What My Mother Could Not Say, She Fried in Mustard Oil

In Bengali households, love is often plated before it is spoken. It arrives without announcement: in the extra spoon of dal, in the fish belly quietly shifted to your side of the table, in mango slices salted and chilled before the power cuts begin. It is possible, in homes like ours, to be fed with extraordinary precision and still remain fundamentally unread.

I have often thought that my mother knew my appetite better than she knew me.

She knew I liked my rice softer than the rest of the family. She knew I hated the bitter edge of over-fried begun bhaja, that I preferred shorshe bata with less green chilli, that I would always ask for the thin layer of crisp skin from the top of the fish if she pretended not to want it. She knew the exact shape of my hunger at thirteen, at seventeen, at twenty-two. She knew how to fill my plate before I asked. But when it came to the other hungers — the ones that moved through the body like fever, shame, secrecy, ache — we lived together inside a language of evasion.

That, too, is a South Asian inheritance: not merely silence, but functional silence. A silence that cooks, serves, washes, folds, and survives.

Food, in such homes, does not merely sustain. It stands in for speech. It becomes apology, discipline, memory, truce, habit, compensation, and occasionally, love. If intimacy is often imagined as disclosure — as confession, naming, declaration — then the domestic sphere in many South Asian families offers another model: intimacy as maintenance. You are fed; therefore, you are still held in orbit. You are remembered in the kitchen; therefore, you have not been entirely cast out.

This is not a sentimental argument. The South Asian kitchen is not a sanctuary by default. It is a site of labour, repetition, hierarchy, resentment, caste-coded purity, and gendered exhaustion. It is one of the first places where we learn who is allowed to touch, who is expected to serve, and whose desire is respectable enough to be fed. Yet it is also one of the few spaces where affect leaks through the cracks of social order. The kitchen may discipline the body, but it also betrays attachment.

I think of this often when I remember the first months after I began, in my own fumbling and unfinished way, to move toward a life my family had no vocabulary for. Nobody said the word queer at home. Nobody asked me what I wanted, who I loved, or why I had become quieter around the dining table. But one evening after a week of tension thick enough to curdle milk, my mother made hilsa in mustard gravy — my favourite, and one she rarely cooked because she claimed the bones were too delicate and the cleaning too tedious.

She did not say, I know you are hurting.

She did not say, I am trying.

She did not say, I may never understand you fully, but I do not want to lose you.

Instead, she asked from the kitchen, “Will you eat now, or later?”

This is how some mothers remain within reach: not through recognition, but through rice.

To write about food and queerness in South Asia is often to write against two flattening at once. The first is the flattening of food into mere culture — festival dishes, inherited recipes, edible nostalgia. The second is the flattening of queerness into speech acts: coming out, disclosure, rupture, exile. Both are true and necessary stories. But they are not the only ones. There are also quieter archives of queer life: the lunch packed after an argument, the tea made without eye contact, the fruit cut and left outside a closed door, the extra roti kept warm though nobody asks whether you are coming home.

These are not resolutions. They are residues. They do not absolve the family of its violences. But they complicate what survival looks like.

In All About Love, bell hooks argues that love cannot exist without care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge (hooks 5). By that definition, many South Asian families fail queer children profoundly. What is offered instead is often a fragmented, compromised, partial love — one that insists on care while refusing knowledge, or practices responsibility while withholding recognition. Yet if hooks give us a vocabulary for what love ought to be, the kitchen gives us a record of what love often becomes under social pressure: uneven, thwarted, embodied, and stubbornly practical.

My mother’s love, if I may call it that, has often come to me in forms too humble for theory and too conflicted for sentiment. It has come in reheated rice. In the way she still asks if I have eaten after every phone call, even when we have spent the rest of the conversation failing each other. In the way she remembers what I am too angry to request. In the way she can wound me by noon and ask if I want more fish by dinner.

This contradiction is not incidental to domestic food-making; it is central to it.

The family meal is frequently imagined as a scene of cohesion. But for many of us, it is also where we first encounter surveillance: of appetite, of gender, of posture, of speech, of body, of desire. Girls are told to eat less, boys are told to eat more, daughters are summoned to serve, sons are allowed to linger, and everyone learns the choreography of respectability. In South Asia, eating has never been a neutral act. It is saturated with caste, class, religion, region, and gender. To eat with someone, to feed them, to accept food from their hands, to refuse it — these are all social acts with historical weight.

As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes, food is “highly condensed social fact” (Appadurai 494). It gathers together economics, ritual, intimacy, hierarchy, and identity into something as deceptively ordinary as a meal. This condensation is precisely why food can become such a potent site for queer kinship. Because if food is where social order is reproduced, it can also become where that order is loosened, improvised, and occasionally undone.

