LFC Mumbai | October 2025
The first time I attended an LFC meetup in Mumbai, I brought egg curry on toast with some pickled cucumber. Simple enough, but it had an important backstory—of how my long-term partner Sachchit finally won over my mother. We had a proper “two states” love story. He’s Maharashtrian, I’m Bengali. He’s a vegetarian, and I’m a committed meat eater. For the longest time, I had a rule: I could never marry or be with a vegetarian! Food was too big a part of my identity. But I quickly found out that we both loved eggs in every form. That became our bridge. My next hurdle was to convince my family.
It was very dramatic and Bollywood-esque. My mother would have long fights with me, concerned over our differences, adamant that this wasn’t a good match. She’d say, “What will I feed him? We are so different.” That was her sticking point.
Caught in this scramble, I didn’t know what to do. One day, my extremely self-assured partner decided enough was enough. He booked a flight to Ahmedabad to meet my parents—a one-way ticket to what I thought would be my worst nightmare.
By then, my father had started to soften, and emboldened by that faint blessing, Sachchit landed at their doorstep. Back in Mumbai, I waited anxiously, bracing for the call that he’d been thrown out.
Instead, my mother—stunned but gracious—let him in. What happened next surprised us all. They sat for hours, talking. He listened while she voiced every concern, and he made her feel truly heard. When lunchtime rolled around, he stepped into the kitchen, offered to help, and gently suggested egg curry—the one dish we all shared. That simple gesture broke the ice.
Four hours later, she told him to cancel his hotel reservation and come stay with them. This was sometime in late 2022. Today, he’s her favourite. I think, sometimes, she likes him more than me.
When lunchtime rolled around, he stepped into the kitchen, offered to help, and gently suggested egg curry—the one dish we all shared. That simple gesture broke the ice.
The egg curry I carried to the meetup wasn’t a family heirloom recipe or a carefully handed-down tradition. My mother is a wonderful cook, but nothing was ever ceremoniously passed on to me. So in my twenties, I began building my own traditions. Egg curry—and the story stitched to it—became one of them.
For the meetup, I dressed it up my way: cooked the curry drier, with classic Bengali flavours, spooned it onto toast, and added some pickled cucumber for crunch. A small homage to the dish that once thawed years of tension and quietly turned my “never” into “forever.”
The following month, when I brought Sachchit along to the next LFC Mumbai meetup, our small community remembered the story. Someone pointed at him with a laugh and said, “Oh, you’re the egg curry guy!”