Translating Caste Across Unfamiliar Hungers: A Recipe in Six Meals

Preparation Time: Ongoing. Still assimilating, still organising thoughts.

Cooking Time: September–November 2025-Present

Serves: Hungry stomachs & Unfinished worlds.

This recipe cannot be replicated exactly. Ingredients shift with history, with geography, with who spoke and who broke bread, and who was made to wait at the door before they could do either.

Mise en Place

There I was, three weeks from my flight, staring at an approved visa to enter Australia, sorry I mean so-called Australia. I don't know exactly when the "so-called" crept in, only that once it did, I couldn't unsay it. Borders are strange, isn’t it? Two imaginary lines deciding whether I was viable, meritorious, worth letting through. I'd answered that logic before. My caste had asked me similar questions, in the same maybe even louder tone, on the land I was leaving, on to a land waiting for visa to enter.

I knew very little about where I was going. I knew the name. I’ve heard of the cities, some fragments of their colonial history. I knew I hated their cricket team, well not anymore, I now just hate the game. I hated it the way every kid of my generation hates a rival, it was like a rite of passage….. I hated Ricky Ponting and loved Adam Gilchrist, and didn't think too hard about it. It was cricket that first taught me this country had its own fault lines. I learned that when Indian cricketers were racially abusing Andrew Symonds, the commentary around it cracked open a story I hadn't been told. I knew kangaroos. I knew platypuses.. yes that impossible thing, and a continent still learning how to say the names of the people who were here long before it became a colony.

This was the sum of what I carried in my head. What I carried in my suitcase was clothes, books, and chilli powder, a key character in the show I was travelling to perform. Come Eat With Me is a one-person, performative piece about the tangled, layered relationship between caste and food, staged over a shared meal. I packed guts and chilli powder in roughly equal measure. I was coming to tell a story and feed a few hungers, some of theirs, some of mine.