Rajma Gojj, Baramulla, 1988

Chanda Jigri, my mother’s bua (her paternal aunt), but Nana to every kid in the Sumbly khandan. The person who, if the world ran any kind of fair competition, would have held every trophy and then handed them back because she had no use for them. I can place her in the F-180, Janipura kitchen without any effort at all: up before dawn, showered, cotton saree draped, and then that quiet, authoritative takeover of the kitchen. Her cooking was serious yet tender, which is a combination most of us spend a lifetime trying and failing to replicate. Anything she cooked was outstanding. Her rajma, her nutree (soya chunks), her mushrooms: nothing has come close to her taste. I mean that not as nostalgic distortion but as simple fact. No one cooks them like hers. Period.

She rustled up meals in her tiny kitchen almost until the day she left this world, feeding an entire matamaal generation and beyond: that whole crowd nourished and loved by her hands, by whatever it is that some people put into food that has no name and no ingredient list. I never got to ask while she was still there to answer. The assumption that she would always be there to answer, that will always be one of my greatest regrets. Her recipes now live in the place where such things go: out of reach, present only in the wanting of it.

What I have instead is a different recipe, from a different kitchen, arriving by a different kind of accident entirely.

The thing is, in Kashmiri Pandit homes, informal cooking lessons from mothers to daughters were never really part of how girls were raised, and even less so after the exodus. The focus, sharply and deliberately, was on education. For boys and girls alike, but perhaps with a particular urgency for the girls: learning was the thing that would travel with you, something no displacement could confiscate. The kitchen could always wait. Your future could not. So, most girls of my generation grew up absorbing by proximity what they were never formally taught, carrying recipes in muscle memory rather than on paper.

My own first real lesson came not by design but by a beautiful chain of mishaps. Picture a young mother, two small children, a notoriously unreliable JKSRTC bus, and a remote official training event in Kashmir — all colliding at once. My mother was meant to be at this official event in a remote part of the valley. I was obviously not meant to be there. But I decided I needed to come along. On day two, the novelty of watching recently thawed adults attempt to sprint wore remarkably thin. And so, I was deposited with my slightly older cousins in Baramulla.

I did not know it then, but that trip ended up as my last time in that house, my last chance to touch the walls that had heard my newborn cries and childhood giggles in the same echo.

The first order of business, naturally, was to raid the kani. That attic space smelled of old paper, dried walnuts and winters that had come and gone without anyone bothering to clear it out. We dug through discarded trunks, uncovering forgotten sweaters and the kind of useless treasures only children know how to value. Once we finished rummaging through the piles, we were absolutely starving. Babbi Didi, as the only so-called adult in the room, promised us gojj rajma for lunch.

But life also comes with surprises.

Just as the promise of food had settled in my stomach, her friends made an appearance with plans of going to the cinema. She was not going to let a small thing like lunch slow her down. So, she strode into the kitchen, grabbed the pressure cooker, assembled rajma gojj with the efficiency of someone who had done it a thousand times, issued a casual instruction over her shoulder, and left someone else to deal with the rest.

The cooker did its work. We ate. It was, predictably, very good.

Now, if you ask most North Indian kids what sits at the very top of their comfort food hierarchy, rajma chawal will be the answer before you finish the question. For Kashmiri kids, perhaps only roganjosh and dum aloo have the potential to push it aside. But here is where we quietly part ways with the rest of North India, as Kashmiris tend to do, politely but firmly, on most things. Our rajma does not follow the same hymn sheet. No onions. No tomatoes. Instead, turnips, and a broth that is closer to a stew than anything you would recognise as a curry, deep and earthy and completely itself.

Don’t get me wrong, we like rajma in any form. The Punjabi style — onions, tomatoes, a generous garnish of fresh coriander — is claimed with equal love and equal loyalty. The best version I ever had was at a dhaba somewhere along the highway on the winter journey down to Jammu: cold air, a long mountain road, and a bowl so warm it felt like it had been cooked specifically for you.

I was just a child waiting for lunch that day in Baramulla. And yet, somewhere between watching and eating, a recipe made its way into my hands without ever passing through my head.

I didn’t get Nana’s recipe. What I have is Babbi Didi’s, the one I watched being assembled in that Baramulla kitchen on a day I was not supposed to be there, making a mess of a trip I was not supposed to come on, waiting for a meal I will always be grateful for. Which is, when I think about it, more or less exactly how the best things arrive: unexpected.

These recipes were never formally recorded because they were never meant to be. They lived in hands and kitchens and the sheer confidence of women who cooked without measuring anything. Writing them down feels faintly rebellious. I think Nana would have found it mildly unnecessary and entirely unsurprising. She’d have fed us anyway.

(see recipe below)