SAN DIEGO — One of the first times food spoke to her, Madhushree Ghosh was 7 years old and being tempted by a guava.
It was the last of the three guavas Ghosh’s father had brought home to the family, and while she knew in her dutiful-daughter heart that she should probably wait to share it with the rest of the household, the guava had other ideas.
“To this day, ” Ghosh writes in her new memoir, “I swear the peyaara (guava) said, ‘Eat me. Eat me now.’”
So she ate the guava, keeping a (slightly) guilty silence when her sister, Didi, started looking for it. More than 40 years later, Ghosh is still engaged in a deep dialogue with food. But this time, she is not keeping the conversation to herself.
On April 4, the San Diego writer and oncology diagnostics strategist made her publishing debut with a memoir that uses food and food memories as a way to talk about so many other things.
Ghosh loves food and food-writing, so there are beautiful food photos, along with instructions on how to make ghee (clarified butter), taro-root curry and a twist on Nigella Lawson’s chocolate olive oil cake.
But there are also loving stories about her Bengali parents and her food- and tradition-rich childhood in New Delhi. There are culture-shock memories from her early ‘90s arrival in the United States to go to graduate school. There is a sociological look at the impact of California’s many anti-immigrant laws on the Sikh farmers in the Central and Imperial Valleys, along with a painful accounting of Ghosh’s now-dissolved marriage to an emotionally abusive man.
“This is how my brain works. I love the concept of a mosaic or a braided essay. It keeps the attention of the reader,” said the 51-year-old Ghosh. “If you’re not curious, if you are not confused, if you are not challenged enough, you will stop reading.”
The details — from the patty of tasteless Land O' Lakes butter Thai Airways served on Ghosh’s first flight to the U.S., to the crazed adventure that was pandemic panic-shopping — are vivid and personal. But the variety of topics and characters that Ghosh weaves into the braid of her book reflect her love of hearing other people’s stories and then passing them along. And like so many things in Ghosh’s life, that fascination with stories came with the ancestral territory.
“When you are talking about South Asians and our way of growing up, we grow up telling stories,” said Ghosh, who was born and raised in India. “Our grandparents told us stories. Our mothers told us stories. I lived off of mythological folklore. You are used to that kind of drama.”
For Ghosh, the writing journey started as an escape from the homesickness that hit while she was working on her master’s in biochemistry at Stony Brook University in New York. After getting her doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Maryland, Ghosh went
to work in the biotech industry, including stints at San Diego’s Thermo Fisher Scientific and NeoGenomics Laboratories, where she works now. She moved into writing nonfiction essays to help her cope with the breakup of her marriage. She then moved on to writing about other things, and for more than a decade now, the process of exploring her deep well of interests and experiences has been its own kind of release.
Ghosh has written about her refugee parents, who walked from what is now Bangladesh to India during the 1947 Indian Partition that uprooted more than 10 million people. She wrote about the ways in which the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain honored the many contributions immigrants make to the food world.
She explained the pressures diagnostic companies faced while producing COVID-19 tests during the early months of the pandemic. She reveled in the comfort of making lamb curry as a tribute to her late mother.
Ghosh’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Kitchn, The Rumpus and many other publications. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her Longreads essay, “At the Maacher Bazaar, Fish for Life,” was awarded a Notable Mention in the “Best American Essays in Food Writing.”
Some of these essays paved the way for “Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family,” where Ghosh makes room for celebrating the things she loves — food, community, autonomy — while also taking a close, unflinching look at injustice, racism and abuse.
When life said, “Share me. Share all of me,” Ghosh listened to that, too.
“When I started writing ‘Khabaar,’ I didn’t want it to be a start-to-finish memoir. I wanted to highlight chefs and home cooks. I wanted to talk about social-justice issues. I have lived a life, and those are things that happened. I talk about domestic-partner abuse. Even though it was not physical, it was important to talk about,” Ghosh said.
“I would love it if people start to read and think, ‘What is she talking about?’ And then they keep reading to find out what I’m talking about.”
