Memory for Sale
In January, after twenty-one hours in transit, I landed in my beloved maximum city: Mumbai. The airport was humid, smelled sweet-and-sour, and reminded me of many occasions dawdling here, daydreaming while the adults fussed about boarding passes. Now the Mumbai airport has a Popeyes in it, and I earn in dollars.
Nostalgia is “the feeling,” Michael Chabon wrote, “that overcomes you when some minor vanished beauty of the world is momentarily restored.” A short list of minor vanished beauties, restored to me during this trip: my grandmother’s cooking; the tangy overwhelm of gulping down a pani puri; an uncle’s too-rare grin; Cadbury chocolate with Magic Masala chips. For two weeks in India this winter, I tried to eat my way through the years.
After arriving, I had just enough time for a kathi roll before we filled up a train car to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, for a childhood friend’s wedding. We used to live one floor apart as babies; our grandparents were best friends. It’s been over ten years since we last saw each other.
A wedding is the perfect nostalgia-prism. We reminisced over extravagant wedding food, Punjabi dance music, and the comedy of bringing forty or so Bengalis to Gujarat. Our Gujarati hosts showed us the best of Ahmedabad’s booming food scene. There were several rounds of chaat, like aloo puri—smashed fried potatoes, topped with green chilies, sev, and yogurt. Paneer in rich creamy curries, or grilled over a flame. Laccha parathas, flaky, coriander-green, and doused in ghee. Alcohol-free jamun (black plum) shots, because we were in a dry state. The uncles surreptitiously poured gin into their jamun shots, briefly teenagers again.
For a short, glorious three days, remember became my favorite word. Between festivities, all the neighborhood kids whom my grandmother helped raise crowded into our hotel room. I felt all floaty with joy, listening to stories about my parents. Everyone called my grandmother rosho-dida—an ode to the roshogollas, clouds of cottage cheese simmered in sugar syrup, that she used to feed everyone.
Afterwards, we hired a driver to visit my mother’s ancestral home, a smaller city in Gujarat called Bhavnagar. Without the wedding to distract me, I grew self-conscious about our newfound Americanness. We traveled in air-conditioned cars. We spent without thinking, on the strength of the dollar. Three dollars for a 30-minute taxi, 50 cents for tea, and 8 bucks for a two-person meal I’d “blinkit” (an app that is now a verb in Indian parlance). The thrill of a good deal captivated me before guilt set in.
In Bhavnagar, Ma tried and failed to navigate to her uncle’s home by memory. When we finally found them, after several rounds of the town, missed WhatsApp calls, and an essential assist from a younger cousin, my great-uncle rewarded us with betel leaves plucked from his garden.
Another aunt served us masala chai and millet theplas, fenugreek-y flatbreads popular in Gujarat. She insisted we eat the theplas with a jaggery that took me back to sweaty afternoons in my late grandmother’s flat, reading an Archie Comic while we snacked. Beside me, Ma sighed, briefly content.
My mother is proud of how well her Bhavnagar cousins are doing, and I could see her picturing a childhood here. Her own life was shaped by migration in search of work, like that of her parents. On my father’s side, the 1947 partition of India by the British, which displaced 15 million people, took my family across the border from what is now Bangladesh to India. We have packed up and rebuilt our lives many times over, moving through doors that vanish forever behind us.
Back in Mumbai, I kept trying to imagine my parents’ lives here, all those years ago. Here, they used to earn and spend in rupees. As teenagers, they squeezed into buses and lived, at times, with five to nine other family members in 500-square-foot apartments. They escaped their families and went out on dates to the old Irani cafés in South Mumbai. After work, they killed time with Mumbai’s iconic street food, its chaat: pani puris, vada pav, sev puri…
On my last day, I insisted on eating a vada pav. It’s deep-fried potato in a buttered bun, usually served with red chili powder and a fresh green chili. My uncle loved them, would come home drenched during the monsoon just for the pleasure of a hot vada pav. It cost me 20 rupees ($0.2). The sting of the chili, the scorching vada, gave me a paltry glimpse into a world I’ll always regret losing.
Tanisha Dasmunshi is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her on Substack here.
