In the wake of the sudden loss of her father, Mandakini Menon found a grounding force in the act of cooking—and the tactility of working with food.
In November 2021, somewhere in the badlands of outer Delhi during a snack break at work, I bit into a hot, crisp jalebi. Syrup filled my mouth and tears pooled in my eyes instantly, like an uncontrollable reflex. Growing up, my father would bring back piping hot jalebis for us from the canteen at the government hospital where he worked.
In August 2016, five years before that cold November evening, my father passed away suddenly and without warning. Grief had taken a pair of shearing scissors to my life. With my father gone, the coordinates of my identity had become scrambled. I could not remember who I was prior to his death or immediately after. I was utterly at sea.
My father was an introvert, incapable of truly expressing himself. Others would often describe him as “simple”. He rarely made his preferences known and as a consequence, barely took up any space. It made me wonder if I really did know him. The facts of a person’s life are abundant even in death—he was a doctor, he was an only child, he married young. But what of his interior world, the stuff of personhood? What was his favourite colour? Did he have a favourite song? What did he like to eat when he was sick or sad? What made him laugh? I thought I knew all of this, but I wasn’t so sure anymore.
It was impossible to reconcile his physical absence with the irrepressible presence of our abruptly truncated relationship as father and daughter. Confronted with this dissonance, I went into a kind of prolonged moult. I had no choice but to shed several layers in order to recover my centre of gravity, my sense of self.
A year or so after my father’s death, I started writing about it. At the time, the impulse was more investigative than sentimental. In an attempt to create an exacting record of my grief, I took notes to log the day-to-day emotional churn.
“Grief is like the ocean.”
“I feel weightless, unmoored.”
“His voice is the hardest to recall from memory.”
I made discoveries that are par for the course among the bereaved, but feel like illicit knowledge nonetheless. That there is no timetable, no silver lining. That grief is very good at arriving unannounced.
I wrote in my father’s eulogy: “It is the ordinariness of the everyday that will remind me of you, that will sit like a fist in my heart.” Sure enough. The more mundane a task, the more likely that it would reduce me to tears. Filling out a form at the bank. Watching TV. Folding socks. Filing taxes. Making a to-do list. Eating a jalebi. The minefields of sorrow were endless—everything a reminder of an unlived life in all its glorious banality.
I made discoveries that are par for the course among the bereaved, but feel like illicit knowledge nonetheless. That there is no timetable, no silver lining. That grief is very good at arriving unannounced.
It was while making my way through this fog that I took to cooking more regularly. I was fortunate to escape the usual gendered diktats that push women into the kitchen. There was no canon for me to follow. Without an inherited legacy of heirloom recipes or cooking secrets passed down generations, my kitchen was a place that was free of any baggage. I taught myself to cook incrementally, following a rhythm dictated by the necessity of living by myself. I learned how to make poha long before I attempted family staples like avial, cherupayar thoran, or erisseri. The essential was prioritised over the maudlin.
But as I became proficient, I noticed something. The spectacle of cooking didn’t interest me. I would look up recipes for complicated meat curries and biryanis only to toss them aside for the solace of something recognisable.
I became obsessed with making jeera aloo taste exactly the way it did in my classmate’s lunchbox back in school, and chased the flavour combination of my grandmother’s maanga chammanthi paired with idlis. Meticulously, I honed my craft just so I could achieve these little eureka moments in the kitchen. Impressing people with my cooking was not the agenda. I was in pursuit of vignettes from my past in an attempt to clarify the present. With my cooking, as with my grief, I tried to answer the question I asked myself repeatedly—who are you?
Even as I became acquainted with grief’s tempestuous ways, in the kitchen, some things remained out of reach. I tried over and over to perfect sambhar, but no matter what I did, that incredible piquant earthiness so unique to the dish remained elusive. These failures threatened to destroy the culinary idyll I had created for myself in trying to keep the drudgery of cooking at bay, until I came across a stray tip on the internet.
“Fry the sambhar powder and hing separately in a little oil before adding it to the boiled dal.”
As I sauteed the darkening brown paste, the smells in the kitchen changed. I thought of my father munching on a dosha while telling me how he likes his sambhar. “It should be a little tangy, but not too much.” Perfect piquant earthiness.
Like in life, feelings became the lodestar in the kitchen—not cup measures and weighing scales. I relied on mouthfeel, smell, and some inner compass calibrated on a distant summer day in the mid-1990s. Armed with instinct buttressed by sense memory, I tried to recall the burnt umber of toasted coconut for a theeyal, or the precise texture of cabbage shredded for a thoran. Reverse engineering recipes became a thrill as I fumbled my way through the kitchen and my senses to arrive at something nostalgia-adjacent.
