Abeer Khurana
The Man with the Empty Tiffin
Every day at exactly 2:15 p.m., after the lunch crowd had dispersed and the oil had cooled in the karahis, a man in a faded brown kurta appeared at the entrance of Parathewali Gali with an empty tiffin and a look that was hard to read. His beard was trimmed but uneven, his eyes carried the weight of too many forgotten memories, and his slippers had long lost the war with the cobbled Old Delhi stones. He never ordered from the menu. Instead, he would quietly lean into the counter of the first stall—Pandit Hariram’s—and murmur, “One aloo methi, two nimbu, and one mirchi. Just like she liked it.” Hariram, with his massive white mustache and stained apron, would nod solemnly and disappear into the kitchen, never once asking the man’s name, never once refusing the strange order that didn’t match his menu or make commercial sense.
The old-timers of Chandni Chowk whispered about the man. Some said he used to be a professor, others claimed he once ran a printing press near Kashmere Gate. There were also those who insisted he’d been a poet, the kind who wrote only on receipts and rickshaw backs. But nobody knew for sure, and the man never stayed long enough to be asked. He’d take the warm parathas wrapped neatly in a paper napkin, tuck them into the now-full tiffin, pay exactly fifty-six rupees without haggling, and disappear into the alleys like a ghost of spice and memory.
It was on a breezy winter afternoon, under the weak sun that made Old Delhi glow like an aging bride, that Meher saw him for the first time. She had come to Parathewali Gali to shoot a video for her food blog—“Fork and Dilli”—and was mid-bite into a banana-stuffed paratha when the man brushed past her. His tiffin clinked faintly. Something about the way he walked—like the city owed him answers it had long stopped giving—made her forget the camera, the paratha, and even her Instagram handle. Her curiosity, always her worst and best trait, took over. She followed him.
He walked not fast, not slow, but at a rhythm that felt deliberate. Past the kite shop, past the man selling lemon soda in thick glasses, past the girl feeding pigeons at the base of a fading Haveli. He turned left into an alley she’d never noticed before, though she’d been coming to this part of town since she was in college. It was narrower than most, lined with doors that looked permanently locked and windows that hadn’t opened since Indira Gandhi’s time. Halfway in, he stopped. He turned to a cracked wall painted in old election slogans and touched it with his fingers, then took out one paratha from the tiffin and placed it gently on the stone windowsill.
She watched in silence. There was reverence in the way he laid it down. He closed his eyes for a moment, lips moving in a silent sentence. Then he turned and walked away, leaving the paratha where it sat, steaming gently in the winter chill. Meher wanted to speak, to ask, to record—but something held her back. It felt like walking into a prayer mid-chant.
Later, she returned to the spot. The paratha was still there. Only now, a small street dog was nibbling at it, tail wagging. Meher crouched and clicked a photo. The caption wrote itself: “A forgotten offering in a forgotten lane.”
That night, Meher couldn’t sleep. The man’s face kept appearing in her thoughts—etched with longing, defiance, and a strange kind of peace. Who was he? Who was she—the one he still ordered for? Why that wall? Why that spot?
The next day, she returned to Parathewali Gali, hoping to see him again. She waited from noon to three, pretending to review parathas she didn’t taste. But he never came. She returned the day after, and the day after that. On the fifth day, when she had almost given up, he appeared again. Same time. Same tiffin. Same order.
This time, she followed closer, careful not to lose him. At the wall, he repeated the same ritual. But just before he turned to leave, she stepped forward. “Excuse me,” she said softly. He froze. “I’ve seen you here before,” she added, awkwardly. “I—well—I wanted to ask…”
The man looked at her, really looked. Not with suspicion, not with anger. With a kind of tired amusement. “It’s not polite to follow people, you know,” he said. His voice was cracked but kind.
“I’m sorry,” Meher said. “It’s just… this place, what you do. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He looked at the paratha on the sill. “Neither have I,” he murmured. Then, without another word, he turned and walked away.
She stood there, feeling like she’d interrupted something sacred. But she also knew this was just the beginning.
Letters in Fenugreek Oil
The next morning, Meher arrived at the gali earlier than usual. The camera stayed zipped in her backpack; today wasn’t about content—it was about a question that refused to quiet down. She ordered nothing, didn’t live-stream anything, didn’t even text her editor back. Instead, she stood quietly under the red awning of Gupta Ji’s paneer paratha stall, keeping one eye on the corner from which the man always emerged, like an old melody in an even older raga.
At precisely 2:15 p.m., he came. Tiffin in hand. The same discolored kurta, same sunken eyes, same measured pace. He didn’t notice her—or perhaps chose not to. This time, instead of following immediately, Meher waited. She wanted to let him make the first move, to keep the space between them respectful.
Fifteen minutes later, she walked down the alley. The paratha was already placed on the sill. The man was gone.
But this time, something had changed.
