Article begins
When Shanthy left her coastal home in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in 1970 for Chicago, she carried ways of caring that would reshape her family’s bonds through war and displacement. Over the next fifteen years, as violence against Tamils escalated, her eight siblings—Shakuntala, Chandran, Babu, Nala, Saddan, Kala, Amutha, and Thushy—and their parents would scatter across temporary homes in Europe, Africa, and the United States, each finding their own way to maintain connection through food. By the time they reunited in Rochester, New York, the Sri Lankan Civil War had erupted, transforming their displacement from a detour and into a permanent reality.
The family initially clung to the hopes of return. But as the war stretched into 26 brutal years, Jaffna—where coconut palms swayed in salty breezes and neighbors called through open windows—had been irrevocably altered. Extended family and old friends dispersed, and familiar rhythms of life were interrupted.
Food emerged as their bridge between past and present, between scattered family members, between the home they lost and the ones they were creating. The familiar aroma of spices and the warmth of shared meals offered both comfort and connection. Each sibling developed distinct practices of care through food, yet cooking and dining together became their shared language. Through these practices, they could not only evoke the flavors of home and pass down traditions but also begin mending wounds left by separation. In the process, they built something more than memories—they created what scholars call an “accidental community of memory,” bound together by ongoing practices of care that sustained them through displacement.
The following stories reveal how different members of this family use food not just to preserve identity, but to actively nurture relationships despite upheaval. Their experiences show how cooking becomes an act of survival, a ritual of remembrance, and a way of building community in new places. Together, they remind us that even in displacement, people find ways to care for one another, creating unexpected forms of connection and belonging that span continents and generations.
Shanthy: Care in Feeding Others
“I didn’t learn how to cook appam until I moved here,” Shanthy says, expertly swirling fermented rice batter in her appachatti. The curved pan transforms the coconut-milk mixture into delicate crepes—lacy-edged with pillowy centers. Though new to her repertoire, her movements suggest years of kitchen intuition.
She works with methodical grace, ingredients precisely measured and arranged. Each appam demands attention: the batter must ferment just long enough, the heat must brown the edges while keeping the center tender. She customizes them—some with egg, others with jaggery or sweet milk—reading each person’s preferences like a familiar story.
For Shanthy, cooking has always been a language of care. Her journey into the kitchen began in childhood, first by watching her mother, then through her mother-in-law’s exacting instruction when she married at sixteen. As the first to leave Jaffna, she carried this knowledge across oceans, using it to nurture first her younger siblings, then her own family.
Kala: Care as Remembering What You Can’t Have
Kala never diluted spices in dosa, puttu, sambal, shrimp curry, and pongal for her children, training their palates to know home. Like her sisters, she learned to cook by watching her mother at an early age in their small outdoor kitchen. Decades later, she now treasures her mother’s handwritten recipes, sharing them through her own cooking for her children and other family members, pausing to reflect on the kitchen where she first learned these dishes.
But Sri Lanka’s fruits, her absolute favorite, elude re-creation. Through shopping and cooking, she seeks fruits that evoke home, tending to a garden of memories with her family.
“Katukali, a purple-violet color, tastes like cherry. We grew it in Chavakachcheri. Six or seven varieties of mangoes, we ate them like candy. In Point Pedro, we have bananas, jackfruit, so fresh.”
Through these recollections, Kala weaves a rich tapestry of flavors, textures, and landscapes, bringing her family together not just around the table, but around the memories of the foods that flourish in their homeland. She hopes her children actively seek out these stories, asking questions about fruits they’ve never tasted but somehow know through her detailed descriptions and careful preservation of memory.
“When you are young, you don’t worry about anything. But as you get older, you feel it, no matter where you live,” she reflects, her voice carrying both loss and determination. This feeling drives her to continue sharing these memories, turning what could be mere nostalgia into an active practice of care that connects her children to their heritage.
Nala: Care as Reconceptualizing Tradition
“Payasam is the sweet, so it has to be sweet,” Nala says of this creamy tapioca dessert, traditionally made for celebrations. She doesn’t even like sweets, but payasam is her dish.
