Notes on Belonging from a Multicultural Kitchen
The mixed heritage of Tamanna Rafique’s family finds reflection in her kitchen, where plates of her mother’s Christmas chicken curry and my father’s Eid pulao co-existed on the same table. Here, she takes us along as she traces her inheritance through taste.
“Gahori mankho tu beleg fale thoba” (keep the pork on the other side), urges my father. He has a slight smile on his face. We are getting ready to set up the Christmas table for the feast along with our tenants. Chicken, pork, mutton, rice and cake fill the table, each with its own distinct aromas. I considered this the perfect harmony of differences. The pork, cooked by our tenants was set a little apart, a gesture of respect and not of prohibition. In that small distance is where my family’s food story begins — one shaped by different religions and cultures, each with their own flavours, but still learning to sit together.
I come from a family where my mother’s Christmas chicken curry and my father’s Eid pulao co-existed on the same table, where the scent of cardamom mingled with the punchy scent of the zabrang (Sichuan pepper), where sewai and raisin cake sat on the same table.
My family history is not a straight line but a river with many tributaries. My mother comes from a mixed heritage: her mother was Garo Christian, her father was Nepali Buddhist, while her grandmother was Rabha Hindu. My father comes from an Assamese Muslim family. When these two contrasting worlds came together, it was a marriage that also involved food.
In our home, it was in the kitchen where these worlds met and, at least in some cases, mixed.
What gets cooked, what isn’t, and what is shared? These decisions loomed heavier than I initially understood as a child. Pork was cherished by my mother’s Garo side, but for my father's Muslim family, it held a different meaning. Chicken seemed like the easy compromise and beef was cooked on special occasions. There were dishes we never prepared, in respect, in silence, in the unspoken rules of coexistence.
But there were also acts of generosity. My mother would prepare pulao during Eid, although it was not from her childhood table. She learned how to keep the spices just right to my father's liking. My father would prepare sweets during Christmas and eat raisin cake with enthusiasm. These were little acts, but in them was a kind of radical care: cooking what is not yours, eating what is not yours, until it becomes yours through love.
The negotiations were as much about words as they were about the dishes. In our kitchen, the names of ingredients often came from multiple tongues. Vegetables would be known by a multitude of names, Roselle leaves were called mesta tenga for the longest time by both my parents until one day, my friend asked me, ‘What’s that?’. It wasn’t until years later, that I figured that it was also called tenga mora in Assamese. It was the same story with my favourite pitha. In the bazaar near my house, I remember spotting something familiar being sold as tekeli mukhot diya pitha (steamed rice cake). It was only when my parents told me that it was the same as laudum (in Bodo) that I recognised it. I grew up slipping between words just as easily as I was slipping between one dish to the next. The kitchen taught me polyphony, long before I knew about the word's existence.
Grated coconut, rice powder, and jaggery for steamed rice cakes. Images credit: Tamanna Rafique
A tea strainer over a pressure cooker used for cooking rice cakes over direct heat.
Freshly steamed coconut rice cakes, soft and lightly sweetened with jaggery.
If I try to trace my inheritance through taste, it comes out like a patchwork quilt. From my mother, I inherited the tang of fermented bamboo shoots, the profound comfort of chicken cooked slowly with herbs and boiled vegetables. From my father, I inherited the warmth of slow-simmered gosht, the sweetness of milky sewai on Eid mornings, and the fragrance of spices from a plate of pulao.
Sometimes I wonder if my memory of taste is confused or enhanced. Perhaps it’s both. My plate has always had a little bit of everything, gundruk (Nepali fermented leafy vegetable) with rice, fish with ou tenga (elephant apple), pickles with dalle khursani (Nepali fireball cherry pepper) and if I get lucky, snails with mati ma (split black gram) that are sent in by my mother’s Bodo sister-in-law. But, there are also absences, shadows of dishes that were never cooked. I imagine what new dishes my great-grandmother might have cooked as a Rabha Hindu woman, and I get an urge of craving for flavours I have not yet experienced. The silence of those dishes is part of my inheritance as well.
Bhut Jolokia (ghost pepper), a chilli cultivated locally in the North East, sold in local bazaars.
Khar, an alkaline extract made from the ashes of sun-dried Bhim kol (banana) peels and stems.
L-R on bowl: dal, Nepali gundruk with potato, Bodo-style river snails with black gram (mati ma), Assamese fish with thekera tenga, sewai, and rice cakes.
L-R on bowl: banana leaf–steamed fish, khar with raw papaya, charred tomato chutney, chana dal chutney, kharoli (fermented mustard seed chutney with kol khar), and bhut jolokia pickle.
Cooking, for my family, has always been more than daily labour. It is a language of care. I would come home from school to find the tenga aanja (sour curry) my mother had made — suka tenga (sour spinach) one day, mesta (roselle leaf) the next, thekera (Garcinia) or ou tenga (elephant apple). In that instant, in that tiny, sun-soaked kitchen, the world felt perfect. My father would have the chicken kebabs waiting for me as well; its golden brown edges crisped to perfection, the centre tender and soft. This ritual continued till the day I moved out of Assam for Delhi. Whenever I returned, the same familiar tastes would greet me, transporting me instantly back to the good old carefree and simple days of school.
Their affection was often masked in these gestures: extra spoonfuls, favourite dishes cooked on difficult days, or the willingness to eat what the other cherished. A multi-cultural marriage comes with its challenges, but in the kitchen, those become less overwhelming. Where words failed, food carried the weight.
Looking back, I realize that our family table was not only about feeding ourselves, but became a culinary map that carried the stories of cross-cultural marriage, adaptation, and survival. The different cuisines on my plate feel like an extension of my fragmented identity that I often struggle to articulate elsewhere.
What does my plate look like now, as I am older? It is still mixed: sometimes I make my mother’s food with my father’s spices and mix them into something that is neither completely hers nor his. Occasionally, I crave for what I can no longer taste, like my grandmother’s cooking, lost recipes, and meals that disappeared with time.
Bodo-style river snails cooked with mati ma (black gram), and Assamese river fish cooked with thekera tenga (Garcinia pedunculata).
Steamed rice cake with coconut and jaggery served alongside sewai cooked in milk with nuts and spices.
I have also come to look at my plate not as confusion but as proof that identities can coexist, and that flavours can live together without erasing one another. It is a sign that love can live through food, even when traditions diverge.
If I think of food as an archive, then my kitchen is full of letters and each dish is as a snippet of memory that I fully cherish. The pulao is a letter from my father’s side, written in cardamom and fragrant meat. The chicken curry and the raisin cake are my mother’s Christmas card, carrying warmth. The zabrang is a note from nature, the sewai a poem of festivity. Together, they make up for an anthology that is messy, incomplete, but profoundly alive.
My family’s kitchen is an archive. It conveys memory as an ever evolving narrative. It is not grand, but full of flavours that remind me of where I come from, and where I belong.
Tamanna Rafique is a DoP from Assam, based between Delhi and Mumbai. Her interests lie at the intersections of environment, identity, culture, folklore, and food, and she extends this inquiry through writing.
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