Tucked neatly beneath the edge of the oily paper was a folded note—yellowed and fraying. Her heart caught in her throat as she reached for it. On it, written in deep blue ink in perfect Devanagari, were just a few lines:
“If you must follow stories, follow them with silence. Not everything offered is for tasting.”
Meher read it thrice. It wasn’t a threat. It was an invitation. Or a boundary. Or both.
She folded the note carefully, placed it back under the paratha paper, and stepped away. The dog from last time, tail wagging, approached and sniffed the food. Meher watched it nibble, thinking about stories that aren’t told but breathed.
Later that evening, sitting in her cramped Hauz Khas flat surrounded by succulents and unpaid bills, she finally decided to speak to someone about it. She called her grandfather in Lucknow—a retired history teacher with a memory like a steel trap and a fondness for mysteries.
“Dadu,” she began, “did you ever hear of someone placing food on a wall every day in Old Delhi?”
There was a pause. Then a sigh. “There was a woman once,” he said. “Back in the sixties. Lived near Kinari Bazaar. After her husband died suddenly in a factory fire, she used to bring his lunch tiffin to the same wall he used to lean against during lunch. Every day, for three years. People said she believed his spirit waited there.”
Goosebumps danced up Meher’s arms. “Do you know her name?”
“Amrita,” her grandfather said. “Amrita Bakshi. She stopped coming after 1972. No one knows what happened to her.”
The next day, Meher returned with a mission. Instead of waiting for the man, she went to Hariram’s stall and asked directly.
“Pandit Ji, the man who orders off-menu parathas. Who is he?”
Hariram looked up from his chopping board. “You mean Masterji?” he said, wiping his hands. “That’s what we call him. Real name? No one knows. Comes, orders, pays. Never misses a day.”
“Masterji?” Meher echoed.
“Some say he used to teach Urdu at St. Xavier’s. Others say he lost someone here. Never talks about it. But every stall in this lane knows not to deny his order. It’s… tradition now.”
Tradition. The word struck Meher. In a lane famous for evolving flavors, viral reels, and food fusion, here was a man clinging to the past like a holy relic.
That night, Meher dug through old newspaper archives. Using her journalism degree for something more than clickbait headlines, she typed “Amrita Bakshi + Old Delhi” into a dusty e-paper portal.
Only one article came up.
“Wife of deceased mill worker continues daily tribute at Kinari Bazaar wall. Locals call it ‘the paratha pilgrimage.’”
Published in 1971, The Delhi Chronicle.
The accompanying grainy photo showed a woman in a sari, back turned to the camera, placing a paratha on the same wall. Meher stared at it, zooming in till pixels bled. There it was. Same crack down the middle. Same fading election paint. Her fingers trembled slightly.
She clicked ‘Print’.
The next afternoon, she returned—armed with the printout and a resolve she didn’t yet understand. As expected, the man came, placed his offering, whispered his words, and turned. But this time, as he passed Meher, she stepped forward—not to interrupt, but to offer.
“I think I know who she was,” she said softly, holding out the article.
The man paused. Looked at the paper. Then at her. Then back again.
He did not take it.
“You don’t,” he said, not cruelly but with finality. “Not yet.”
And he walked away.
The next day, he didn’t come.
Nor the day after.
Parathewali Gali was unchanged—oily, bustling, fragrant. But the wall remained empty, the sill cold. The dog came, sniffed, whined, and left.
Meher felt the absence like a missed beat in her favorite song.
On the third day, something was on the wall again.
Not a paratha.
A notebook.
Old, bound in red cloth, tied shut with a rubber band.
A single word written on the cover: Meher.
The Notebook That Smelled of Fenugreek
Meher stood before the wall, her breath caught between hesitation and wonder. The red cloth-bound notebook sat quietly on the sill where parathas once rested. She glanced around the alley. No sign of the man. No footsteps. No dog. Only the faint waft of asafoetida and fried ghee drifting in from the gali.
She touched the notebook. It was warm, as if it had been held just moments ago. When she picked it up, the scent surprised her—fenugreek, turmeric, old paper, and something subtler, like pressed marigolds.
She untied the rubber band, careful not to tear the aging cloth. The first page bore no name, just a single sentence in careful Urdu script:
“Some memories are not to be erased, only tasted again.”
The following pages were a mix of diary entries, sketches, and what looked like recipes—but not ones from a cookbook. These weren’t instructions. They were conversations. Parathas as metaphors. Emotions kneaded into dough. Regret folded like ajwain between layers. Rage deep-fried in mustard oil. Each entry was signed with a simple “A.”
She flipped back to the beginning. The first full entry read:
“12th June 1970 — Today, I cooked him aloo methi after two weeks of not speaking. I didn’t say sorry. I just folded it into the layers, let the bitterness stay at the edges, let the salt carry my apology. He smiled when he bit into it. That was enough.”
Meher read the notebook sitting cross-legged on her rooftop that night, ignoring her buzzing phone and the cold dinner waiting in the microwave. Every page pulled her deeper into the world of a woman who cooked her silences, her arguments, her affections. Every paratha was a sentence, every chutney a footnote to a love that clearly hadn’t ended with the man’s death.
