eating pork.
Eating out in Delhi, though, was very much a question of how much money we had to spare as broke students. In college at St Stephen’s, the taste of mince cutlets, Maggi, gulab jamun, and nimbu paani, so different from Madhu’s. Beyond that, thick parathas with white butter, cheap and filling at roadside stalls. Bun anda for late-evening cravings, a wealth of mithai, orange “Chinese” food, Nirula’s hot chocolate fudge, bheja fry sizzling along the pavement restaurants in Hudson Lines, aloo tikki, pani puri and chaat everywhere.
Slowly, though, Delhi became more palatable. I fell in love with Mughlai cuisine – rich, flavourful – and started eating more rotis than rice. On rare occasions, treats at one of many newly opened foreign restaurant chains in the capital, a sign of newly liberalised India. McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, and, when we were feeling especially flushed, an evening out at TGIF during happy hours. Here, a different world, of deep-fried American deliciousness. Exotic to us too. Onion rings, potato skins drenched in sour cream and chives, nachos. What a time, we thought, to be alive!
I must admit to not really missing the food of home very much. All this was much too exciting, new, and thrillingly unfamiliar. Those years in Delhi felt like years of freedom, of being away from parents and grandparents, and finding myself anew, over and again. New friends, new experiences, new tastes, a new era.
From here, I travelled even further away. For my graduate studies in London, in the United Kingdom. There, at the halls of residence, a mini United Nations. An Italian who cooked pasta every day, a Greek student who longed for home and made many attempts at dolmades, a close Palestinian friend who roasted peppers and meat, a Japanese student who cooked and ate everything miso, a Swedish girl who tried to convince us to try pickled herrings. All the world in our kitchens, and everyone cooking the food of their home – or at least as close as we could get to it while buying everything on the “soon-to-expire” shelf at Sainbury’s where stuff was cheapest.
Being a student in the UK introduced me to supermarkets. I have never been so confused over which cereal to buy in all my life. So much meat on the shelf. So much yoghurt. “Indian” meals came packaged in microwaveable boxes. I tried, and loved, dim sum. Japanese food. Ethiopian. If I had moved far away from the hills I once called home, my tastes had travelled even further; not a thought now for Mylliem chicken, or putharo, or pork with mustard leaves. I dated a vegetarian English student, and with him discovered the pleasures of paneer piled on chilli con carne. Butternut squash in Thai yellow curry. It was all a mixture. A strange, yet not unbecoming, coming-together of flavours.
“Indian” food consisted of dosas at Dosa n Chutney in Tooting, or the cheap vegetarian buffet at Ravi Shankar behind St Pancras station. I did not even once think of cooking Khasi food. It had left me, cleaned off of my palate – just as that part of the world had almost been. I had a choice now, you see: whether to stay on in the UK, on an extended “Working Holiday Visa” (that allowed a young person to live and work in the UK for two years), and try to find a job and build a life, a career there, or return – not to Shillong, but to Delhi. It is strange how the place of return was never quite articulated. It was taken for granted, by my parents, by me, that if ever I took the decision to chuck up a life in the UK (the horror, the horror), it would not be to come back to my small hometown.
I did chuck up a life in the UK – not once, but twice, both times feeling as though the country was not for me. It was also, of course, tremendously difficult to get a job in my area of passion and interest – art, literature, writing. To do this I would need to freelance, but the living cost in the country was exorbitant, from rent to bills to groceries. My family weren’t, shall we say, pleased with my decision either time. I ought to have stuck it out, and stayed on in the country where it was desirable for desi children to be.
Eventually, I was forgiven, because they are supportive parents, but also because I managed to make a life in Delhi. I had written and published books, and I was offered a job as a teacher of creative writing at a university – nothing I’d done before, but I discovered that I enjoyed it greatly, finding it more rewarding than any other job (in publishing, and working at a city magazine) I’d had previously. Slowly, things fell into place.
I lived on my own, rebuilt a life after the end of a long-term relationship, started writing again, found a network of close, supportive friends, and began to enjoy living in Delhi, as I perhaps never had previously. I was earning steadily, and – for the first time ever – decently, and could travel, and eat well. I started cooking more often than I had in the past, and enjoying it too. Lots of different kinds of food, but slowly, an inclusion of Khasi dishes. Smoked beef with potatoes, smoked pork with pumpkin. I started bringing back ingredients with me whenever I’d visit Shillong. Black sesame to make doh nei iong, and dai iong, pork cooked with black sesame, lentils too, thickened with ground black sesame. White sesame to mix with radish or banana flowers. My suitcase would overflow with food I couldn’t find in Delhi— –or that I thought was definitely not of the same quality – but also ingredients that I did find in the capital. Turmeric from home was different – better? – than anything store-bought in the city, as was pepper, cinnamon, honey.
I began bringing back these items to gift to close friends. “From home,” I’d tell them proudly. I began to long for oranges, for blood plums, soh ot or chestnuts, soh phe – fruits and nuts that were more difficult to carry back with me, as they were quickly perishable, and I couldn’t always time my visits back to Shillong to the right season.
My suitcase became a space of longing. Of hope. Of dreams. I’d feed myself, but more importantly, my friends. Food from home, though precious, was always for sharing – and in this way, mainly, it felt truly mine.
Slowly, in these years, I began to feel like I was coming back to myself. In life, in dreams, in food. And in writing too.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Hills, Plains and the World: A Life in Meals and Morsels’ by Janice Pariat in Food Journeys: Stories From The Heart, edited by Joel Rodrigues and Dolly Kikon, Zubaan Books.
