As a closing remark in a session where I was invited to inspire younger women colleagues, I was asked what my immediate dopamine fix was. I intuitively said – a good mutton biryani. The room laughed. I laughed. And on the way back, I was telling myself, “Aishwarya – you’ve got to sound more intelligent than this in rooms like these.”

My dopamine kicks are many and from such varied sources that I at times find my own optimism a bit delusional. While I revisited them to see what would be a more intelligent answer, the honest one with no contender was in fact mutton. The conditioning I grew up with around mutton is neurologically coded.

The conditioning is a Sunday ritual of lunch.

While the default mutton was relished, I sat for lunch not with my parents – but with two children who belonged to a different time and rhythm. Two children who got to taste the mutton – but never got their hearts full of it.

The Longing

My mom was the last of three. My dad the last of five.

They were both loved. Adored, even. Good food was the heart of both families – three courses for every meal, and each family had its recipes, which are inheritances. But when it came to mutton, oh, the succulent mutton – they were humoured… and their longing grew into a desire.

My mother says she always wanted to ask for a second serving, but that would cost her mom her own portion. My dad had a different remorse – with a much larger family, it would be minced meat mixed with vegetables, the flavour being such a tease without an actual bite.

They longed to know what it would feel like to eat just for the sake of indulgence. That came in brief and rare moments. As a young girl, my mom would be sneaked away by her father to a military hotel for mutton biryani – sworn to silence at home, or else… My dad tagged along with his maternal uncle, a high court lawyer, and ate a few heart-full meals in that shadow.

Insatiable

Come adulthood, they got matched. My dad’s side, with both his sisters working, was seeking a working girl for him. My mom, after finishing her B.Sc, was toying with doing a B.Ed to get into teaching when my dad’s alliance came along. Her parents warned that she didn’t even know how to peel an onion, let alone cook. That did not seem to be a concern, and they were married.

They stayed with my dad’s brother for a few years, where my mom learnt all her cooking from her sister-in-law. Equipped to keep themselves fed, and with a little mischievous toddler – my sister – they rented a small house, where the freedom was much larger than the sq.ft.

My mom would make mutton pulao in a copper dabara (handi/ a large pot) that came in her dowry. My dad the sous chef. Come lunchtime, they’d feed my sister some other food and pack her off to the owner’s house. Then – and they describe this scene so cinematically – they would bring the dum-sealed dabara to the hall-cum-kitchen, place it in the centre of the floor, and sit down. My mom offering one last prayer that it had turned out well. My dad encouraging her to remove the lid with dhairyam (courage). And when they describe the first whiff that escapes, their eyes light up and I also get to smell the whiff.

They found it unreal that a full dabara of mutton pulao was only for the two of them and no one else. They would serve each other multiple servings and, like drunkards they say, continue to eat long after their stomachs were full. Then nap the most beautiful nap – until my sister screeched into their ears.

Hands that feed

The more emotional stories from this time are of my maternal grandfather’s visits – how emotional he became eating her mutton pulao, beaming with pride that a girl he hadn’t allowed to enter the kitchen had mastered the craft.

But there’s also the way my mom describes how my dad always made sure her father ate without the guilt of eating in his ‘daughter’s’ house. Without ascribing any further emotion to it, she testifies to something about her husband.

I have grown up watching my parents feed and host people.

Festivals were intimate and small, but the grandness was in the three or four lunches they hosted each year. A small home they built together, like a matchbox with three floors, on a fragmented piece of land my dad inherited. But it was the most expansive living room I have ever lived in.

Their generosity came from a conscious choice and not an excess. It wasn’t a flex – it was how they showed love to their tribe. There were many days when, to stretch the monthly provisions, my mom would eat ganji (fermented rice in water and curd), and we would get rasam rice with a piece of karwad (dried fish). The local ration shop ran a credit line, but my mom never wanted to use it – she did not want to start the next month with a higher expense.