By the fifth entry, it became clear: Amrita Bakshi wasn’t just mourning a husband. She was protecting a ritual, holding on to something larger than grief. And someone—Masterji, the man with the tiffin—was continuing it.
But how were they connected?
The next morning, Meher returned to Parathewali Gali, the notebook clutched tight in her bag. She didn’t expect him to come again so soon, but by instinct, she stopped at Hariram’s stall and said quietly, “The man. He left something for me.”
Hariram didn’t blink. “He came early today,” he said. “At noon. Said he wouldn’t return for a while. Asked me to give you this.”
From beneath the cash drawer, he pulled out a photograph. Black-and-white. A group of people at a poetry event. String lights, low chairs, an old harmonium in the corner. And in the center—young, radiant, eyes full of fire—a woman Meher guessed was Amrita. Next to her, smiling gently, a man with no beard, but those same eyes. Masterji.
On the back, in neat handwriting:
“Not every love begins with desire. Some begin with words that refuse to be unspoken.”
Meher stared at it for a long time. The story she’d stumbled into was no longer a curiosity. It was becoming a kind of inheritance.
She took the photograph to Dadu.
He looked at it and exhaled slowly, like someone opening a window into the past.
“Ah, the Delhi Kavita Sabha,” he said. “That was 1970. Summer. I attended a few meetings. Amrita Bakshi was the star of those evenings. People came to hear her just speak about food and longing. And that’s Naseeruddin Khurshid beside her. He taught at St. Xavier’s before leaving abruptly one day. People say he fell in love with Amrita. But she was married.”
Meher sat back. “So they…?”
“No one knows,” Dadu said. “Only that after her husband’s death, she withdrew from everything. And Naseer vanished.”
The pieces clicked together. The parathas weren’t just a memory—they were a love letter passed back and forth across decades. A ritual neither of them could give up. And now, somehow, Meher had been handed the last line of that poem.
Back in her flat, she read the notebook again, slower this time. One page caught her breath:
“3rd March 1972 — I saw him again. I had stopped bringing the parathas for weeks. Thought maybe letting go meant letting hunger return. But he waited. Not at the wall. At the gali entrance. He didn’t speak. Just held out my old tiffin. I took it. I made aloo methi again. Not for my husband. For the one who waited when I didn’t ask him to.”
Meher’s hands trembled.
The wall wasn’t just a place of mourning. It was the midpoint of a story no one dared call a love affair. It was devotion without name, hunger without shame. And now she was part of it.
The next day, for the first time, Meher came with her own tiffin. She had learned Amrita’s recipe from the notes in the book—aloo methi with a hint of kalonji and crushed dry mango.
She placed it gently on the sill, tied in a cloth. Next to it, she left a note:
“I followed your story in silence. Thank you for letting me listen.”
As she turned to leave, someone called out softly.
“You forgot the green chutney.”
She spun around.
There he was.
Masterji.
This time, he smiled.
“I never liked it without chutney,” he said.
Meher grinned. “Next time, you’ll get extra.”
And for the first time since it all began, they walked back down the lane together.
A Spoonful of Silence
They didn’t speak for the first fifty steps, and Meher noticed how Masterji always avoided the puddle near the neem tree and nodded at the boy selling kulhad chai even though he didn’t stop. This wasn’t just his path. It was choreography, rehearsed over decades. A man who had danced with ghosts so long he knew exactly when to bow.
Finally, she said, “I read the notebook. I hope that’s okay.”
He nodded, lips tight. “That’s why I left it.”
“Was it all real? Amrita? You?”
His steps slowed. “What’s real?” he asked. “That she was married to someone else? That we never touched but knew each other better than most husbands and wives? Or that she folded years of unsaid things into parathas she never expected anyone to eat?”
Meher hesitated. “But you did eat them?”
“Not always,” he said, a faint smile curling his lips. “Sometimes I’d just smell the tiffin. That was enough.”
They stopped near a peeling poster for a forgotten political rally. He leaned against a wall, the one with a painted peacock now barely visible under dust. “She never told me she loved me. Not once. She only told me how to chop ginger so it wouldn’t burn.”
Meher chuckled. “Sounds like love to me.”
He looked at her, sharp. “That’s what I told myself. That’s what kept me alive.”
There was no anger in his voice. Only exhaustion—the kind that sits deep in bones, older than grief, older than guilt. He pulled something from his kurta pocket—a delicate anklet, silver, slightly tarnished.
“She left it behind once. I told her. She smiled and said, ‘Then you keep it safe, till my next paratha burns.’ That was the last day I saw her.”
Meher looked at the anklet, its little bells silent now. “Do you think she knew?”
“That she’d vanish?” His voice cracked. “I think she was trying to. Disappear slowly, so I’d get used to it.”
Meher sat on the edge of a low platform where vendors used to stack their potatoes. The notebook in her bag felt heavy again. “What happened to her? After she stopped coming?”
