Aaji measured nothing. The chana dal, the jaggery, the pinch of nutmeg she called by no name — all of it lived in her hands, and her hands did not share. On Gudi Padwa the whole kitchen went sweet and brown with the smell of puran boiling down, and she would slap the poli thin between her palms, thinner than any rolling pin could manage, and hold it up to the window to show me the light coming through it. If you can read the newspaper through it, she said, you have made it with respect.
I never learned. There was always next year, and the year after that, and then a decade in Bengaluru where puran poli came from a shop in a box and I ate it at my desk and told myself it was the same thing.
She is ninety-one now and does not always find my face. Last Padwa I sat her in the kitchen chair and cooked, and I got it wrong — too much jaggery, the dough tearing under my hands — and I was ready to apologise to her for it. But she reached out and took the torn poli from me, and she raised it to the window the way she once made me do, her wrist trembling, and she looked at the daylight coming through the hole I had made.
Beta, she said, to a grandson she could no longer name, you have made it with respect.
I have the recipe now, or something close to it, written down the way she never needed to write anything. Grams and spoons, on a card propped by the stove. It is not the same and it will have to be. Some things you can only inherit by getting them wrong in front of the person who got them right — while there is still time for her to forgive you the holes.