“Remember,” he said, “in Boston, you drink that coffee. Here, you drink this .”
After breakfast—a feast of soft idlis , crispy medu vada , three kinds of chutney, and that legendary sambar—the real work began. Amma washed her hands and pulled out a small, heavy stone mortar.
“Amma, tell me the recipe for sambar .”
As she worked, Amma began to talk. She talked about her own wedding, forty years ago, when her mother had packed a jar of podi in her saree trunk. She talked about the time Meera, at age five, ate so much podi on her dosa that she started hiccupping and crying, but refused to stop. She talked about the 2004 tsunami panic, when the power went out for three days, and the family survived on leftover rice mixed with podi and ghee.
And suddenly, she was not in a sterile Boston apartment. She was in the Chennai kitchen. She could hear the grinding stone. She could smell the jasmine from the morning puja . She could see Amma’s hands, stained with turmeric, reaching out to wipe her mouth.