“No one knows,” he said. “Maybe she moved. Maybe she died. Or maybe she just… became air.”
She didn’t push. Some questions deserved to remain unanswered, like a spice whose secret you guess but never confirm.
Later, as they parted ways, he handed her a piece of paper. “Don’t open it now,” he said. “When the lane feels too quiet.”
That night, Delhi was blanketed in fog and an unusual stillness. Meher’s flat felt lonelier than usual, the walls too white, the hum of her fridge too loud. She brewed herself some ginger chai and finally unfolded the paper.
It was a recipe.
Chutney of Silence
Ingredients:
– 1 handful of fresh coriander
– 4 mint leaves
– 1 green chili
– A pinch of longing
– Half a spoon of moments unspoken
– Salt, as bitter as memory
Instructions:
Grind everything, slowly.
Don’t rush. Let the leaves bleed. Let the silence settle.
Serve with anything that’s been waiting too long.
She didn’t cry. Not right away. But she pressed the note to her chest, as if it had a pulse.
The next day, she did something she’d never done before—closed her blog for 24 hours. No stories, no videos, no reels. Just a blank page with one line:
“Some stories deserve silence.”
The internet, surprisingly, responded with reverence. Hundreds of comments. A few asking if she was okay. A few sharing their own stories—of love that never spoke, meals made for those who never returned, and recipes that carried secrets.
Three days later, the parathas returned to the wall.
But this time, they were different.
Not folded like before. One was half open, revealing a scribbled line inside in food-safe ink.
“Salt added by someone else always tastes like a question.”
More people started noticing.
A college student came daily to sketch the sill. A poet wrote a verse and left it tucked under the napkin. An old woman brought pickles once a week and left them quietly. And Meher? She documented none of it.
Instead, she started cooking.
Every Thursday, she made a new paratha from the notebook—Amrita’s recipes that read more like diary entries than instructions. And she left them. Sometimes they disappeared. Sometimes they didn’t. That wasn’t the point.
One evening, she found a folded napkin left on the sill. Inside it, a poem in shakily written Urdu:
“You brought me back, not with words, but with wrappers.
Each one unwrapped a life I thought no longer fit this city.
Now I taste again—not for her. But for me.”
No signature.
But Meher knew.
Masterji had started writing again.
The Curry Leaf Conspiracy
The transformation of Parathewali Gali was not loud. It was not broadcasted, advertised, or hashtagged. But it happened. Slowly. Like the way pickle matures under a winter sun—imperceptibly until one day the whole jar sings. One afternoon, a teenager left behind a small bundle of poems printed on recycled paper, calling it “Poetry With Ghee.” The next week, a musician began humming old ghazals near the corner where the brass plate shop used to be. A chaiwala renamed his stall “Chai for the Missing Ones” and began offering free tea to those who left behind something from their past—a letter, a locket, a story.
Meher had unwittingly started something. And she was no longer just a follower. She had become the gali’s accidental archivist.
The notebook had pages left. Not many, but enough to sustain the Thursdays. This week, the entry was different. A little angry, a little fiery—just like the recipe that followed it.
“He said I was too much. Too spicy, too loud. I said he was bland. Then I made a laung and curry leaf paratha that burned his tongue. He said, ‘Now I taste you everywhere, even when I drink water.’ I smiled. Not because I’d won. Because he finally noticed.”
The recipe was exact—three cloves, fifteen curry leaves, sautéed till they almost blacken, mashed into a paste with green chili and a touch of jaggery. It was fire and forgiveness folded into wheat.
Meher made two.
One for the sill.
One for Masterji.
She didn’t expect to find him that day, but there he was, reading a crumpled newspaper near the sugarcane juice cart. His eyes lit up when she handed him the warm foil.
“She made this once,” he said, biting into it. “I couldn’t eat more than one bite. Told her it was excessive.”
“And now?”
“I regret that bite was my last.”
They sat near the marble step outside a locked haveli and ate in silence. Then, almost casually, he said, “You should meet Rukhsana.”
Meher blinked. “Who?”
“She was Amrita’s closest friend. They used to write together. Rukhsana still lives nearby. She might tell you what even I can’t.”
He scribbled an address on a torn paper napkin and handed it over. “She doesn’t speak much now. But you’ll know when she’s listening.”
The next afternoon, Meher found the address. It led to a house tucked away in Ballimaran, hidden behind a curtain of drying saris. The door was open. Inside, the smell of mothballs, fennel seeds, and rose water floated in the air.
Rukhsana sat by the window, her back straight despite her age. Her eyes were cloudy but alive. She wore a shawl that looked older than Meher’s entire wardrobe.
“You’re the girl from the gali?” she asked, before Meher could speak.
Meher nodded.
Rukhsana smiled faintly. “She would’ve liked you. You listen. Most storytellers forget how to.”
