BuzzFeed News Online

BY WENDY J. FOX
JULY 26, 2022

Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family by Madhushree Ghosh (University of Iowa Press)

In this memoir, Ghosh is the architect of a cultural, familial, and political history through the lens of food. She uses the same care in writing of a touching Diwali celebration she hosts in San Diego as when she tells of a young Sikh man whose shop is burned in the riots after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. She memorializes her parents through food — going to the fish market with her father, remembering how her mother prepared the fish — and throughout the arc of the book Ghosh asks what it means to be of one place yet living in another, whether as a Bengali living in Delhi or as a South Indian on the West Coast of America. Ghosh braids the American ideas of Indian cuisine against the connection she forges with a local Indian restaurant that caters to Californians looking for chicken curry; she also pairs the colonial history of tea with ubiquity of masala chai. She is at her best when she writes of her “now ex,” a man whose family she once tried to impress, only to have a battle of ghee with her “now ex”-mother-in-law, and, later, a battle over marital assets with the ex himself. While Khabaar is a food memoir, it is also much more than that: It is the story of a woman who learns to find a seat at her own table.