About five years ago, Mrs B, a very close friend of my parents, moved to Mumbai after half a century of living in Calcutta. By the time she left, both my parents had passed away, as had the lady’s husband. In a city where we had no relatives, I had grown up with my parents’ friends being my aunts and uncles. Mrs and Mr B, ‘mashi’ and ‘kaka’ respectively, were one of the three couples who were effectively my family. From 1978 the Bs were also our neighbours, their flat across the landing from ours. When Mrs B left, she hoped to return to this city for some time, even if for a brief period, and she kept her flat untouched. Recently, her health not aiding her, Mrs B decided to finally sell the place, and her daughter and son-in-law came across from Mumbai to start the procedure of wrapping up the house and disposing of all the stuff that goes into making up a well-to-do Indian home.

In spite of being a very ordinary cook, I am somewhat of a kitchen-equipment addict. My medium-sized kitchen contains all the paraphernalia my mother deployed to feed us, many of the old gadgets that she couldn’t bring herself to throw away plus my steel, ceramic and wood accumulations from the 10 years spent living in Delhi. Add to this the cook-gizmos I often pick up on trips abroad and you already have a kitchen that could give a catering company a run for its money in terms of hardware. So when Mrs B’s daughter asked me if I wanted anything from her mother’s large and well-equipped arsenal, the rational angel on my right wanted to say, “Thanks, but I have no space.” The irrational anti-angel on my left, however, had other ideas: “Ooh, let me take a look,” I found myself saying.

For a time, my parents and Mr and Mrs B lived in a period I now call a ‘modernist design bubble’. Mr B had business in East Germany and this allowed his wife and him to travel abroad every year. Mrs B had impeccably good taste and, as they journeyed through late 1950s and 1960s’ Germany, France and Scandinavia, their flat in Southern Avenue began to be populated by odd-shaped crockery, plastic wares in funky patterns, containers with sharp lines contrasted by other smooth, rounded, matte-finished objects, all of which I loved to feel and hold. Through a slightly separate, parallel route, my parents too were bitten by this Western minimalism. The furniture in our house was all straight lines and bright colours, the original paintings, modern Indian, and the reproductions mostly from 20th-century art.

I now realize that this was probably a resistance to three kinds of aesthetic. One was the ‘taste’ that could only be afforded by the truly wealthy, Westernized class: the antique furniture, the chandeliers, the curlicued French and British dinner services which went with the towering, dark brown libraries of leather-bound tomes and vast Persian carpets, say in the old zamindari baris of Calcutta among others. The second was the tackily opulent brittle glitter of new money, with the slabs of marble, newer chandeliers, vast gaddis, all dotted with rashes of silver and suppurations of gold. The third sensibility they were fighting, my parents and the Bs, was that of their own background: the dark, conservative, claustrophobic, psycho-parsimonious, over-religious middle-class and lower middle-class home environment of the Ahmedabad pols and the upper-end Bombay chawls of Prabhadevi, Ghatkopar and Matunga.

In this reaching for the light, in this breaking free of old shackles, they were inspired and empowered by the city in which they found themselves. It was no coincidence that both families moved away from the Gujarati enclaves of Burrabazar and Bhowanipore — one to Lake Gardens and the other to Southern Avenue — where they lived surrounded by south Calcutta Bengali bhadralok and bohemian artist-types. Our furniture came (in stage by affordable stage) from a designer in Jodhpur Park who had a facility for channelling American and European Modernism. The strictly vegetarian Gujarati kitchens were stainless steel-based, but there would be odd bits of crockery from the Janahs and more hand-painted stuff from that weird phenomenon of Gujju-Bong style, Rajniklal & Co. A large Jamini Roy painting loomed over me at the dining table, at Mrs B’s we were served chhaash (buttermilk) in frosted Iittala glasses from Finland, but the coasters and placemats were woven designs from the Cottage Industries shop.

By the late 1970s, this Modernist bubble-time was over. Both families moved to Minto Park, into one of the new buildings now interfering with the verdant bungalow gardens near La Martiniere. Comfort, and the scale required for entertaining large groups of friends, overtook the desire for the minimalist, the avant-garde and the whimsical. Perhaps it was a function of the two ladies’ advancing years, my mother and Mrs B, but the colours became more sober, even as marble, literally, gained a foothold on the floors of the families’ new apartments. Mrs B put a large black and white photograph print of the Konark wheel on the ceiling of her hallway, my mother introduced Ganesh statues. The (now aging) colourful plastic and melamine plates and bowls were put away at the back of the kitchen storage while newer crockery, complete with those previously resisted curlicues, was introduced. It was de rigueur, it was a nod to social requirements, it was a tacit acceptance that they had moved back from south Calcutta exile into the bosom of a Gujarati/Marwari neighbourhood, albeit consisting of highly modified Gujjus and Medos, quite different from the ones they had distanced themselves from in the late 1950s.

As I piled up my booty of Mrs B’s kitchen paraphernalia, I realized what I was doing was collecting for my museum of memories rather than filling in any gaps in my already over-stuffed cooking space. This kind of thick steel thali was impossible to find nowadays, and to me far more valuable than any antique copper thali. The bright yellow, flexible plastic Tupperware container, pure 1970s America, would go well with my mom’s ancient monster of an Osterizer blender, the one with the ten frightening buttons that could probably also have controlled the Gemini spacecraft back in the 1960s. The beautiful, slim velan (wooden rolling pin), veteran of thousands of paper thin Gujarati rotis, was also an extinct species and needed to be preserved. That particular multi-coloured, polka-dotted plate incited a pure lode of sensory memory from when I was seven, while that strange brass instrument was clearly designed to torture flavoured besan into fine vermicelli and into a boiling handi of oil to make fine shev (‘bhujia’ to the slaves of North Indianese). Being interested only in the hot and crispy end product, it was something I had never noticed as a child.

A friend from Pakistan had bought me a strange object while visiting the local auction rooms around Park Street. It’s a square glass jar with a tin lid, but with a crank inserted through it which is attached to a small wooden propeller that goes into the jar. It’s clearly a machine to make lassi or chhaash, and I would place its manufacture in the 1920s. More recently, I’ve acquired these two bright green silicon cups that look most like very thin padding for bras; they are actually poaching containers for eggs that use the new heat-resistant material in an innovative way. In between these two objects lies almost a whole century of cooking and eating, of living day to day with the means you are given and the choices you are able to make as to your surroundings, what you cook with, what you eat upon or in, and your aesthetic attitude to life itself. I was lucky that my formation of this understanding began at a unique time and in a unique social segment. As I gathered these odd objects from Mrs B’s kitchen I realized I was trying to grab back not only those first stirrings of understanding tactile beauty but also the work and the love of the hands that fed me and forever linked the nourishment of taste to the nourishment of the soul.