They spoke little. Mostly, Rukhsana did. She spoke of how Amrita once wrote poems comparing heartbreak to burnt jeera. Of how she never cried after her husband died, but once wept because someone put too much salt in a raita. Of a night when Amrita nearly left Delhi forever, but stayed because someone left a poem under her window that simply said, “Stay. Your parathas have not finished speaking.”
“That poem?” Meher asked. “Did Naseer write it?”
Rukhsana didn’t answer directly. She only said, “The city always knew. They were never secretive. Just sacred.”
As Meher stood to leave, Rukhsana held her wrist. “She didn’t die. You know that, don’t you?”
Meher froze. “What do you mean?”
“She didn’t die when people thought she did. She just stopped answering. Stopped being found. Some say she moved to Jaipur. Some say she opened a small café near Nashik. She told me once—‘If I ever leave, I’ll become a menu no one recognizes.’”
Outside, the Delhi sun felt different. Like someone had peeled back a curtain she didn’t know existed.
That night, Meher wrote in her own journal for the first time in years. Not for the blog. Not for an audience. Just for herself. She wrote about parathas that tasted like confessions, men who waited for flavors instead of words, and women who left behind more than memories—they left behind recipes that hummed with the truth.
Two days later, a new paratha appeared on the sill.
It wasn’t made by Meher.
The wrapping was different. The paper was lilac, scented faintly with rose. Inside, a neatly folded triangle. The flavor? Meher couldn’t tell exactly. Cardamom, orange peel, cloves, and something floral.
Tucked inside was a small note.
“For the girl who listened. Not everything forgotten stays gone. —A”
Where the Parathas Speak
For the first time since the ritual had begun, Meher was not just a silent observer or a humble bearer of stories. She had received a message, not from the living but from memory—or perhaps from the living still hidden inside it. The paratha was unlike any recipe in the notebook. It felt new, created in a kitchen untouched by time but deeply familiar with its flavour. The orange peel sang of reinvention. The cardamom whispered nostalgia. And the note—those four words: “Not everything forgotten stays gone.”
She reread the line five times before wrapping the paper carefully and pressing it into the back pocket of her journal. That night, she didn’t sleep. She searched everywhere. She looked up Amrita’s name, not in archives this time, but in café listings, in women’s cooperatives, in blogs about lost food artisans. Jaipur. Nashik. Lucknow. Nothing definitive. Just hints. Shadows. One photo of a woman standing at a food stall in Pushkar, face half-turned. Could be her. Or not.
But deep down, Meher felt something more important: she was still alive. Somewhere, Amrita Bakshi had decided to keep writing. Not with ink. With ingredients.
The next morning, Masterji was waiting for her at the chai stall, sipping with both hands around the kulhad like it held something ancient. He had already heard. Of course he had.
“She made you one,” he said.
Meher nodded.
He took a long sip, set the cup down gently. “I thought she had stopped cooking for everyone. Even herself.”
“You think she’s still in Delhi?” Meher asked.
“No,” he said. “But she’s still here.”
She thought he meant emotionally. But his eyes said otherwise. That he felt her. Smelled her in mustard oil. Heard her in the hiss of a tawa. Love does strange things to senses. It sharpens what’s missing.
They walked again, this time to the very end of the gali, where it met the whispering walls of Kinari Bazaar. There, under a dusty awning once used for weddings, sat a man frying fritters. No signboard. No crowd. Just the smell of onions, laughter, and old grief.
“Tell her about the curry leaf paratha,” Masterji said, motioning Meher forward.
The man looked up, middle-aged, eyes lined with sun and sorrow. “She sent you?” he asked.
Meher blinked. “Who?”
He smiled. “She told me someone would come one day, who understood more than just spice ratios.”
He introduced himself as Sameer—once a student of Amrita’s poetry workshops. “She taught us that poetry was in the waiting. In the water heating. In the pauses between stirs.”
Sameer didn’t have her number. Didn’t even know where she lived now. “But she mails me recipes sometimes. Without return address. Always in lilac envelopes.”
“Recipes?” Meher asked.
He nodded, reached under the counter, and pulled out a small tin. Inside were at least a dozen folded notes, each with unique instructions: “For when the sky forgets to rain” or “For forgiving someone who never asked.”
He handed Meher one. “You take it. You’ll know what to do.”
Meher unfolded the paper:
Paratha of Rain That Never Came
– Crushed lotus seeds
– A pinch of dried rose
– Black sesame
– Memories of an umbrella shared too late
Grind in silence. Fold into patient dough. Fry on low flame. Do not rush. This one is not for the eater. It is for the one who left before they could taste it.
Her throat tightened.
Back home, Meher didn’t post about it. She didn’t shoot a reel. She just cooked. And as the paratha sizzled on her tawa, she hummed a tune she didn’t remember learning. Something soft, lilting. Possibly something Amrita had once sung under her breath.
When it was ready, Meher didn’t eat it.
She took it to the wall.
No note this time.
Just silence.
But when she returned the next morning, something else was waiting.
A box.
