Missing an Ingredient
Those Delicious Letters is a light, frothy read that falls short of being something more
Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta’s second book, Those Delicious Letters, revolves around food, just like her first, Bong Mom’s Cookbook, but this time around the popular blogger and writer has experimented with fiction. The protagonist Shubhalaxmi SenGupta introduces herself with her hyphenated surname, explaining, “as in, I was sane before marriage”. The book begins with her 40th birthday and follows her while she has something of a midlife crisis. At her surprise party, while listening to her frenemies brag about their humanitarian aid trips, the marathons they have run, the instruments they have learned to play, dream jobs and “learning to cook at least five things your mother made”, she spirals down memory lane.
We learn that Shubha gave up a career in architecture to look after her two daughters and now that they are 15 and 12, she feels like her life has been spent “packing lunchboxes, snipping coriander, sitting outside Piyu’s ballet lessons and waiting in parking lots for Riya’s swimming lessons”. But being a “Bong mom”, in her case, did not mean churning out Bengali recipes for her family. Traditional Bengali meals were more her busy husband Sameer’s area. She was the type to have taco nights for the kids or bake a salmon fillet in the oven. Having lost her mother at a young age, Shubha never learnt how to cook Bengali food and confesses that initially it felt “too painful to attempt”. Now that the pain of having lost her mother has dulled, she is intimidated by the idea of cooking those dishes.
It is around this time that mysterious letters from a woman claiming to be Shubha’s grandmother are delivered to her office (she is 20 per cent partner at a fledgeling publishing firm). Each letter in this semi-epistolary is dedicated to a different month of the Bengali year, highlighting the recipes eaten during the season—kochuri for Jamaishasti celebrated in the summers, khichuri and bhapa Ilish that spells monsoon for all Bengalis, and the Saraswati Puja special gota Sheddho, among others. The book is a breezy read and the grandmother’s nostalgic ramblings provide a compelling romantic backstory.
But Those Delicious Letters also has its flaws. How does a middle-class Bengali grandmother who was in college during the Swadeshi movement know about cooking hilsa in the oven? The book also suffers from a lack of exploration of the distant relationship between Shubha and Sameer. The supporting characters, too, seem unidimensional. Even her angst at losing her mother and the solace she finds in these recipes decades later feels like more tell, less show. As a reader, it is hard to relate to Shubha. Plus, to nit-pick a little more, while “liberally pouring 1960s’ wines”, could she not have chosen a more convincing variety than Chardonnay?