Inheritance, Burnt Side Up

In our home, love was measured in ladles. But I came with a pen. 

If you could spend a few slow afternoons in my family kitchen, you would see that it was a biome of its own—a humid, spice-laden ecosystem where generations of women evolved with an uncanny ability to season, stir, and sear with precision. They moved through it like migratory birds tracing ancestral routes, guided not by maps but by an inherited instinct for balance and flavour. The air pulsed with the heat of simmering oil and the urgency of bubbling lentils. Kitchens, at my in-laws’ place and home, thus, have been places where the fire was tamed but never really extinguished inequalities of labour – of cooking, and cleaning, and serving. The hearth was the only place at home where they forgave burns but not indifference.

Cooking is a language of love, yes. But what if the dialect never landed on my tongue? 

I was born with a different muscle memory that worked best when stringing together words, not spices. The lineage I came from demanded reverence in the form of perfectly kneaded dough and well-balanced gravies, but I was an outlier. Rolled out into shapeless meteorites, my rotis gasped for form and the way I boiled rice on the stove resembled a bomb-defusal mission, though the latter might, arguably, be easier. 

There were years when I was told that I was difficult, disobedient. I lacked the hunger, they said, to learn this skill that a “million girls would die for”. And I believed them. The guilt popped under my skin—like smoke that stains the walls long after the fire has passed. No glowing report cards or academic awards could compete with the absence of chopping cabbage finely. My accomplishments and higher education degrees shrank under the weight of a stove I was expected to claim as my inheritance. Instructions came over long-distance calls—recipes spoken like the Ten Commandments, with a sense of tradition being lost. I was told to learn how salt had to be added to bhindi just at the right time to prevent the spreading of its sliminess: a minute too soon wouldn’t make it crisp and the colour of the dish won’t appeal. I learned that mastering a curry could make me more lovable, more whole. Basically, no one said it out loud, but it was understood:

I might be ready to win the world, but I had to overpower the stovetop first. 

The kitchen in my childhood home in Chittaranjan Park, New Delhi, was a perpetual motion machine. Like her mother-in-law before her, Maa moved through it with the confidence of a satellite orbiting an invisible center, each movement precisely calculated. She knew how to feed a gathering of twenty without breaking a sweat, while I could barely dice an onion without looking like a tear-stained, grieving mess. The rule was simple: keep the cycle going. Teach your daughters the ways of the khunti, pass down the precise way to balance salt in dal, and let the matriarchal lineage move forward like an unbroken river.

Maa spoke of her mother-in-law’s cooking as if reciting a scripture. The bottle gourd, she would say, was an inconspicuous vegetable, as mundane as a pebble on the roadside. And yet, in her mother-in-law’s hands, it became something else entirely—poetry on plate. Just a spatter of sesame seeds in hot oil, a handful of boris, finely chopped bottle gourd, and at the very end, a swirl of warm milk folding into the dish like mist curling over a river at dawn. The dish could potentially slip between taste and memory. Maa retired as the Chief of Nursing Services in Medanta, Gurugram but her associates always took pride in the way she laid out her tiffin during lunch.

My refusal to conform to this culinary rhythm did not halt my mother’s movements. She still made her perfectly spiced biryanis and parathas stuffed evenly on all sides, in ways I would never understand. When it came to house parties or social gatherings, Maa would launch the spell that she was best known for. For it was a given, every time our kitchen carried the scent of hing long after she had left the kitchen, she had done her part. 

The kitchen simply moved around me.

Perhaps, she hoped I would be spared the apprenticeship, or maybe she believed—naively, lovingly—that my hunger for books would be enough. But after my wedding, something shifted. Calls began with “Ki baanali, aaj?” (What did you make today?), and not greetings. Proportions of khichdi or dal fry were offered as survival tactics. It was as if stepping into a new city meant proving my worth through the alchemy of cooking lentils. I was supposed to turn into the right kind of woman. 

But what if I were accelerating toward something else? I never could roll doughs round enough for a roti and my children now know that very well. But over the years, I found force in my words that carried my voice farther than the aroma of any home-cooked meal ever could. My kitchen, then, perhaps becomes the blank page. My children have no memory of me standing over a stove, nor do they expect a dish made by my hands. Their nostalgia, years from now, will not be linked to a signature meal or a Sunday ritual of slow-cooked Aloor Dom. 

Instead, they know that when hunger strikes, I hire well. I hire seasoned cooks even if I am merely an observer or a supplier of high-quality organic staples. They will not carry forward the taste of my curries or long for a dish that only I could perfect. I am not the bearer of secret family recipes. My legacy will not be printed or plated. This was the dilemma I lived with for years, but I chose to put this to rest. 

I am not someone who will ever build her identity around her cooking.

And yet, I do not judge the ones as they have judged me. The women of my family built empires within their kitchens. My grandmother was the most beautiful fair-skinned Bengali goddess who wore crisp taants. Her cooking was a revolt in her times. The politics of the spice was deep-seated in the divides of East Bengal and West Bengal. There was a purpose to the stir. Maa cooked incredible meals with a full-time job. This was her way to deconstruct the kitchen space that is often romanticised as a feminine domain. She cooked with purpose, too. I didn’t want to light the stove at all. 

Maybe, years from now, my children will stumble upon my words in a book, or find an old essay of mine and realize—this was my nourishment. This was how I fed myself.

And perhaps they will not resent me for it.

Despite the weight of tradition pressing down on our shoulders, we are meant to stir the world in different ways. They will understand that I wasn’t just stepping away from patriarchy—I was unfastening from the matriarchy too. Let them say I survived. Because there are many ways to mother. Many ways to be holy. 

And not all of them begin with a flame.

Aditi Dasgupta is a writer whose work has appeared in Borderless Journal, The Wise Owl, The Hoogly Review, WritingWomenCo, InkNest Poetry, and The Writer's Hour. Views expressed by the author are their own. This article is a part of our ongoing series Dissent Dispatch, in collaboration with Usawa Literary Review.