Not large. Covered in old marbled cloth. Inside, letters. Dozens of them. All addressed to Dear You. None signed. But the handwriting was unmistakable. The flour-flecked curves. The ghee-stained edges.
One letter began:
“You think parathas are about comfort. They’re not. They’re about longing. You think I cooked because I missed you. I cooked because I didn’t know how else to hold on.”
Another read:
“Every time I folded dough, I imagined your fingers folding it with me. And when I salted the filling, I left space for your hunger.”
And the last one—
“If someone finds this, tell him: I never left. I just moved to a place where ingredients speak louder than mouths.”
Tears blurred Meher’s vision.
She walked to Masterji’s flat that evening and handed him the box.
He didn’t open it immediately.
He just said, “She kept writing?”
Meher nodded. “She never stopped.”
For a long while, he said nothing.
Then he whispered, “Neither did I.”
He pulled out a small book from his shelf. Leather-bound. Worn. Inside were his poems. All untitled. All dated with Thursdays.
One of them read:
“When you cook for a ghost, make sure your hunger stays alive. Otherwise, it’s only smoke.”
They didn’t speak after that. But something settled between them, soft and warm. Like parathas wrapped in old cloth.
The Day the Tawa Cried
The weather turned. Delhi’s crisp winter gave way to a sky the colour of old brass and the smell of ripe guavas. It was the kind of day when the streets remembered monsoon but forgot the rain, and Meher, notebook in hand, found herself writing more than she had since college. The stories were no longer about food alone—they were about absences that cooked themselves into rituals, about recipes that healed and haunted at once.
But something changed that morning.
Hariram’s stall was closed.
The shutter pulled down, the smell of sizzling oil missing, the entire gali slightly off-key, like a harmonium with one broken note.
Meher asked a nearby vendor, who shook his head. “Hariram Ji’s son called. He had a stroke. Mild. But he won’t be cooking for a while.”
She stood still, the reality more bitter than burnt jeera. Hariram’s parathas had been the first vessel of the mystery. The tiffin had always begun there.
Later that day, as if the gali itself responded to the emptiness, a group of elderly men brought folding chairs and sat in a circle near the wall. They didn’t speak much. Just sat, watching people pass, their chai cups steady in wrinkled hands. It wasn’t protest. It was remembrance.
Masterji appeared just before sunset.
He didn’t carry the tiffin.
Instead, he carried something heavier—a flat iron tawa, old but shining, wrapped in red cloth.
“He used this when he first opened the stall,” he said, laying it down gently on the stone near the wall. “Said it gives parathas a memory.”
Meher looked at it. “You’re leaving it here?”
He nodded. “Let it rest. Let it remember.”
They didn’t cook on it. They didn’t even unwrap it again. It became an altar of sorts. People walked by and placed things on it—chopped coriander, a poem, a torn photograph, a spoonful of pickle. By evening, it was surrounded by offerings, quiet but loud in meaning.
That night, Meher had a dream.
She was standing in a kitchen where the walls were made of old recipes and the ceiling hummed with unsaid things. Amrita stood at the stove, stirring something in silence. Then she turned, smiled, and said, “You don’t need to find me. Just listen to what’s left behind.”
When Meher awoke, she didn’t brush it off. She knew dreams were often footnotes to stories unfinished.
She went to Rukhsana again.
This time, the old woman handed her a key. No words.
It belonged to a storage locker near Chawri Bazaar.
Inside, Meher found a battered trunk. It smelled of cloves, ink, and longing. Inside were dozens of handwritten recipes—none repeated, none conventional.
One read:
For When You Cannot Speak but Must Be Heard
– Half a cup of silence
– Three spoons of crushed regret
– One green chili, deseeded
– A single garlic clove, bruised but whole
– Cook in butter, not oil. Butter forgives.
Another read:
For Those Who Leave Without Warning
– Mustard seeds
– Tamarind
– Two dried red chilies
– Shavings of raw mango
– Cook until the kitchen smells like goodbye.
And in the middle of the trunk, wrapped in soft muslin, was a voice recorder.
Old. Tape-based.
Meher took it home and played it.
Static.
Then a voice. Amrita’s.
“If someone is listening, it means I didn’t vanish completely. It means my words are still hungry. That’s all I ever wanted. Not fame. Not return. Just for someone to still be hungry.”
The tape ended with humming.
The same tune Meher had found herself singing weeks ago.
The next day, she played the tape aloud in the gali.
People stopped. Some smiled. Some cried. One man sat down and peeled an orange without realizing it.
Masterji stood at the end of the gali, his eyes closed, hands pressed to his chest like a prayer.
When it ended, no one clapped.
But someone placed a fresh paratha on the tawa.
And then another.
And another.
By sunset, the old iron plate held fourteen parathas—each from a different hand, each from a different memory.
That night, Meher wrote her longest journal entry yet.
“Today, the gali didn’t serve food. It served grief. And love. And questions we never learn to ask until it’s too late. The tawa didn’t cook—but I swear, it cried. And everyone tasted it.”