And yet, on such days, when my parents would delay spending even a rupee more, someone passing through Bangalore would self-invite themselves to dinner, just to eat ‘Leela aunty’s mutton chops’ – a recipe she taught herself. Where is the money?!? With no second thoughts, my dad would borrow – mostly from one of his two sisters, riding his TVS first to their home and then to the butcher’s, with absolutely no guilt of indulgence. And after the guests left, he would grin his mischievous grin – “What a blessing this person was, because of whom we got to eat mutton when we were prepared to eat rasam!”

Prasadam – the divine offering

My own favourite memory is from when I was about 19.

My mom had tuberculosis. My dad went into full-time caregiving mode, my sister taking over the other errands. And what my parents have mastered is making sincere deals with gods – all gods.

After she recovered, we went to Tirupati and my parents tonsured their hair.

We went to St. Mary’s Church in Shivajinagar and lit candles.

And at the dargah, my dad had offered to feed four poor people – so they invited a fakir from the dargah, a ripe old Muslim coconut seller who was a regular on our street, the elderly Tamil woman who delivered milk packets to our home and had walked my sister back from school when my parents couldn’t afford a van for her, and ‘Ajji,’ an old Gowda woman who was our house help, living with her grandson.

The mutton pulao my mom made that day was the tastiest mutton anything I have ever eaten.

My father and I led the serving, and all four ate to their hearts’ content, unable to stop praising its deliciousness after every bite. We thought they were humouring us. But my, my – when we ate, my mom herself was shocked. She said she had used only ghee, no oil. She has tried since then to replicate the proportions of that night – but never could. It was divinity itself.

Distaste

My parents are nowhere close to being called an ideal couple. They each have their quirks. And they went through a crazy rough patch, whose scars hurt all of us still. But no matter how bad and ugly the arguments were, I can’t rationalise – today even more than when I was a child witnessing them in locked horns – how sincere in their duties to each other they were, and continue to be.

I don’t have an emotionally vulnerable relationship with my dad to ask him – but I always asked my mom: why do you still ensure you do all those little things that you know matter to dad? With a poker face she always said, I am only doing my ‘dharmam.’

I was never convinced that was all that kept them together – now for 48 years!

Come Sunday during those days of disharmony, my dad would still go to Russell Market and get the mutton, leaving it in the kitchen. My sister would well be on her way to cooking the mutton along with the rasam, which was otherwise her only task – and some days my mom would soften seeing my sister step up, and for her sake, cook the mutton and the rest of the meal. But there have been many meals that my sister anchored and fed the three of us, not eating herself – to somewhere register her dissent.

Those Sundays, silence would replace the joyful reminiscence of the two children of the years gone by.

The delicious mutton being the only constant, and all of us disappearing into different rooms across the three floors after the meal. And somewhere around 5 in the evening, my dad enters the kitchen, quietly washing the vessels – perhaps feeling the guilt too, of seeing his older daughter bearing the weight of a conflict she had nothing to do with – while brewing tea for all, and asking me to go give my mom her glass.

The words they hurled at each other could not be taken back and cannot be unheard by my sister and me even now. My memory remains vague, harboured in the fact that I still got to eat mutton even on those Sundays. But in these acts of my parents behaving normal, there were apologies their egos were stubborn enough not to mention. And slowly as the two hungry children’s stories returned to the lunch table of the Sunday afternoon – the family healed.

Consideration

I always thought my parents’ shared values and the same moral centre of their world views were what kept them together. But sitting with this forensic analysis of why I love mutton so much, replaying these stories and double-clicking on every double-click, I realised that what my parents have is perhaps something more precious and far rarer in any relationship.

Consideration.

That’s what they have for each other.

They each identified the child in the other who carried a hunger that was never filled, and they fed that child with such generosity. And they didn’t stop there. They fed anyone they could. Their abundance was in how they shared whatever they had – with each other, and with the world.

Now, when I think back, mutton has been an unlikely social marker of my parents’ progress – from permission to eat a second serving, to consideration for each other, to holding onto their relationship when it was at risk, to the generosity of hosting others to eat.

And two children somewhere forever live on in the neurology of my mind.