From Adelaide to Varanasi: Travelling from the dining table

The Varanasi of Ravi Kapoor’s childhood was serene and calm. People lived along the Ganges where life revolved around the river. Each day began with temple bells ringing, mellifluous chanting of Sanskrit mantras, and a dip in the holy water.

The Kapoor family home sat just metres from the riverbank. Their 400-year-old dwelling housed four families. Its tiny kitchen kept them well nourished.

Besides the occasional kachori — a typical Varanasi breakfast of crisp, deep-fried bread stuffed with potato and chickpeas, and coated in a citrusy coriander chutney — breakfast, lunch and dinner were all eaten at home.

When the months turned warm, the family would visit a local mango garden just outside of the city.

“In those days you would buy the whole tree, and a good tree fruits four to five hundred mangoes,” Ravi says.

“We’d stand there with a little sheet, one at each corner, and the farmer would throw them down one at a time, so they didn’t go on the ground.”

 “You’d bring them home and wrap them in newspaper in such a way that they didn’t ripen at the same time.”  

Known as the ‘king of fruit,’ mango is relished— from Indian Royalty gifting mangoes (one of the 500 varieties grown in the country) in return for political favours, to forming the base of a quenching summertime drink to prevent heatstroke. They remind Ravi of his childhood when Varanasi’s hills and valleys were enveloped in mango orchards, leaves so thick and mangoes so plump that the sun didn’t reach the grassy floor.

I can hear the exhilaration in his voice as he remembers that basement heaped with mangoes. “I would come home from school and eat 10 — I wasn’t even hungry for chapati.”

It's a cold Saturday morning in Melbourne when I interview Ravi, my step-dad, over the phone from my room in Melbourne. I’m following the cracks in my ceiling for the hundredth time that week, while he gets ready to open Eastern Silk for the day. Adelaide has managed to keep Covid-19 cases down and has, so-far, avoided long and arduous lockdowns.

Over the past few months, I have memorised the pitter-patter of the dog next door running for its dinner, and have spent days craving my family's incredible cooking. The smell that fills the entire house and makes your mouth water. 

And at the same time as I miss his cooking, he craves to inhale the familiar and vibrant sounds, smells and colours of Varanasi. 

Over the past three decades, Indian migration to Australia has steadily increased, and in 2016, India became Australia’s largest source of immigrants. Ravi migrated to Adelaide in the early nineties leaving behind his family, a business, and bustling India. For the past 30 years, he has been running Eastern Silk, an Indian homewares, fabric and jewellery shop.

“When you leave your place and migrate, you crave your roots,” he says.

“You always talk about your people, your place, things that you grew up with. This inspires you to do something to connect you to your culture. Food is one such thing — 365 days a year, 3 times a day.”

His ever-growing family with many aunties, sisters and cousins meant that arranged marriages were frequent.

From a young age, Ravi was trusted with gathering ingredients for their grand weddings. This monumental task offered him a glimpse into the kitchen — a place typically reserved for women.

Grasping the 10-page list of ingredients, he could hardly read the handwriting. but the shopkeepers knew exactly what was written. Within the month, he had to find the best produce available: freshly ground chickpea flour, pulses, grains, vegetables and unfamiliar spices.

Chefs catering an Indian wedding must be prepared, arriving a week early with hundreds of bricks to build the oven on-site; eighty litre stock pots for braising and simmering, and enough recipes to feed a thousand guests. While some cooks noisily grind spices in a sil-batta, the Hindi word for mortar and pestle, others fry hundreds of identically rounded ladoo, a saffron infused biscuit gifted to the groom’s family.

“I watched them making all of these beautiful foods. I watched how they kneaded the dough; I saw samosas and sweets in mass production; I heard them talk about when to lower the heat and when to turn it up,” he says.

“Sometimes they’d cook something that was too salty. They add some yogurt, some lemon juice or some spices. Do this and mix that. And then they’d say, ‘oh it’s okay.’

“When I came to Australia, these memories came to my rescue.”

A few days after our interview, a package arrived with 30 delicate samosa filled with poha, dried peas and fragrant spices — a dry version made to last the fickle journey with Australia Post. They were little pastry treasures that captured a taste that has now come to feel like home for me too.