“Once in a while we burned a wok trying to make our churan, and Jima, Bhanu, or another matriarch would banish us from the kitchen. “You should’ve told us,” they’d say. “We would’ve helped you.” You’re not getting it, Neela and I thought. This is our party and you’re not invited. To this day, the elder women of my household in Chennai still regard Neela or me with suspicion whenever we enter the kitchen to make anything other than tea. No matter that I host a cooking show or that Neela has raised two healthy daughters who clearly haven’t starved or been disfigured by a kitchen accident.”

“Once in a while we burned a wok trying to make our churan, and Jima, Bhanu, or another matriarch would banish us from the kitchen. “You should’ve told us,” they’d say. “We would’ve helped you.” You’re not getting it, Neela and I thought. This is our party and you’re not invited. To this day, the elder women of my household in Chennai still regard Neela or me with suspicion whenever we enter the kitchen to make anything other than tea. No matter that I host a cooking show or that Neela has raised two healthy daughters who clearly haven’t starved or been disfigured by a kitchen accident.”

“I know most people use their phones to tell time, but there's something very romantic and beautiful about a timepiece.”

“I really like to sometimes go into food detox and eat very simply.”

“From the simple stringing together of lemon garlands for the goddess Durga, to dividing the prasadam or blessed foods for the children first, I came to associate food not only with feminity, but also with purity and divinity.”

“You don't want your jewelry to make you look fat. A lot of what's out there now does - you just wind up looking like a Christmas tree.”

“At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.”

“Everything I had been carting from one stage of my life to another, to remind me of me, was in the boxes that surrounded me. And there were so many of them now, just days before my thirty-seventh birthday. But so little left of me. At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.”

“And so I was left with a mantra, a sort of haiku version of our relationship: I don’t regret one day I spent with him, nor did I leave a moment too soon.”

“Perhaps I didn’t voice my unhappiness soon enough; rather, I spent more time feeling like a disappointment and scrambling to patch our cracks than I did considering whether he required an unreasonable level of tending.”

“Teddy taught me about kindness, about love that is unconditional; a sentiment not dependent on acceptance, approval, or the expectation of something in return. It was the first time I would ever feel this from a man who wasn’t my grandfather. And I didn’t know what to do with it at all. If only I’d embraced our differences sooner. I didn’t know it then, but we had so little time left.”

“Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once.”