The Space Between My Fingers

Trying to follow a family recipe taught me how to deal with loss and separation

I learned about separation from a chef on YouTube. I was kneading dough to make pooris for my boyfriend one morning in our apartment in Washington D.C. The dough must be tough, he said, cracking at the skin, hardy but pliable. If the dough felt wet, the pooris wouldn’t rise. Good poori dough is meant to stick together no matter how much I try to pull it apart. It is meant to be molded and shaped into submission; cut into small circles of flattened bread that puffed and browned the minute it was immersed in a pot of boiling hot oil. For a whole hour, I sat kneading the dough, flicking wheat flour off my fingers, frustrated that it wouldn’t comply. This is what you were like when you were a teenager, my mother would have said, a year’s work in a day’s time.

But she wasn’t around to pick a fight with.

After my family emigrated to Winnipeg from Chennai in 2012, I had to move back to Bangalore and find a new job because the government had denied my visa. You are not a dependent anymore, their letter said, you do not qualify to emigrate. So I saw my family off at the airport and promised that I’d come visit soon. (It was unlikely.) My Indian mobile phone barely had enough credit on it, and I relied on data and the office Wi-Fi to connect on Skype and Whatsapp. Winnipeg was thirty hours away by flight and between us lay a jumble of oceans, jungles and mountains. Texting was a chore. Calls were expensive. When the sun rose outside my window, my mother would be welcoming nightfall. For three years, I tried to find a way to visit but each time, the government was steadfast: No, you do not qualify. In 2015, by luck, I found a job that would bring me closer to my family in Washington D.C. but we were still divided by a long Northern border.

I figured that I’d look up a recipe online.

I kneaded, and kneaded, and cursed, and kneaded. When the dough finally fell through my fingers dry as clay, clunky and ashen, I looked at the mess I’d made, filled with dread. Good dough required consistency — part water, part oil, part flour, part salt — and the mixture wasn’t right. Without it, the dough couldn’t offer life; it sat hard and broken at the bottom of the bowl, a misshapen glob that had no personality.

For a minute, I resented how it defied me. I despised that it refused to stay together when I needed it to.

My mother and I are like oil and water. We always were. For most of my childhood, I watched her take care of veetu-vellai, the Tamil word for household work. She’d walk in and out of that stuffy kitchen in our home in Sivakasi, appearing, and disappearing with stuff she whipped up in a moment’s time. I couldn’t stand this unbearable drudgery of domestic life — I was sent away to a boarding school when I was eight and grew up with the Spice Girls and Britney Spears and liked eating out. She tried to discipline me, often talking about traditions and rituals I didn’t care for, scolding me for defying her, reminding me that we lived in a small town in Southern India where everyone knew each other. Our arguments were furious and vicious, and we wounded each other repeatedly, throwing words that sliced through our bodies and left us bleeding inside.

It wasn’t until I graduated high school in the early 2000s that we actually shared a space. We found out that cancer was eating away at her body and that this new life would involve waiting in hospital corridors, quick meals, and a collective, soul-crushing anxiety. I began to spend long, frustrating hours trying to figure out the kitchen in our rental apartment while she recovered in the hospital. That summer, just before I started college, after she started rounds of chemotherapy, she became determined to teach us — my three sisters and I — the basics.

“You need to learn to survive on your own,” she said matter-of-factly, perhaps a bit aghast that I didn’t know a thing about cooking. “You need to know at least how to make your favorite meal.” Perhaps she meant to tell me that the kitchen might first seem lonely but even in it, there was room for comfort, for creation, companionship. But the ladle felt strange and foreign in my seventeen-year old hands. I watched as she casually threw in mustard seeds, cumin, and peeled onions into a pan, stirring it in circles.

“How many teaspoons of masala should I add?” I’d ask irritably when I tried on my own. To which she’d always shrug and say she didn’t know. That she was married when she was eighteen and had to figure it out. She just threw in what she felt was right. In time, the flavors would blend, the aroma would find its way outside the kitchen. In time, everything that felt separate and strange, would come together.

I found this an infuriating exercise in patience.

Still, when I got my first job and moved to Bangalore, I spent all my evenings cooking. I kneaded dough, chopped onions, and fried chicken. Sometimes I burned pans, sometimes the rice turned to mulch. But I tried over and over again. I bought spices from the supermarket and began to learn how to recognize their aromas. I began to understand that food too had a vocabulary. It could speak the language of comfort, of home, of satiation.