I think of queer friendships in rented flats and hostel rooms, of midnight Maggi cooked on illegal induction stoves, of one steel bowl of leftover chicken passed between four people after a protest, of birthdays assembled out of bakery puffs and melted ice cream. If the natal home teaches us that food is discipline, queer life often teaches us that food can also be permission. Eat. Stay. Sit longer. Take some for tomorrow. Come over, I cooked. These are not glamorous utterances. But they are often the first grammar of chosen family.

Michael Warner writes that queer world-making emerges through forms of relation that exceed normative domesticity and public legitimacy (Warner 57). In South Asia, where queer lives are so often forced into improvisation, food becomes one of the most available materials for that world-making. A pressure cooker, a kettle, two chipped plates, one person chopping onions while another complains about rent — this is not merely subsistence. It is infrastructure for belonging.

To feed another person is to say: I have imagined your return.

That sentence may be the closest thing I know to erotic tenderness.

The call for this issue invokes the relation between food, desire, and the pornographic. We live, after all, in an era of “food porn,” of mukbang spectacle, of aestheticized consumption designed for the screen rather than the mouth. Food now circulates as an image before it circulates as nourishment. It must gleam before it can satisfy. But “food porn” is a strangely revealing phrase, because it captures the contemporary tendency to strip food of relationality while heightening its visual excess. It asks us to desire food as object, as spectacle, as consumable fantasy — detached from labour, hunger, caste, or care.

What gets erased in such visual economies is not simply the cook, but intimacy itself.

The erotic, as Audre Lorde reminds us, is not reducible to titillation or display; it is a deeply felt capacity for connection, sensation, and power (Lorde 53-55). If we take Lorde seriously, then the erotic life of food does not begin with plated decadence or social media excess. It begins elsewhere: in touch, texture, slowness, anticipation, offering. In fingers tasting curry from the same spoon. In someone peeling an orange for you because your hands are shaking. In the sensual intelligence of feeding and being fed. In the knowledge that appetite is not only about consumption, but about being attended to.

There is something quietly radical about this in the South Asian context, where so much of food labour remains feminized, invisible, and morally regulated. To imagine cooking as erotic is not to sexualize the kitchen cheaply. It is to notice how intimacy already resides there — in heat, smell, repetition, proximity, and bodily attention — while also asking who gets to inhabit that intimacy freely. For women, queer people, domestic workers, lower-caste communities, and others consigned to the labour of feeding, the kitchen has rarely been a neutral space of affection. It has been obligation. Performance. Sometimes punishment.

And yet, because power is never total, the kitchen also produces fugitive pleasures.

As Sara Ahmed notes, orientation is about how bodies take shape through what they move toward and around (Ahmed 1-2). Desire is directional. So is feeding. To cook for someone is to orient oneself toward their body, their taste, their need, their return. It is to ask: what will sustain you? what will comfort you? what softness can I prepare against the world? These questions are not always romantic, but they are profoundly intimate.

Some of the most tender queer moments I know are culinary and almost embarrassingly ordinary. A friend deboning fish for another because they are too tired to bother. Someone saving the last rasgulla because they know who will want it most. A lover stirring tea while you sit on the kitchen counter talking about everyone who has failed to love you correctly. A flatmate learning your spice tolerance by accident and then remembering it forever.

These are not grand declarations. They are minor devotions.

And perhaps that is why food matters so much to queer life: because queer kinship has often had to survive through the minor. Through gestures too small for the law, too domestic for spectacle, too fleeting for archives, too compromised to look like liberation from the outside. Food does not solve estrangement. It does not repair structural violence. It does not magically turn the family into a safe space. But it does reveal how attachment persists in unruly, sometimes insufficient forms.

I do not want to romanticize the mother who cannot say the thing that most needs saying. There is harm in that silence. There are losses it cannot undo. To be fed is not the same as being known. A plate of fish cannot replace affirmation. Rice cannot do the work of justice.

And still.

Still, there is something I cannot dismiss about being remembered at the level of appetite.

There is something devastating about a woman who cannot utter your truth aloud but knows exactly how much salt you prefer in your mashed potatoes, or how long to fry your fish so the edges curl the way you like. There is something unresolved, and therefore deeply human, about being loved in fragments.

Maybe this is what food can do when language reaches its limit. It can hold contradiction without resolving it. It can let care and injury sit on the same plate. It can reveal that intimacy is not always pure, politically coherent, or emotionally articulate. Sometimes it is compromised. Sometimes it is belated. Sometimes it arrives smelling of mustard oil, carrying all the things nobody in the room can bear to name.

My mother still asks, with the same ordinary cadence, “Have you eaten?”

It is not enough. It has never been enough.

But I have come to understand it as more than small talk.

It is, in its own wounded dialect, a way of asking whether I am still here. Whether I remain reachable. Whether there is, despite everything, still a route back to each other through the body.

And perhaps that is one of the oldest queer truths foods can teach us: that kinship is not always inherited through blood or sanctified through recognition. Sometimes it is assembled through appetite, through repetition, through feeding. Through what is placed before us, quietly, stubbornly, before the world has decided what to call our hunger.