A Grandmother in Amritsar, an Afternoon, an Audio Recording
Bibiji Surinder Kaur, 84, has bought mustard oil every Tuesday for sixty years. A long conversation about memory, kitchens and what a good bottle should never lose.
Bibiji Surinder Kaur lives on the third floor of a narrow house in Katra Ahluwalia, Amritsar, in the room where her three children were born. She is eighty-four. She walks to the kirana at the corner of her gali every Tuesday morning and buys the same things in the same order: one kilo of toor dal, two kilos of atta, half a kilo of jaggery, and one litre of mustard oil. The brand has changed twice in six decades, both times because the old one stopped being made.
“Sixty years ago, every house had two oils. One for the kitchen, one for the head. Both were mustard.”
On the oil her mother used
She talks about the kirana down the gali where her mother would send her, eight years old, with a steel can. The oil was sold loose then, poured carefully and carried home like something precious. She remembers the smell more clearly than the shopkeeper.
On winter mornings
She rubs mustard oil into her grandson's scalp every Sunday afternoon. She has been doing this since he was four. He is now twenty-three and lives in Bangalore. He flies home in December. The first thing she does when he arrives is heat the oil.