Food Tales for Nostalgia

First Draft is a fortnightly column in our digital features section, where we invite translators to give us a glimpse into their process. They share a first draft of a single paragraph – no more – from a translation they are currently working on, accompanied by a brief reflection on the decisions, challenges, and discoveries that shaped that particular version. 

The first draft occupies a unique place in the life of a translation: it is where intuition meets craft, where meaning begins to find its form, and where the translator's voice first enters into conversation with the original text. It is provisional yet revealing, carrying within it the possibilities and tensions that later revisions may smooth over.

We think of this column as a translator’s diary: a space where translators let readers into the negotiations, dilemmas, interpretations, and choices that shape the work of translation.

“Someone planted an idea in Lochhmi’s head. She marched up to Indubala, took an eight-anna coin from her pouch, put it on the ground, and said, I’ll have something to eat at your house today maaji. Don’t mind, all right? The 12.25 to Canning has left, I won’t get home before dusk. I need some food, or I’ll collapse, maaji.’

Indubala neither agreed nor refused. No guest at the family home in Khulna across the border had ever left without a meal. Today, too, she couldn’t possibly send Lochhmi back unfed. She couldn’t bring herself to say that her larder was bare, there wasn’t even a handful of rice to be cooked. What about her lokkhir jhapi, where she saved a coin or two now and then? Empty. She didn’t even have the means to buy a bit of humble muri for Lochhmi. Without pondering too much, Indubala tied the coin that the fisherwoman had given her securely to the end of the achol of her shaari draped over her left shoulder. Then she balanced a pot of water on the unoon, put her young daughter to bed in the room upstairs, and despatched her eldest son Prodeep to the grocer’s. Going out the back door, she picked some tender pumpkin leaves from the garden, along with ripe chillies. After months, or was it years, she fetched the heavy sheel, a proud member of the kitchen from her mother-in-law’s reign, and laid it tenderly on the floor. She washed the ancient, ice-cold grinding stone with care, placed a few mustard grains on them, and picked up the pestle. The primeval friction between the sheel and the nora swiftly turned the last of the mustard seeds that Indubala’s mother had sent her from Khulna into an ever so slightly grainy paste. Meanwhile the thick green pumpkin leaves were simmering in the kawrai in which the water had all but vaporised. Now she released the mustard paste from cupped hands into the shallow, circular pan with conveniently located handles, where the tender leaves began to bubble in the low heat of the coal fire. Upstairs her daughter Khuku opened her eyes and waved her arms and legs in play. Both the boys ran up to the kitchen door with their plates in the hope of being served some rice to eat. The fiery tang of the chillies was still soaking into the light green mustard-flavoured pumpkin leaf curry.”

An excerpt from the first draft of Arunava Sinha’s translation of “Indubala Bhaater Hotel” by Kallol Lahiri.

Kallol Lahiri’s Bengali novella “Indubala Bhaater Hotel” (2021) is meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia and longing for a specific past. The novelist does this by using food to trigger individual, collective, family, and even racial memories — of lives lived or recounted. Of times experienced first-hand, or vicariously through recollections. Of tastes and flavours remembered on the tongue or through family legends. 

This is not a revolutionary notion. But, the success of this approach assumes that the novel’s readers share the same culinary history as the writer. For the original Bengali readership, this assumption is a reasonable one. The dishes encountered on the pages — prepared in particular ways, eaten at certain times of the day, month, year, or season, by specific people — already exist in the collective sensory archives. They easily summon histories of loss, migration, adaptation and yearning. 

The novel tells the story of Indubala, now in her seventies, who recollects the dishes that she grew up eating in East Pakistan — the country created by the Partition of India and of Bengal. These dishes bring back to her memories not only of food but of her childhood, first love, family relationships and youth. Now, she cooks them for her customers in a Calcutta restaurant, Bhaater Hotel, after which the book is named. The language subtly combines speech and thought, often flowing smoothly from one to the other and back. These non-transitions had to be carried over into English.

“Indubala Bhaater Hotel” speaks directly to the people of Bengal, many of whose families were separated all those years ago by the Partition. The nostalgia, therefore, is rooted in the reader’s familiarity with the food and the larger culture behind it. The book begins with a burst of remembered tastes and flavours, re-created lovingly by an ageing woman for her young patrons, for many of whom the food represents links with their own family histories.

Now, what happens when this novel is translated into English? Everything shifts. Translation unsettles all assumptions. In English, the novel occupies a different field of reception. The reader is unlikely to recognise the names of the dishes or the ingredients, has probably not tasted them, and is unable to imagine them with precision.  The English reader doesn’t hanker for the taste with the fervour that has, for instance, led several YouTube channels to dedicate themselves to the recipes mentioned in “Indubala Bhaater Hotel”.

The cultural memory that sustains the original Bengali text is absent in English. The translation, therefore, cannot rely on recognition as a means of evoking nostalgia. The question, then, is not how to reproduce the original experience — since that is impossible — but how to create an equivalent emotional effect. 

There is an interesting parallel here with the flood of Japanese novels translated into English, where food plays a central role. There, too, the food comes from a different culture, but thanks to the globalisation of Japanese cuisine, readers do have some awareness — and, more  importantly, curiosity — about this food. Yang Shuang-zi’s Mandarin novel, the 2026 International Booker Prize Winner, “Taiwan Travelogue”, also uses local food from Taiwan as a key element of the narrative. In Lin King’s English translation, the food retains its distance from the reader, who is not expected, even in the original, to already be familiar with it. Instead, the food serves to represent larger cultural elements, meant for the reader to discover, rather than be nostalgic about.

The challenge for a translation of  “Indubala Bhaater Hotel” is different from both of these cases. It is to evoke what is described in Welsh as hiraeth — homesickness for a home that never actually existed for the English language reader. How can a translator achieve this? How can the translation not alienate the reader with its emphasised foreignness, that risks being exoticised? 

For me, the first draft is aimed at getting as close as possible to the invisibles in the text: voice, music, implication, allusion, and avoidance, among other things. The equivalents of words, phrases, and so are ongoing negotiations through subsequent drafts. I have tried to lean into the richness of the tastes and flavours, without trying to familiarise them for the reader.  To focus on the characters’ responses, and nudge the reader towards similar feelings. The translation serves up the tang of mustard oil, the heat of green chillies, the thick sweetness of jaggery syrup, the freshness of greens, the tenderness of fish. My objective is to draw out distinctive sensations through language that try to compensate for the absence of cultural familiarity. This is, after all, a novel to be tasted as much as it is to be read.