Desserts

The first basundi I ever tasted arrived at our door in Karachi in a steel bowl with a plate for a lid, still cold from the fridge, carried over by our Gujarati neighbour’s daughter with strict instructions to return the bowl washed. Her mother made it on slow Sunday afternoons — a wide pan of …

The first Ganesh Chaturthi I spent in Pune, my friend Sneha’s grandmother sat on a low stool with a steel plate on her lap and a mound of white dough under a damp cloth, producing modaks the way other people produce conversation — without stopping, without looking, without one wasted motion. Twenty-one had to be …

The first mysore pak I ever ate was cut for me at a sweet stall in Mysuru, from a tray so glossy with ghee it caught the evening light like polished brass. The man weighed my pieces on an old balance scale, wrapped them in a paper cone, and told me to eat one before …

The first time I tasted shrikhand, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of my friend Priya’s home in Ahmedabad during Navratri, a steel thali in front of me and about fourteen relatives talking over each other. Her mother set down a little bowl of something pale gold and impossibly smooth, and when I asked …

Every festival season, the mithai shop at the end of our street rebuilt its front window around one tray: motichoor ladoos, heaped in a glowing orange pyramid that sat under the tube lights like a pile of marigolds. Walking home from school, I would stop with my bag still on my shoulder and stare through …

Every family has one sweet that exists purely for emergencies, and in our house it was always this coconut ladoo recipe. The phone would ring at four in the afternoon — relatives in the neighborhood, stopping by in an hour — and while my mother put the chai on, I was already reaching for the …

Every bakery loaf in our house had the same fate. The soft middle slices vanished into sandwiches within a day, and then the two end pieces sat in the bread box, ignored and slowly drying out, waiting for someone to feel guilty about them. In our kitchen that someone was my mother, and her answer …

There was a small Parsi bakery near my father’s office that he treated less like a shop and more like a relative. Every few weeks he came home carrying their cardboard box tied with string, and inside, in its squat aluminium mould, sat the dessert he had ordered in railway dining cars his whole life. …

Every wedding I attended as a child ended the same way: not with the rukhsati, but with the small cardboard box pressed into my hands at the door, tied with ribbon and heavy for its size. Inside, packed between layers of tissue, sat the sweets that had been waiting all evening — ladoo, barfi, and …

Every dawat of my childhood ended the same way: the men drifting toward the drawing room, the aunties comparing notes on the biryani, and one glass bowl carried in with both hands like a trophy. It was my khala’s trifle — stripes of red jelly, yellow custard, cake and cream stacked so neatly you could …