To my kitchen, from yours

 To my kitchen, from yours

Food's aroma and flavour transport us  back to our childhood kitchen. 

The kitchen of  our Ammi. 

Every morning, we were greeted by the aroma of freshly prepared Bhuna gosht and zerra roti for abbu's workplace lunch. Also, certain sealan dishes were made using a variety of vegetables that I would grumble and refuse to eat most of the time, forcing me to eat something else. However, I can't help but think of Zeera roti, which is one of my favourite things to eat with mango pulp, bathua roti, and gajar ka halwa, how delicious it was when made by you.

That Pulao with the best aroma and Shami kabab, I'll never be able to replicate them in my kitchen, but one thing is certain: every time I prepare the meal, my memories transport me to your kitchen and intertwined with the virtual reality of my past, Ammi, where we all had chores assigned to us while you were busy preparing food. 

I'm thinking of how squeezed our schedule used to be, coming home from school and cooking meals for all of us, and then tutoring , when you had to tutor several kids during the day. While making a meal for us all.

The road map is extensive, and our voyage was brief, but the memories we made will last a lifetime.

Sometimes it is our heritage, our family routine, and our way of life that define us, helping us mould who we become and who we are. 

I am often thinking that we pretend to be someone who we don't want to be , but we fall for it, because it seems so glamorous or sometimes forceful  but we forget who we are. And we become increasingly perplexed in the process. 

I'm thankful for those morning rituals, routines, our way of life, and your happiness because they've helped me grow as a person and reminded me of my true self.  The recipe you provided us for our personal prescription for how to adopt and absorb positive choices like kindness, generosity, and gratitude. Everything came from your kitchen, and loving nature , a really simple and authentic way of life, that has provided us the best recipe of contentement .

The aroma and atmosphere have a history there, but with us growing so quickly and you passing so suddenly, everything has been altered, and I've begun to believe that everything is maya (melting water) that has evaporated our time into the air. 

We are all very much grounded to the soil and intertwined with all the strings of love and relationships, owing to your upbringing. 

Our hearts, on the other hand, have never stopped aching since then, carrying the storm, sadness, and agony of insecurity that we had gone through.

You know, you took the entire science of the kitchen's magnetic relationship with you. We don't recall ever smelling anything from the kitchen again, and the entire routine seemed to vanish into thin air, as if the pressure cooker had lost its steam and everything inside had settled to the surface.

Our hearts, however, have never stopped aching since then, carrying the storm, grief, and torment of uncertainty we had experienced.

I was not able to keep the same flavour into my dishes but I tried my best to pour the essence of love and kindness  into two souls. Your tender heart, the glimpse of that  can be seen in Asad, reaches out to those who are struggling, even when it requires great personal sacrifice, is nothing short of inspiring. Ali’s understanding and driven personality inherited in him and shows great achievements of his goals.

Those simple reminders were what kept me going during the long days, months, and years that followed. 

While those early memories of our grief over your death are still vivid in my mind, they have recently been eclipsed by calm observations of boys' growth into remarkable men.