The Recipe That Was Never Written
The next morning, Meher woke to an inbox full of messages. Not from brands or sponsors or foodies—but from strangers. Some had been to the gali. Some had never left their cities. But all had read her journal entry. Someone had posted it to an old poetry group. Someone else had translated it into Tamil. A woman from Lahore said she remembered a paratha her mother made with pickled gooseberries that always made her father weep. Another from Kochi said her grandmother used to fry silence into jackfruit seeds. Everyone, it seemed, had a food they never finished mourning.
Meher closed her laptop.
Today was not for screens.
She wrapped the tawa again in red cloth. Lifted it like it was someone’s child. Carried it to the roof of her flat. There, under the thin winter sun, she laid it flat, set a burner underneath, and opened the final page of Amrita’s notebook.
But it was blank.
Not scribbled. Not torn out.
Just an unmarked sheet.
Meher stared at it. Flipped it over. No ink. No hidden watermark. Just paper.
But she knew better now.
Blank pages weren’t absence.
They were invitations.
She placed a small bowl of wheat flour beside her, then another of chopped onions, crushed black pepper, and ghee. And then she began writing—on the page, with a pen that had run dry but left grooves like paths across dust.
Her recipe had no quantities. Only feelings.
Paratha for the One Who Kept Coming Back
– One walk through an old gali
– Two eyes that never stop searching
– Half a teaspoon of almost-love
– A dollop of endings that never arrived
– Knead with songs you once forgot
– Fold regret inside like ajwain
– Fry until memory lets go
When the dough was ready, she rolled it gently, hearing not the rolling pin, but Amrita’s laughter, Rukhsana’s silence, and Masterji’s whispered poetry in the corner of her mind. She placed it on the hot tawa, watching it puff like a secret swelling to be told.
She didn’t eat it.
She took it down, wrapped it, and carried it to the wall.
But something had changed.
The wall was being repainted.
A municipal worker was scraping off old layers, including the faded election paint that had lived there since 1985. The sill was bare. No more paper offerings. No more poems. Just buckets, brushes, and a signboard: “Beautification Work. Inconvenience Regretted.”
Meher stood there, stunned.
Not angry. Not sad.
But… lost.
It felt like watching someone take down a shrine and call it progress.
She walked up to the worker. “Can I just leave something here? For one more day?”
He shook his head. “Instructions from above, didi.”
She nodded.
Took one last look at the wall.
And turned away.
But then—
A tap on her shoulder.
It was Masterji.
No tiffin.
Just a box.
“I was waiting,” he said.
“For what?”
“For the moment when it all disappears,” he replied. “So we can begin again.”
He led her back into the gali. Not to the wall. But deeper. Past the kite shop, past the shuttered stalls, into a tiny corner that used to be a locksmith’s kiosk. There, behind a half-broken door, was a space. Empty. Dusty. But open.
“This was Amrita’s secret kitchen,” he said.
Meher gasped.
“She used it after she stopped writing for the world. She cooked here sometimes. Alone. For no one. Or maybe just for me.”
He opened the box.
Inside was a single brass plate. Slightly dented. A small tiffin. A spice box. And a spoon, curved with time.
“She left it for whoever came after me,” he said.
Meher didn’t ask how he knew.
Some things you just know.
That evening, they cleaned the space. Lit a diya. Set the plate in the centre.
And cooked together.
A simple paratha—mint, coriander, and green chili. The first time they shared one.
Not Amrita’s recipe.
Their own.
Outside, Delhi didn’t notice.
But inside, something shifted.
The gali didn’t need the old wall anymore.
It had grown a new one.
What the Gali Remembered
The new kitchen wasn’t grand. Its ceiling flaked with the memory of a thousand Delhi summers, and the floor bore the unevenness of a city that had settled too many times. But to Meher and Masterji, it was sacred. They called it The Gali Inside, though no name was painted outside, no opening ceremony held. Yet, within days, people began arriving.
A chaiwala from Daryaganj brought a kettle and offered tea to anyone who brought a story. A widow from Turkman Gate showed up with a tin of pickled lemons she hadn’t opened since her husband died. A girl from Civil Lines began reading aloud from her grandfather’s war diary while stirring moong dal batter.
No one sold anything.
They exchanged.
Recipes for regrets. Flavours for forgiveness. Chutneys for chapters.
And Meher? She listened. She cooked. She scribbled. And she remembered.
One evening, she sat cross-legged in the corner of the kitchen, notebook on her lap, while Masterji folded a spring onion paratha with the grace of someone performing last rites.
He said, “You know, she used to say the gali could hear.”
Meher looked up. “Hear what?”
“Footsteps. Secrets. Silences between bites. And especially—who remembered and who just ate.”
Meher smiled. “Then maybe it’s listening now.”
They served the paratha to an old man who used to deliver coal to Chandni Chowk shops in the 60s. He took one bite and said, “This tastes like my sister’s voice.”
Nobody laughed.
They all understood.