In her kitchen, tapioca pearls sizzle in butter before joining the rolling boil. The tapioca must turn glass-clear before she adds coconut milk and her distinctive sweetener: jaggery. This unrefined palm sugar brings a complexity white sugar can’t match.
Like Shanthy, Nala never made payasam in Sri Lanka. She taught herself in Rochester, choosing jaggery because it felt right—a Sri Lankan ingredient for a Sri Lankan dish. Her care isn’t about perfectly replicating tradition. It’s about maintaining connection—to her culture and to those who gather for her dessert. Her payasam matters not for its exactness but for what it preserves.
Babu: Care as New Traditions
In Jaffna, Babu’s father ruled with an iron fist, especially at mealtime. No one was allowed to eat until he sampled and finished his food. A stray pebble in the rice could send a plate flying into the yard. His mother cooked; his father judged—a strict gendering of roles that reflected broader Tamil patriarchal traditions that kept men out of the kitchen. Had Babu stayed, he might have inherited that dynamic, perpetuating the distance between male authority and the intimate labor of cooking.
But displacement upended these gender norms. Like many Tamil men of his generation who were forced to leave home, like his younger brother Saddan, who learned to cook in his Indian boarding school, Babu learned to cook first for survival, then discovered it as a way to nurture others. This transformation wasn’t just about acquiring new skills—it represented a fundamental shift in how Tamil men could express care and participate in family life.
Fifty years later, cooking shapes his days as he settles into retirement. Each morning starts with solitary coffee, followed by exercise, then the trip to his grandchildren’s house. There, he prepares the dishes that root them to their heritage: paruppu, chicken fry, shrimp curry, and hard-boiled eggs with rice. In contrast to his father’s critical distance from the kitchen, Babu finds joy in the intimate details of feeding others. His grandchildren’s praise—“Your food is better than Amma’s [Babu’s wife]”—brings a delight unthinkable for men of his father’s generation.
“I feel good… content. When I cook, I feel relaxed. I enjoy.”
For Babu, cooking has become more than just a practice of joy and satisfaction—it represents a reimagining of what it means to be a Tamil man. His meals provide a link between generations, blending the past and the present while modeling new ways of expressing masculine care. It is not just about the food—it is about transforming patriarchal distance into intimate connection, nourishing his family both physically and emotionally in ways his father never could.
Saddan: Care through Staving off Longing
In Jaffna, Saddan’s role with food was minimal. While his sisters apprenticed in the kitchen, he and his brothers gathered firewood or fetched garden vegetables. They learned the taste of home but not its creation.
Displacement changed everything. At 19, Saddan found himself at an Indian boarding school with two other young men. Tired of cafeteria fare, they decided to cook their own meals on a dormitory fire stove. Like his older brother Babu, Saddan’s displacement disrupted traditional Tamil gender roles that had kept men from engaging in the intimate work of cooking. While their father had wielded authority from outside the kitchen, both brothers found themselves drawn into the daily practices of care that their mother and sisters had once managed alone. His mother sent handwritten recipes, and through burnt paruppu (lentils) and undercooked chicken, they learned.
“Whatever I ate in Sri Lanka, I’m having it here,” he responds proudly.
Saddan’s love of cooking is undeniable decades later. What began as a necessity became a means of transforming loss into nourishment, a way to bridge the distance between his past and his present. In the kitchen, he found not only sustenance but also connection, stitching together the threads of his identity and memories in each meal.
Chandran and Karthika: Care as Unwritten Recipes
Steam rises from the back patio, where Karthika works over two propane burners. She shakes unmeasured spices from unmarked containers onto a foil pan of mutton while managing large pots of green beans and eggplant. Though her setup looks improvised—a folding table, industrial-size spice tubs—her movements are precise. Her daughter films each step, trying to capture what can’t be written down.
“Do you feel like you want to write your recipes down?”
“The problem is… I don’t measure.”
“Nobody here measures!”
The irony is that Karthika learned Tamil cooking not from her mother, who carefully guarded her kitchen expertise, but from her father, Chandran. As a young man, he lost his right arm in a train accident in Sri Lanka. During years apart from her mother, Karthika watched her father cook by instinct, relying on touch, taste, and smell instead of written recipes. With Chandran gone, Karthika now passes on knowledge the same way—through shared moments at the stove, trusting in the inherited intuition that transcends formal instruction.
