PERSON Poem: Shukto, As I Carried It, by Sreyash Sarkar

I.
I was born between two tastes.
Salt. Bitterness.
No flag for the tongue.
Only a bowl.
Full.
Of memory pretending to be food.
Dida’s saree—mango-skin folding open.
Light hung in neem.
The dusk stirred by her hands.

II.
The spoon—
gleamed like an answer I wasn’t ready for.
Her song crossed rivers.
Not in words. In fever.
Cumin fell like ash
across the borders inside me.

III.
I came blurred—
like something dissolved in poppy.
The marrow of gourd stuck to the teeth of silence.
Sap held the shape of her absence.
Every step—
a prayer that forgot its god.

IV.
Plantain. Lentil.
Soft wounds.
Jacaranda bruised the air.
Violet means something else in exile.
Clove burned under the ribs.
I carried her in my hunger.
Her voice—current, pull, undertow.

V.
Oil wept through neem.
She bathed me in mustard steam.
Spoke in turmeric.
Each taste:
a map
that refused to settle on one country.
A forest breathing from the root up.

VI.
Now the bowl is a silence.
Not empty—just unsaid.
Where is the address of dusk
when no one is waiting at the door?
Does it dream in ginger?
Or does memory
rot sweetly
in the dark?

VII.
The last spoon.
I am not the meal. I am what remains.
Chalice. Vessel.
Her voice breaks into spice,
into shade,
into a home I can never return to
because I never left it.

Notes

1. Shukto:

A quintessential dish in Bengali cuisine, shukto is a bittersweet medley of vegetables—typically including bitter gourd (uchhe), plantain, eggplant, drumsticks (shojne danta), and often flavoured with mustard, ginger, and milk. It is both a taste and a ritual—served first in traditional meals to prepare the palate and, symbolically, the soul. Bitterness here is not rejected but embraced—an initiation into memory, grief, and the complexity of origin.

2. Dida:

A term of affection and respect for one’s maternal grandmother in Bengali. Dida is not just a familial figure but an archive of taste, voice, and survival—a carrier of tradition, a keeper of recipes, a bridge between past and present.