I thought of my father munching on a dosha while telling me how he likes his sambhar. “It should be a little tangy, but not too much.” Perfect piquant earthiness.
At a time when I was unable to find any sort of emotional certitude in my life, cooking became my anchor. In being able to feed myself—and sometimes others—I recovered a modicum of control. My feelings were wildly unpredictable, but with each passing day the outcomes of my experiments in the kitchen became increasingly predictable. The tactility of working with food was a grounding force. As I repeated the motions of chopping, stirring, peeling, tempering, I unspooled an invisible thread connecting me to myself.
I suspect that for my father, food was more fuel than fantasy. He would eat his meals in a hurry, often standing up and in the small distance between the kitchen and dining area. He ate cold chapatis with room-temperature dal and an Onam sadhya with equal gusto—never belying actual enjoyment. When we ate out, he left it to us to order and ate whatever was on the table, as if he had no preferences, no opinion on flavour, no relationship with food whatsoever. Every once in a while, though, I’d see glimpses of what brought him joy: roasted peanuts in winter, shakarkandi chaat from the little carts at the market, ice cream and fruit. Nothing made him giddier with joy than fruit.
The bounty of fruit in summer animated a different side of my father—one that was almost greedy and in stark contrast to his seeming bashfulness towards most earthly pleasures. On his way back from work, he lugged corpulent watermelons on his scooter. Then he’d sit cross-legged on the floor, cutting the melon into chunks to store in the fridge. When finished, he tipped the plate into his mouth, drinking the blush juice pooled at the edges.
He bought dozens of mangoes—Langra, Chausa, Dasheri, Kesar, whatever he could find—and ate them whole. Peeling a mango with his teeth, he would squeeze the fruit between his palm and suck the pulp from his fist. He left nothing—with all the golden flesh gone, the pale hairy seed looked like a bald infant’s head. He ate even the peel, picking it off our plates. “Don’t waste,” he’d say, the devoted supplicant unable to comprehend our lack of commitment to this summer activity. To see my reticent father lose himself so wholly in something as simple as fruit always stirred something in me. Loss has since illuminated that stirring as love.
Every once in a while, though, I’d see glimpses of what brought him joy: roasted peanuts in winter, shakarkandi chaat from the little carts at the market, ice cream and fruit. Nothing made him giddier with joy than fruit.
In the immediate months after his death, I experienced another peculiar feeling. Sometimes, while standing in my kitchen or sitting at my desk, I felt fairly certain my father was behind me, looking over my shoulder. Each time I’d turn around to look as if half expecting him to be there. It made no sense. I read about others experiencing similar feelings or events; one woman was certain she was being visited daily by her deceased mother in the form of a bird. Others mentioned encounters with the dead that felt impossibly real like messages from the deep. Eventually, I understood that this is grief’s incredible alchemy; in loss, it is the living world that begins to seem absurd.
Grief and food share a similar DNA. Food is a redolent tether to our many selves. Grief is love that remains after loss. Both are emotionally charged, both are associated with uncomfortable feelings, like shame. Our lexicon assigns virtue to food where there is none—guilty pleasures, cheat meals, comfort food. We try to break down grief into neat stages the way we try to compartmentalise food. And hunger evokes a void not unlike sadness. It’s no surprise, then, that advice on the internet on “how to comfort the bereaved” almost always includes a gesture around food. People find it easier to say “eat something” than “I’m so sorry”. Communal forms of care, like bringing over food, act as a stand-in for this missing vocabulary.
Cooking every day during the Covid-19 pandemic, I had another realisation. Grieving is lonely but sharing a meal is always a safeguard against loneliness. In making a well-loved biryani or the cure-all rasam, I can conjure up a friendly presence at will: my grandmother cracking pappadum at the lunch table, my friend sharing her noodle bowl with me, my mum mailing me a small batch of molagapodi, my laconic partner raising his eyebrows in appreciation over a mouthful of pepper chicken, my father asking for a bite of my crisp, golden apple.
Even now, as if conducting a séance for one, I persevere at the stove and try to find flavour pairings that tease forgotten memories. I imagine eating the food I have made, with my father—him chewing loudly, me chastising him for it. In the snapshot of this scene in my mind, it’s not the food that is central but the act of eating it. Like comfort food that is achingly simple in form yet complex in its emotional function, the stuff of routine acquires profound meaning in grief. Arguing with my father about his bad table manners is no longer mundane but a specter of love. And my appetite for love is what keeps my grief close—a mere ladle’s breadth away.
Mandakini Menon is a filmmaker and writer based in Bombay. Her writing explores themes of grief, identity, and memory among other things. She is an alumnus of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.
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