“I’ll give it a try,” my boyfriend, Dan, said to me one day. He took a bowl and bag of wheat flour and began to work the dough. I watched him — 5’10, blond, a former gymnast — focusing on pooris in the living room.

When we met in Bangalore the year after my family emigrated, I was curious. I’d badgered him with questions about Canada. He grew up in Ladner, a suburb of Vancouver, surrounded by farmland. He pulled up Google maps to show me where it was. My parents, he pointed out, lived in the Prairies, where the winds swept across flat land. Here, he explained, the winters were so cold that it could crack the windows in cars parked along the road. At night I imagined my parents in their new home; my mother stirring warm curries and my dad shoveling snow. In Sivakasi, where I’d spent all my childhood, summer lasted all year. We spent all day indoors, sometimes going ten hours without electricity, or paying around 14 cents to use the only pool in town. I couldn’t get my head around it.

Strangely, I was homesick for a home I didn’t really know. I felt an intense resentment thinking about that letter from the government.

The rage always led me back to the kitchen — if I didn’t cook, I’d make tea. I’d savor its bittersweet aftertaste. Then, I rummage through our pantry. Separation had begun to toy with my memory. I was forgetting the flavors of childhood — the rush I felt when I bit into spicy chicken and puffy pooris. The tangy taste of lime pickle on my tongue. The earthy warmth of filter coffee and masala dosas.

“I think I got this right,” Dan said, massaging the dough and flicking off pieces with his fingers. But the consistency was wrong. Cheerfully, he rolled them out and decided to make chapatis instead.

I watched the way his fingers moved, amused at the way he frowned and focused on the rolling pin as he pushed it back and forth. He sliced chicken, tomatoes, and onions humming as he made korma.

I thought of my mother. No one taught me to cook, she’d always remind me, I was married when I was your age.

When Dan set the table, I pushed these thoughts away. I didn’t care if cooking came to me or not. I just wanted to eat. I was so mad, and so bitter, that the government had stolen my time with my family.

“I’m craving pooris and potatoes”

“I’ll make them when you come home.”

On the phone, my mother still talked the way she did when I came home from school. In her mind, time didn’t exist. We’d been separated for three years but we’d lived apart for over a decade since that summer she was diagnosed. I didn’t know what home was anymore, I’d moved too often and too much. She sent me photographs of food she made in our new home in Winnipeg; fried fish, soda bread, and aebleskivers. But nothing felt familiar. I felt rootless now, a broken branch adrift at sea. When we chatted on video, I noticed that she’d hung photos on the wall and brought a sturdy chaise and fixed a cat perch on the window. Her hair had greyed. The kitchen now overlooked a spacious deck and the yard was dotted with apple trees. She collected Pyrex jars and cast-iron pans.

Unknown to her, I’d changed too. For a whole year after I moved to Washington D.C, I fried potatoes on a $9 aluminum skillet set I bought from Walmart. Unable to afford a good pot, I sometimes made fresh tea in the frying pan, straining the leaves over the sink and pouring the insipid liquid into a coffee mug. I had no appetite.

“Are you eating well?” My mother would ask when she called. “Eat a lot of vegetables.” She’d talk about the fresh spices she was grinding at home, offering to send some over for my kitchen. I’d say everything was okay. But really, there was never any food in my fridge. The studio I’d rented that year was small. I bought a bag of rice and lentils that lasted over the week. I took lunch in a plastic box to work, always worried that the scent of Indian food would overwhelm my American colleagues. I ate at my desk, swallowing as fast as I could. At times, I’d sit out in the office lounge with a girl I became friends with. She was Peruvian. Our foods were similar — so on those days we sat together, we talked about love, childhood, and craving a taste of home.

Later, I’d simply go to Safeway and stand there staring at the produce. I didn’t know what to do when I stood in front of aisles filled with asparagus, broccoli, chard, and lettuce. I didn’t long to take them home with me. They didn’t offer comfort.

I was hungry for ghee rice, pooris, and dosas with coconut chutney. I knew if I wanted a piece of home, I had to create it on my own.

“Okay, let’s do it right this time.” Dan opened his iPad and turned on a YouTube channel.

Our apartment in Washington D.C was a corner unit; brightly lit and spacious. It was a cold February evening. We brought out a bowl, a bag of wheat flour and a saltshaker. I flipped some old newspapers over the granite countertop and poured a can of oil into the pot.

