Sunday Nani

Sunday mornings in Rohan’s house had a sound. It was the tablet ringing at exactly nine o’clock — breeng, breeng — and it meant one thing:

Cooking class was starting. And the teacher was seven thousand kilometres away.

“Good morning, my chef!” Nani’s face filled the screen, her own faraway kitchen bright behind her. “Wash your hands. Show me.” Rohan held up clean hands to the camera. “Good. Today: roti. Get the big bowl. Not that one — the BIG one. There he is.”

This was the rule of Sunday mornings: Dad propped the tablet against the biscuit tin and then stayed OUT of it, drinking his tea in the corner, because — as Nani had announced on the very first Sunday — “I taught YOU, and now it’s his turn, and you’ll only confuse my methods.”

Nani had been making rotis for fifty years. Fifty! Rohan could not properly imagine fifty years, but he could hear it in the way she taught — she knew things no recipe book knew. She knew the dough was ready not by the clock but by the sound: “Poke it. Did it sigh? It should sigh, like your father on Monday mornings.” She knew the pan was hot enough when a drop of water danced on it — “if it just sits there, it’s still sleeping.” She measured nothing and knew everything, the flour by handfuls, the water by eye, the salt by “enough.”

“How do you KNOW all this?” Rohan asked, elbow-deep in dough.

“Because my Nani stood me on a stool when I was your size,” said Nani, “in a kitchen with no tablet, and her Nani stood HER on a stool. You are the newest stool-stander in a very long line, Rohan. Mind the line — knead with your whole hand, not just fingers.”

Rohan’s first roti came out shaped like Australia.

He held it up, worried. Seven thousand kilometres away, Nani inspected it with complete seriousness.

“Australia,” she confirmed. “Mine was shaped like a chappal, my first one. Your father’s looked like a question mark, which suited him. Australia is a good start — big country. Now roll the next one, and this time, turn-turn-turn as you roll. Round comes from turning, not from wishing.”

Turn-turn-turn. The next one looked like Australia with less Tasmania. The one after that was nearly, almost, basically a circle. And when the best roti puffed up on the flame — puffed right up into a proud little balloon, the way rotis do when they’re happy — Rohan shouted so loudly that Nani cheered, and Dad spilled his tea, and somewhere seven thousand kilometres apart, one kitchen became briefly, completely, a single room.

“NANI! IT PUFFED!”

“Of COURSE it puffed! Fifty years of puffing is standing behind you, boy! Now — butter it fast, and eat it hot. Chef’s reward. The first puffed roti never reaches the table; that’s the law.”

It was the best thing Rohan had ever eaten. Partly the butter. Mostly the fifty years.

The Sundays kept coming — dal after roti, then poha, then Nani’s famous lemon rice, the recipe she said existed nowhere on paper, “only in hands.” That was the thing Rohan slowly understood, stool by stool, Sunday by Sunday: he wasn’t just learning cooking. He was being handed something — something old, that had travelled from kitchen to kitchen down a line of stool-standers longer than any aeroplane route — and it had crossed the ocean to reach him without a single suitcase.

“Same time next Sunday?” Nani always asked, at the end.

“Same time, Nani.”

The line holds, she’d say to herself, seven thousand kilometres away, wiping down her counter, already planning next week’s lesson.

The line holds.