Mixed dal musings ✍🏽🍛 When I went to write about love, I realised there were too many things 🧠, but this lil surprise plate of mixed dal from Bhavin’s Vegetable Shop yesterday in Tooting tumbled out and crystallised some things.
First chance to try Rohit's wife's cooking - with homemade chapatti, sliced tomatoes onions and chilli - talking with pride of his wife's magic hands, Rohit chopped the drumsticks (moringa). "Its eaten in south India with idly served in sambar”, and tells me about the gram flour yogurt curry he loves "we'll make it next week". That sharing along the chain really does something.
All the things that make me leap a little I realised were not romantic - they were love of friendships, family, moments, spontaneity, of the city, of humans, surprise and of food. In spaces where an equality of giving something, and something being given back, can flow in different forms. Mutuality 💞
In a city so vast and fast sometimes a tupperware of leftovers can be a tool to unpack n help scoop out the deep feelings - passed hands, generation exchanges - they’re around there dancing in the back kitchens waiting to move you so keep your eyes peeled.
The way Rohit and Arun's face lights up when i come in to buy my greens - "it’s quiet because it’s Valentines day everyones out! what are you doing?" - and when I say I’m making a spinach and egg wrap for lunch, Rohit gives me the look that says noyourenot and marches me to the back shop for curry 🍛.
His want to feed me and me to be fed, asking about the vegetables he used to eat in Kenya and how he'd cook things. literally it’s like this reliance we have to pick each other up and my questions and him seeing me enjoy it.
Happiest moment? When i went to wash my plate and a customer in the shop asked me where the meat samosas were. What is this feeling? Belonging? Acceptance? Or just happiness for the small I think it is.
Been told “you love too much”, “too passionate, “why do you love everything”; well I also had a double whammy of fortune cookies saying “your love of life will carry you through any circumstance” and I think it is true, sadness too.
”The choice to love is a choice to connect to find ourselves in the other... the experience of knowing that we always belong", Bell Hooks. Ah, yes it is.
[More #BhavinsVegetableShop adventures and backshop cooking lessons here].