Prachi Sharma shares how her mother’s cooking influenced her to save the recipes.
My mother taught me to read before I could write my own name. Years later, when I was seventeen, she became a teacher herself — in a small corner of Arunachal Pradesh, in northeast India, where my father also taught. Before a kidney transplant, my mother spent years on dialysis.
At one point, she began writing down our family’s old recipes — dishes from Agra, where she grew up. Then COVID happened. She was visiting us in the US, and her transplant and immunosuppressants made her too high-risk to fly home.
She was locked down with us, unable to leave. So, she cooked. My son, just one years old at the time, stood in the kitchen and watched her grandmother make dish after dish from memory. That’s how the recipes finally became a book. She passed away in 2022. I live in California now, far from Agra, far from Arunachal. But something she planted kept growing. I wrote a book in her memory.
So did my sister, son and nephew. Three generations. Seven books. None of us planned this. It just kept happening, the way a habit becomes a family trait without anyone naming it one.
I think about my mother often here in the Bay Area, trying to recreate her chilka dish without her in the kitchen to correct me. I don’t always get it right. But I keep trying — the recipe, and the rest of it too: that you write things down so they don’t disappear, that a story, once told, belongs to whoever needs it next. That’s what she taught me. Not just how to read. How to make sure nothing is lost. With a Perspective, I’m Prachi Sharma.
Prachi Sharma is a writer and founder of a children’s publishing house. She lives in Dublin, California.
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