“But if you don’t measure, how will they learn?”
“I’m teaching her!”
For Karthika, care comes in the form of shared cooking experiences and unwritten recipes. These moments—unquantifiable, but deeply significant—allow her to pass on not just food, but also the lessons of resilience and adaptation. The food she prepares carries the essence of her family’s history and her father’s ingenuity, encapsulated in every unmeasured pinch of spice.
Shakuntala: Care as Paying Respect
Shakuntala, as the eldest child and daughter, didn’t grow up with the rest of her siblings. She was shuffled between relatives’ homes and boarding schools, never feeling a sense of stability. Cooking became a forced function. “That’s not something like they train you, and then you go on a job,” she reflects. “When you move around a lot like me, you are asked to do a little job, like peeling the onions, scraping the coconut. This is how you start.”
In the years before she married and left for the United States, Shakuntala worked at a school she had once attended. She became close to a colleague, who she calls “the best cook” she’s ever met, and found stability and guidance she’d never experienced before. Over fifty years later, Shakuntala remembers this time fondly, of the care she received.
“Most of the cooking I learned from her… The best time of my life was with her.”
For Shakuntala, food represents respect—both the respect of learning from someone who cared for her and the respect she continues to show through cooking. Through food, she honors the lessons learned from others and passes them forward.
Thushy: Care in New Communities
“If you find any Sri Lankans here, you become friends,” says Thushy of his life in Raleigh, North Carolina. After twenty years in Rochester, he and his wife built a new community with eight Tamil Sri Lankan families. Their shared history of displacement and nonlinear journeys maps itself in familiar tastes and rhythms—though strangers before migration, they recognize home and feel cared for in their shared meals.
“Everyone comes and we talk about a lot of things…Food is a big part.”
For Thushy, cooking for others becomes more than sustenance; it is a form of bonding that transcends individual histories, weaving together a collective memory that binds his new community. Each meal served is an act of care, a gesture that welcomes others into a shared experience of remembrance and belonging. Through food, Thushy and his new neighbors create a space where they can find connection, comfort, and, ultimately, home.
Amutha: Care as Making Time for Older Rhythms
Some recipes remain out of reach for Amutha—appam and sambal resist mastery, curry fell away when her boys didn’t love it, Jaffna-style snack recipes never recovered their creators as a result of displacement and war. Health constraints moved some dishes like kothu roti from staple to luxury. But more than lost recipes, she worries about lost rhythms of tradition.
“Do you think your kids will carry on some of this?”
“Not mine. I’m sure they love it, but they won’t have the same lifestyles… they’re too different.”
Yet her sons sought knowledge before going off to college: “When do you put this? How much is this, this, this?” Their insistence on learning recipes and her style of cooking becomes its own form of care—preserving not just flavors, but ways of being that help her hold on to a piece of her past.
Thurka: Care as New Bonds, Asking Questions
“Somehow, I’ve become the accidental family historian,” Thurka reflects. “After decades documenting others’ migrations, I turned to my own family’s food stories in 2022, when my uncle, Chandran, passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic. At cutting boards and stoves, I collected more than recipes—I gathered fragments of memory that, shared between relatives, completed forgotten stories.”
Documenting these food practices became a form of care, opening unexpected channels of communication. Her questions brought forth vivid memories of kitchens, gardens, and shared meals. Through food, stories of loss and resilience emerged in ways that felt natural, even healing.
Two years later, Thurka’s phone still buzzes with updates: Babu sending garden photos from Rochester. These ongoing conversations suggest that care, like cooking, is never finished—it continues to evolve, finding new expressions across generations and distances. In gathering these stories, Thurka has learned that remembering together is its own form of nurturing, a way of strengthening family bonds even as we acknowledge what has been lost.
These food stories reveal how displacement, while severing countless connections, can also spark new forms of care and belonging.
“Through everyday acts of cooking and feeding others, my family has created something remarkable: a web of relationships that stretches across continents yet remains as intimate as a shared meal.”