Indian Hospitality is Not for the Faint-Hearted
Especially when your hours slaving in the kitchen get eclipsed by a store-bought cracker.
Indian hospitality is not for the faint-hearted. In India, if you’re visiting from overseas, the red carpet isn’t just rolled out — it’s pressure-washed, flower-strewn and anointed. There are feasts, sightseeing excursions, introductions to everyone in the village and a flurry of elaborate home-cooked meals that require hours to prepare.
I know this first-hand from visiting my relatives there as a kid. I was treated like a little princess. In Singapore, where I live, we’re more subdued. We’ll host you at our home if we like you. If we like you even more, maybe we’ll take you out to see the city. But the expectation to host in that Indian sense? That doesn’t come naturally to our Singaporean branch of the family tree.
Still, when some relatives from India came to visit for Deepavali — most notably including my grandfather, the family patriarch, my mum pulled out all the stops. She is Singaporean but got used to doing hospitality the Indian way, since marrying my dad (an Indian national). She would host relatives graciously in our home for two to three month stretches (yes, they each stayed that long) and would make homemade meals every day, regardless of whether she had just finished a long night shift or not.
And now that Deepavali was approaching, the Indian equivalent of Christmas, she took extra care to prepare. She spent the day before at the market picking out the freshest ingredients and the entire day cooking. She prepared gravies, vegetables, mutton dishes, chicken dishes. Everything except beef, of course.
She was so busy cooking and cleaning in the days leading up to this event that I barely got to spend time with her. I watched her move through the house like a focused whirlwind — always one dish, one errand, one chore away from her elusive rest.
Now, my grandfather from India is a regal man. He is stately and lion-like in bearing, with a thick moustache and a polished wooden cane. He wears a pristine white buttoned shirt, and a matching gold-bordered vesti, which is a traditional ankle-length wrap. You’d think wearing something skirt-like might soften his appearance. But no. He had the gravitas of a king from a faraway Indian state.
He worked as an astrologer, and I remember people sitting by his feet in the village, listening intently as he predicted the future for them. I was one of them at his feet, shocked by the revelations he would share, especially when I saw them come true in the coming days and weeks. I thought my grandfather could predict everything. But apparently, not dinner.
Near the end of the meal, he leaned back in his chair, chewed slowly, and declared with a discontented look on his face, “The pappadum is nice.” That was it.
No recognition of the tender mutton, the many dimensions of different spices in the gravies, or the hours my mother spent wiping sweat from her brow while curries sputtered and steamed in front of her. No. The pappadum. A store-bought disc of lentil flour, imported from India. Fried for maybe two seconds till it was done.
A pappadum comes ready-to-cook. There’s almost nothing you can do to change how it tastes. And so it would always taste good. But for that to be the only thing my grandfather complimented.
There was a silence so complete, the only sound in the room was the crisp crackle of the second bite my grandpa took of the pappadum. My mother grew very still. I imagine her heart was racing, that she wanted to yell, but outwardly she remained composed. The art of swallowing a burn with grace is something many Indian women have to learn.
No one else at the table said anything. Maybe they didn’t want to challenge the lion. Maybe they didn’t notice the implied insult. I certainly didn’t.
I was a child, too distracted by the thrill of being allowed to eat with my hands and the crisp joy of pappadums — which, in fairness, were my favourite Indian food at the time. So I didn’t realise I was witnessing the culinary equivalent of a slap across the face.
After the dinner, my father admitted to my mum that my grandfather was insensitive, but he told her not to take it to heart because that was the kind of person he was.
Years later, I still think about that day. About how “praise” can wound more deeply than outright criticism. About how women are treated with disrespect, but asked to swallow it all and keep cooking anyway.
My mum is a career woman. She works harder and much longer than my dad, due to the nature of her job. So it hurt me to see how she was still expected to carry both domestic and career roles, only to serve men who would judge her efforts unfairly. It makes me sick, and that’s probably one of the reasons why I chose to marry a man who doesn’t have those kinds of expectations.
My husband is not a lion by default. With me, he’s more like a golden retriever who tells white lies about the quality of my cooking when it’s bad, and runs in circles shouting praises when it’s good. I love him. He has never, not once, praised the rice when I’ve clearly worked hard on the roast, or subjected me to that kind of humiliation.
I think my mother is much stronger than I realised. Over the years, she has since broken free from the negative patterns and set a standard for herself. And I find myself tracing similar patterns. When I cook, I do it unapologetically now. Sure, I want to please the people I’m cooking for. But I’m not going to bend over backwards.
If you didn’t like the food, and give me constructive criticism, I’ll thank you and work on improving it. But if you compliment only the pappadum, the only thing that’ll crack next time is my tolerance for disrespect.
