Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri

In Never Too Much on My Plate, published by Om Books International, Ramona Sen turns to essays that braid food with family history, nostalgia, class and changing urban India. In this conversation, she reflects on memory, literary identity, publishing, and why every meal carries the past within it.

Shantanu: Never Too Much on My Plate marks your first major excursion into non-fiction after novels like Crème Brûlée and The Lady on the Horse and Other Secrets. What drew you towards the essay form, and did writing about food and memory demand a different emotional honesty from you as a writer?

Ramona: Ironically, even in school I usually skipped the essay and chose the short story. The essays here came to me out of the blue one day when I sat down to respond to a writing prompt online that invited submissions delving into eating cultures, food history and literature. It made me think about what I like eating, and how much of that harks back to familial patterns. I’ve discovered that the essay is a way to treat one’s own life not as something extraordinary, but as a microcosm that reflects everything which has played out before one’s own limited experiences. And this I suppose does demand a certain emotional honesty, and also humility, because writing fiction allows us to couch everything as figments of our imagination, which would be disingenuous to do for the essay.

Shantanu: Food in this book becomes much more than appetite. It turns into a map of family history, migration, class, nostalgia and even grief. At what point did you realize that food could hold together so many strands of personal and cultural storytelling?

Ramona: I’m always preoccupied with nostalgia, personal histories and the class-caste tussle. My novel The Lady on the Horse and Other Secrets explores the need to trace our origins to shed light on our present circumstances. I suppose it’s become a pattern with me to attempt to identify which events in the past might have led us where we are now. The first three essays in the book do just that, touching on ghoti-bangal food snobbery, colonial Christmas heritage and how liberalization changed food cravings for generations to come.

Most of the other essays also talk about how eating habits have evolved over time to shape our current dinner plates; my mother’s keema pasta was the precursor to Spaghetti Bolognese for me, our local bread man is losing his business to artisanal sourdough, the rusk we dip into tea can be traced back to Mughal armies needing an energy-laden snack. I also have a section on other people tracing their own kitchen habits to culinary memories. In a nutshell, we like to recreate our mothers’ recipes which they recreated from our grandmothers who were cooking in a whole different era and here we are now ordering Kosha Mangsho Ravioli at lunch. Everything we do has its roots in the past.

Shantanu: The structure of the book itself – appetisers, main course, digestif, dessert – is wonderfully playful. Did the ‘menu’ format come naturally from the subject, or was it a deliberate literary device to shape the reader’s journey?

Ramona: I found myself writing a wide variety of food-related essays for this collection. For instance, not all the pieces are about me. I wanted to represent other people’s culinary experiences and memories as well (that’s probably the journalist in me emerging). I had a novella written already and thought it was a good theme-fit. I wanted a recipes section, but not in the traditional sense. And after all that, I didn’t want the reader to be confused. So what better way to structure a book on food writing if not as a menu?

As I’ve said in my Author’s Note, this book is not for chefs or food writers, it is for all the gourmands who make their memories with aromas and flavours, who live their lives one meal to the next. The menu offers five courses: Soup and Dinner Rolls (introductions), Appetisers (essays), Main Course (novella), Dessert (recipes), Digestif (afterword on comfort food). After which, you can Call the Cab and Totter Home (acknowledgements). I’ve also included a note on how to partake of said menu which clarifies that while the Soup prepares your palate for what the book contains, you can leap right into the Main Course or peck at the various Appetisers. Since it’s more a la carte and less table d’hôte, you can mix and match the menu offerings, but I’d still leave the Dessert and Digestif for the end.

Shantanu: Readers of Crème Brûlée will be delighted to see Aabir Mookerjee returning in the novella Potluck. What made you revisit that world and character after all these years, and how do you think you have changed as a storyteller since your first novel?

Ramona: Potluck was originally written for the launch of a reading app in 2018, which no longer exists. It seemed a shame to have it disappear into the e-book nebula since, as you know, novellas are hard to publish. I wrote it some years after Crème Brûlée, so I do think the writing is tighter and the plot is better paced.

It took me four years to write The Lady on the Horse and Other Secrets and it was in that phase that I felt my writing evolve on the page. Originally conceived as a coming-of-age story of two girls, it metamorphosed into a family saga spanning a hundred years in Calcutta. I found myself diving into historic events and tying it to the daily lives of ordinary people.

While the antics of Aabir will always be amusing to write, now that I’ve found my historical lens, I might never be able to put it down. In that sense, the essays reflect my ‘adult’ narrative voice more than Potluck. Since I started writing Crème Brûlée fresh out of university, I feel as though everything I’ve written and published over the years mark the milestones of my growing up. Although I have to admit that the journey started with a short story titled ‘Belinda’s Dressing Table’ when I was five, a story my mother told me about fairies who come to little girls if they keep their rooms clean. It was the only way she was able to get me to eat pepe sheddho as a child.

Shantanu: You’ve had the unique perspective of being both a writer and an editor/content professional. How do you view the current publishing and literary ecosystem in India, especially for literary fiction and hybrid writing that doesn’t fit neatly into categories?

