What's on your lips

I graduated as a computer engineer in Montreal where I grew up. One day after a long day at work, I fell and injured my hip and spine. I was 24 years old and couldn’t walk, sit or lie down. The fall triggered a huge identity crisis for me. When you’re young, you just live and use your body. Being temporarily disabled was very shocking. My intuition told me that I had to enter the pain, that my body was trying to tell me something, and when I look back at that episode, the accident was a blessing in an ugly disguise. It triggered this intense need to be creative. I wanted to do something else with my life, and I started to think about what creativity meant to me.

To me, creativity was something warm and loving – a link between love and the act of creating. As a child, I played piano and danced, but I was born into an Indian immigrant family where creativity wasn’t seen as a profession – it was seen as a hobby. While I was laid up in bed and had all the time in the world to think, I started to wonder whether my life could be full of what I’m most passionate about? Could it become my job? The thought started to expand within me and generated an excitement that meant that my pain almost made sense.

The language of love in my family was food. The way my mother showed my sisters and me love and care was by providing nourishing meals. My mother’s kitchen never slept. Wonderful, and sometimes strange, smells always streamed out of her kitchen and materialized on our plates. There was always a story being told by the food in the pots, and I realized that food made me feel loved.

Luckily, I’m slightly mad, and when I want something, I go after it. So I applied to the culinary school in Montreal and felt that everything just fell into place.

When I was young, I spent most of my time studying in the library, but at culinary school a whole new world of friendships, cooking times, carving and endless plasters on my fingers from cutting mishaps opened up. I went out, drank, surrendered myself to taste universes and discovered a whole new side of myself. A world that wasn’t only intellectual, but also sensuous. I entered into my own body.

One of the teachers at the school told me:

“Your parents are from India, you look Indian, but you know very little about Indian food culture. Why don’t you do some work experience in India?”

I thought he must be crazy. What would I do in India? Cook French food? But I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. Because India is, of course, a piece in the personal jigsaw that I was now working on. Maybe I could learn something about myself if I connected with that part of me.

I arrived in New Delhi in June. It was 40°C and there were mosquitoes, traffic and billions of people everywhere. Total chaos. I had found a work placement at a hotel and worked in a basement with 160 men and one other woman. It was such a crazy challenge. They didn’t understand what I was saying. But when you’ve grown up in an immigrant family and your parents came to Canada with five cents to their name, you have an implicit understanding that you just have to succeed. Giving up is not an option, and today I’m so thankful for that fighter instinct. I boiled and sweated my way through my chef’s jackets from morning to night on my little station, but I stayed there – and kept extending my stay – without really being able to explain why. I ended up staying there for nine years. I married an Indian man and opened a restaurant called Chez Nini, a cozy little bistro on the French model which became my baby. Then I got divorced. My heart was broken, and I used the despair and grief as my fuel to focus on my restaurant. It was such a healing process where I grew and went through a great transformation. Though, after 6 years I was physically and emotionally exhausted and realized that the time had come to close the restaurant and leave India.

Ayurveda can teach us a great deal about ourselves. Most of the time we walk around ignorant of what our bodies really need. What does the feeling of hunger or a craving tell us? It tells us something about what’s happening in our body – in the same way as a feeling tells us something about how our soul’s feeling.

We are very concerned about what type of petrol we put in our cars, but our body is the vehicle that we use to transport us to the most beautiful experiences in our lives, but we still eat so much food that’s bad for us. The Internet has contributed to so much confusion about food and health that we’ve become removed from our natural instincts. Ayurveda teaches us that food must constitute nourishment for all of your life – your joy, your cells, your brain, your energy. Eating goes so much further than just the mechanical action of putting something in your mouth.

The idea with my cookbook was to make food based on Ayurvedic principles just as tasty as chocolate or a cake. I wanted to showcase the colors, the joy of the sexy and the delicious. That’s my personal interpretation of Ayurveda.

The book is called Ojas because in Ayurveda ojas is the energy that gives you life. It’s your spark and everything you use to feed your body and your mind. The finest by-product of all the things you consume. The food, of course, but also every table you have sat at, the conversation, the feeling of community, every memory.