The Space Between My Fingers
Trying to follow a family recipe taught me how to deal with loss and separation
I learned about separation from a chef on YouTube. I was kneading dough to make pooris for my boyfriend one morning in our apartment in Washington D.C. The dough must be tough, he said, cracking at the skin, hardy but pliable. If the dough felt wet, the pooris wouldn’t rise. Good poori dough is meant to stick together no matter how much I try to pull it apart. It is meant to be molded and shaped into submission; cut into small circles of flattened bread that puffed and browned the minute it was immersed in a pot of boiling hot oil. For a whole hour, I sat kneading the dough, flicking wheat flour off my fingers, frustrated that it wouldn’t comply. This is what you were like when you were a teenager, my mother would have said, a year’s work in a day’s time.
But she wasn’t around to pick a fight with.
After my family emigrated to Winnipeg from Chennai in 2012, I had to move back to Bangalore and find a new job because the government had denied my visa. You are not a dependent anymore, their letter said, you do not qualify to emigrate. So I saw my family off at the airport and promised that I’d come visit soon. (It was unlikely.) My Indian mobile phone barely had enough credit on it, and I relied on data and the…