Ramona: Yes, I started out in HarperCollins India in marketing and then shifted to editorial. So I’ve seen editors struggle to commission the manuscripts they like and try to justify it to sales. I’ve seen marketing juggle all the books published in a month on little to no publicity budgets. I’ve attended celebrity book launches as well as book launches where no one turned up other than the publishing team (the books in the latter category were often the good ones). I went on to journalism and then a communications start-up, so I’ve seen all kinds of ‘content’ being generated for consumption. I see this Catch 22 playing out at all times: there are more aspiring writers in India now than there are readers.

Given our striated society, there can never be a book which works ‘for everyone’. Every individual has their own relationship with the English language (another phenomenon that can be traced back to our history). Publishers trying to meet these diverse and conflicting demands has led to all-round dissatisfaction. For some, commercial fiction is ‘unreadable’. For others, literary fiction is ‘pretentious’. There either doesn’t seem to be enough of one genre or too much of another. Perhaps we need more publishers to publish more books for all the diverse readers we have in India.

But distribution is more difficult than writers know. Making enough sales to survive is a massive hurdle, which is why I have tremendous respect for a publishing house like Speaking Tiger which built its lists slowly, one good book at a time, without having a backlist from international publishers. I see Running Head has dipped its toes into this pool as well and I can only hope they see success.

I think what could help publishers is that most of us try to get off Instagram reels before bed and go back to reading the old-fashioned way. The act of reading has been marred by our phones buzzing next to us with DMs, urgent work mails or comical memes. Back to the Page, kids!

Shantanu: Your prose often balances wit, cultural observation and emotional intimacy without becoming sentimental. What does your writing routine look like? Are you a disciplined daily writer, or do you write in bursts around work and life?

Ramona: Now that I’m on sabbatical, I am a daily writer. I’ll hedge on the disciplined bit, though. I do write obsessively but I can’t put myself on a schedule. I detest routine. Some days I’ll skip lunch to write (I hear some scoffing but it’s true), or I’ll scribble on my Google docs app so that I can change position and give my neck a break. It often takes a while to really get into the mood of a piece and it seems a shame to break the flow to run a chore or hit the gym. When I was juggling writing with a full-time job, there were longer gaps. But this helped to revisit a manuscript in new light and change direction accordingly. I wrote a lot of my last novel during the pandemic since going to office and social dinners were on pause. If writers find that time-blocking helps their schedule, that’s an advantage. If time-blocking doesn’t help, I’d suggest writing on the go on an app or in a notebook, because some progress is better than no progress. It’s like everything else that you might want to make headway in: just show up every day, however inadequate you think it might be in the moment.

Shantanu: The book is deeply rooted in Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay, but it also reflects changing urban Indian food cultures, from old-school ‘Continental’ eateries to delivery apps and café culture. You have a unique grasp of the change in food habits over the last 15-20 years. Do you think Indian cities are losing culinary memory, or simply creating new ones?

Ramona: It’s an interesting time to be answering this question, given Bengal’s changing colours. This recent article by The Telegraph describes a rapidly changing culinary landscape. The following lines from my book feel weighed down with irony as the Chateaubriand steak disappears from club kitchens: It’s a stiff competition between the Bombay ham steak and the Calcutta chateaubriand, or the Calcutta bread pudding and the Bombay mawa cake. But what’s grand is that I’ll never have to choose.

I don’t think Indian cities have lost their culinary memories entirely. But we might be a ticking clock if we continue to pretend that certain events in the past never happened and the taste of time didn’t mark our palates with its varied flavours. It is in fact a diverse country with diverse people. The way we eat is representative not only of religious beliefs but also of the caste, class and community assigned to us at birth. A broad diktat to fit a forced narrative of our cuisine will work about as well as dissimilar readers being offered the same genre of commercial fiction. While the culinary world is its own art form, we can’t move forward if the past is erased. I have a feeling (in my gut, if you will) that the next decade will see a more drastic change in the gastronomical landscape, and by then it’ll be time for another book of essays. I only hope I won’t have to be a proponent of Calcutta’s chilli parwal instead of Calcutta’s chilli pork.

Shantanu: Having written fiction, essays, food writing and cultural commentary, do you consciously resist being boxed into one genre or literary identity?

Ramona: I don’t consciously resist it. Reading and writing is a little like waking up and wondering what you’ll eat that day. Some days I’m in the mood for dal bhaat aloo bhaja, on other days I want a ham steak. I might wake up with a certain voice in my head or story idea that needs telling in a particular way. I run with that. There was enough time between my first and second novels for me to not be boxed into a genre. I think I might have two distinct narrative voices: humorous and serious. Crème Brûlée was humorous with smatterings of serious. The Lady on the Horse and Other Secrets is more serious with humour to lighten its darker portions. Never Too Much on My Plate does a bit of both depending on the subject of the essay.

Shantanu: And finally, now that Never Too Much on My Plate is out in the world, what comes next for you: another work of fiction, more non-fiction, or perhaps something that combines the two again?

Ramona: I’m definitely first and foremost a fiction writer. I have multiple ideas floating around in various documents but I’m working on a particular one with more focus. That apart, I’m also building something for serious fiction aspirants, who can keep an eye out on Write Up Your Alley for more details.