A Kitchen That Learned Sinhala

Homesickness, I have discovered, does not arrive on schedule. It skipped my birthday. It skipped the first cold morning. It waited, with a strategist's patience, for the last week of December — when campus emptied, the lab went quiet, my housemates went home to their mothers, and the group chat filled with photos of Colombo weddings and beach trips and my brother wearing my father's good shirt. Then it arrived all at once, like a monsoon, and pinned me to my bed in a small grey room in a small grey town five thousand six hundred kilometres from the smell of my mother's kitchen.

I gave myself one full day of misery. I am recording that honestly: one day of lying in bed watching old Sinhala films on a laptop, eating toast, which is not food but a apology for food. And then I got up, because I am my mother's daughter, and my mother's daughter does not lose to a feeling. I went to the kitchen and I opened the spice tin for the first time since I packed it.

The great spice hunt

The tin gives you the spices, but a curry needs fresh things too, and fresh things required expeditions. Coconut milk, it turns out, is sold here in tins with pictures of palm trees that look apologetic. Curry leaves — actual, fresh curry leaves — cannot be found in any supermarket, no matter how large, no matter how it advertises its world foods aisle, an aisle I have come to know as the place hope goes to be marked down. Rice exists but the wrong rice, in bags the size of my forearm rather than the size of a pillow, priced like a delicacy.

Salvation came, as it usually does here, from asking. The Sri Lankan Society president — a fourth-year engineering student who treats new arrivals' food emergencies with ambulance-service seriousness — sent me a list within an hour:

• The Tamil grocery two towns over: curry leaves, frozen pandan, real rice
• The Bangladeshi shop behind the bus station: green chillies with actual heat
• The Polish shop, unexpectedly, for coconut oil at a sane price
• A WhatsApp group where somebody's aunty sells homemade lunumiris

Note the shape of that list. Nothing about surviving here as a foreigner is found in the main aisles. It is all side streets and back doors and somebody's aunty — an entire parallel infrastructure of the missed and the missing, invisible until another homesick person hands you the map.

Calling home for the recipe

On the 28th I attempted my mother's chicken curry, and I want to state for the record that I did it properly: I called her first. Recipes in my family are oral tradition, transmitted live, with commentary. She stayed on video for the whole hour — supervising, appalled, delighted. The onions were wrong (too pale; fry them longer). My roasted curry powder technique was wrong (that is not roasting, that is warming; braver, put it back). The coconut milk went in at the wrong moment and she made a sound I have only heard her make at weddings when the bride's sari is pinned badly.

But here is the thing: it worked. Not perfectly — my curry was to my mother's curry what my English accent is to the Queen's, recognisable but geographically confused. The kitchen, though, did not care about perfection. The kitchen filled up with the smell of roasted spices and simmering coconut milk, and the smell went down the corridor, and the one other student left in the house — a quiet Norwegian mathematician — appeared at the door like a cartoon character floating on a scent trail and asked, with the formality of his people, whether this was a private ceremony or whether one might be permitted to observe.

He was permitted. He had two helpings and asked for the history of rice and curry, which I delivered at a length he could not have anticipated.

What a kitchen knows

I have thought a lot since about why the cooking worked when the lying in bed did not. I think it is this: homesickness is the feeling of being far from where your life makes sense, and you cannot argue with it, because it is correct — you are far. But a kitchen is a place where sense is manufactured. Fry the onions until they are the right colour — the colour is knowledge from home, alive in your hands. Roast the spices until they smell the way the kitchen you grew up in smelled. You are not pretending to be in Colombo. You are teaching one small room of England to speak Sinhala, one pot at a time.

My grandmother's sari is still wrapped around my laptop. The tin is back in its cupboard, seals tight, half the curry powder gone, and I have already messaged my mother about sending more with the next parcel. She replied with a voice note, seven minutes long, mostly instructions, ending — as all her voice notes end — with the same four words she said at the airport. The new year starts in two days. The kitchen and I will be ready for it.