That night, Meher walked alone to the now-scrubbed-clean wall.
It was painted light yellow. No trace of the cracks. No scent of oil. No groove from the thousands of tiffin taps over the years. Just a polite plaque that read:
“Cultural Heritage Zone. Maintain Cleanliness.”
She placed her hand gently on the wall, closed her eyes.
And whispered, “Thank you.”
She wasn’t sure who she was thanking. Amrita. The city. The silence. Maybe even herself.
As she turned to leave, she noticed something.
At the bottom corner of the wall, someone had scratched faint initials into the paint:
A.B. + N.K. = ?
The equation felt incomplete. But it was enough.
She walked back to The Gali Inside and found Masterji asleep on the bench. A paper rested on his chest. A poem.
“To the one who folded me in flour
Not once
But forever
You never needed to say it
I tasted every word.”
It wasn’t signed. But she knew.
Amrita had written again.
Maybe not with her hand.
Maybe through him.
The next day, the first article about the kitchen appeared in a small local newsletter. Not because Meher wrote it. Someone else had. A boy who had once come in asking if they had anything gluten-free and had stayed for three hours, peeling garlic and listening to a woman explain how her ex-husband never liked fennel.
The story spread.
People came.
A film student made a short documentary.
An old music teacher composed a raga based on the rhythm of dough being slapped.
A publisher offered Meher a deal to turn her notes into a book.
She refused.
“Some things aren’t meant to be sold,” she said.
Instead, she started a community zine—Fry Me Gently—filled with anonymous stories, poems, recipes, grief maps, and laughter lines.
And every Thursday, without fail, she cooked one of Amrita’s unwritten recipes.
The trunk had more now.
Letters appeared on their doorstep.
Sometimes folded in banana leaves. Sometimes in faded notebooks. Sometimes typed, left unsigned. All carried the same scent: memory.
One read:
“I never knew why my mother cried while making okra. Then I found her diary. Every time she chopped it, she remembered the train she never boarded.”
Another:
“My father burned every recipe my mother left behind. So I wrote them again. With tears instead of turmeric.”
And a final one, unsigned, but smelling unmistakably of lilac:
“I found your kitchen. I’m glad you found mine too. The dough never really forgets the hand that shaped it.”
The Last Paratha
It was a quiet Thursday. The kind where the sun forgets to shine too brightly and the breeze smells faintly of roasted cumin. Meher arrived early at The Gali Inside. She cleaned the counter, opened the spice box, and lit a single diya near the tawa that had once sat on the sill. Everything felt slower, softer. As if the kitchen knew.
Masterji was late.
He was never late.
She waited. Brewed tea. Rolled dough. Wrote in the margins of a new notebook—the old one now full, its pages fat with crumbs and emotion. By 4 p.m., she knew something had shifted.
She visited his flat.
The door was unlocked.
Inside, everything was in order. A paratha on the table, still warm. A handwritten note beside it.
She picked it up, heart racing.
“I won’t return next Thursday.”
“Or the one after that.”
“But I’m not leaving.”
“I’m simply becoming what I always was—a flavour you carry.”
Below it, a final recipe:
The Last Paratha
– 1 moment of full silence
– 1 tear, not yet fallen
– A handful of ground coriander
– A memory you’re afraid to lose
– No salt
– Let whoever eats it add their own
Meher folded the note gently, pressed it to her chest.
She didn’t call anyone. Didn’t cry. Not yet.
Instead, she returned to the kitchen and made that paratha exactly as written.
When it was ready, she placed it on the centre plate, surrounded by brass bowls—one filled with mint chutney, another with mango pickle, and the third left empty.
By evening, the kitchen filled with people—those who had come before, and some new. No one asked where Masterji was. They knew.
The paratha remained untouched.
Not out of fear.
Out of reverence.
A young boy placed a rose beside it. An old woman recited a line of poetry in Sanskrit. Someone began to hum that same tune—the one Amrita had once sung.
And Meher?
She finally wept.
Not from sorrow.
From fullness.
Later that night, she wrote the final entry in her journal.
“He left without ceremony, just like she did. No goodbyes, only warmth left behind. Today, I served a paratha made of silence and it fed everyone. He taught me how to wait. She taught me how to taste. I now know that hunger isn’t just for food—it’s for memory, for truth, for presence. I am no longer the girl who chased a man with a tiffin. I am the one who stayed to listen.”
Years passed.
The wall was painted over again and again.
The gali became busier. Trendier. Some stalls were replaced by boutiques. QR codes replaced menus. But one corner, always slightly tucked away, remained unchanged.
The Gali Inside.
Its name never written.
But always known.
New hands cooked there now. But every Thursday, one paratha was still made using a recipe that didn’t exist in any book.
Visitors said it tasted like poetry.
Locals said it tasted like love.
And somewhere, perhaps in Jaipur, or nowhere at all, a woman still wrote on lilac paper and folded it gently with rose petals and fennel seeds.
Waiting for someone to taste.
THE END
