some things feel sacred

like making rice the way my grandmother taught me. Rice, just barely more water, pressure cooker, bring to the point of pressure release, simmer on impossibly low heat five minutes, turn off the heat, two minutes, release the steam, the lid, the rice. Today I mix old and new: pressure-cooker rice and prepackaged cream sauce originally intended for chicken. It's going to be egg curry, now. Dadi would flinch but she knows cooking as all-day practice. Discipline. I mostly learned it as hunger-avoidance, as party trick, as survival skill. I do not eat chickpea flour and water and spices, mixed and balled up in my hand; that would be true survival cooking. Rickshaw-wallahs eat that day in, day out. Their calves are ropy muscle tied to bone; their faces are gaunt--it is cheap, cheaper than the eggs you can buy from the next wallah over, with his charcoal fire-in-a-pot for roasting them. It doesn't taste bad, if you don't mind chalky, and it's high in protein. They eat a lot. Then they barter: extra for a fat American, they say. It's a lot of weight.