As he began to knead, I watched the dough bulge and rise between his fingers. He sprinkled salt and semolina flour and massaged the bits that fell away. Many years ago, at my grandmother’s home in Quilon, I remembered our cook, Seethai, working the dough this way. Kneading, crushing, punching, pressing, pinching. She shooed us children away from the kitchen but still, I climbed up the spice cupboard on the side and watched her as she expertly tossed flattened dough into a pot of boiling oil. The pooris instantly puffed and floated to the top, browning in seconds. Nonchalantly, Seethai tossed them into a serving tray to strain the oil that dripped from its corners.

“Got your plate?” she’d ask, frustrated at my prying.

I’d nod and pile my plate with fresh pooris and skip to the dining hall to help myself to sambhar and potato masala. My mother would later make pooris this way at home in Sivakasi, when we came home from school for the holidays. I’d poke the puffy skin and scoop up mouthfuls of fried flaky goodness.

When he’d pinched and rolled out the last piece of dough, I offered to slip the flattened discs into the side of the pot, the way I’d seen all the women do back home. I waited. Almost immediately, it rose to the top, puffing and browning. I watched it rise and float — my chest tightening — as it came to life, small bubbles appearing on its dimpled skin. Immediately, I flipped it over and strained it over kitchen towels. We took turns, laughing, cheering, egging each other on as we slipped the pooris into the oil, one after another. Excited, I took out minced beef and stewed it into a hearty gravy filled with peas and carrots.

“Ommmmguhh,” Dan muttered, a mouthful of juicy meat in his mouth. “This is so tasty.”

“Yeah, I know.” I said, scooping a spoonful of gravy onto my plate. If only you knew, I found myself raving, if only you knew how much of this I ate when I was a child.

“I can imagine.”

But I knew he couldn’t. I, on the other hand, had already drifted into those familiar corridors that led to that old kitchen in our home in Sivakasi. I licked the spicy stew off my fingers, letting the taste of coriander and chilies linger on my tongue.

Outside, the wind whistled.

We found a lawyer who believed I could make a case to the government again to cross the border. I was so cynical that when my passport arrived with a Canadian visa stamp in 2016, I stared at it for a long time. I’d finally found a way home. I stopped at the restroom to adjust my jacket and rub the kohl off my tired eyes at the Winnipeg International Airport. I’m home. I’m home. I’m in Canada. My parents stood near the escalator in the arrivals area, my mother recording my descent on her phone.

“I made everything you like,” she gushed, “Lots of food waiting for you.”

My sisters and I sat around the table as we did many years ago before we left our home in Sivakasi. Since that winter in late 2003, when my mother was undergoing chemotherapy, we’d seldom sat around a dinner table together. There’s an odd intimacy that a table of food forces on people and we sat here — undone by separation — not knowing how to start all over again.

“It feels so long. Four years — ” I began.

“More than ten years,” my sister cut me short, “You didn’t really live at home after we moved to the city.”

Suddenly, that year came to me again. I was seventeen when we moved temporarily into an apartment in Royapettah, a short drive from Mount Road in Chennai. I applied to an arts and design graduate program. High school was behind me. In that single month of May, I was thrust into adulthood, love, and an insatiable appetite to be free. I remembered my father’s attempt at boiling potatoes and peas in cold, clumpy gravy. I remember that I wept because it tasted so bad. That was the summer my mother taught us how to use the pressure cooker and fry potatoes the way we liked it. That was the summer, I barely slept at night, wondering if she was going to live after all this.

I silently served myself curd rice and green peas, trying to ignore the heaviness in the air. It is hard to explain separation to people, it’s hard to explain how physical space wrenches open and widens an emotional space.

“I have so many things to give you,” my mother said, throwing open our kitchen cabinets. I looked at a neat row of blue and pink Pyrex bakeware. “I also have something else.” She showed me the iron pan that she used to make dosas in long ago. I watched as she walked me through her storage — skillets, beaten iron pans, an iron press to flatten dough to make pooris and chapatis. She’d saved pieces of our home in Sivakasi and brought them with her.

Months later, I’d arrange them in my kitchen cabinet in Washington D.C. I’d send her photographs of hot curries and pancakes. We’d laugh. We’d gossip. We’d discuss how we missed the tastes and flavors that had made us. And the new flavors that made our new homes.

But at that moment, I simply shrugged and said I’d take them. This was what was left of our old lives, I didn’t care if it was of any use to me. I wanted a piece of home.

I know now that good poori dough needs more than science. More than oil. More than the chemistry of skilled hands meeting wheat flour, salt and semolina. More than water. It needs a desire to bring odds and ends together, a language that undoes chaos and binds the elements.

Otherwise, the dough will not rise.

It won’t come to life.