Dadi's Recipe, Her Story, and the Part of Her I Never Knew

My grandmother made the same dal every Sunday. Same pot, same spoon, same sequence of spices in the same order. And every time, it tasted like something you could not name but desperately needed.

I asked her once to teach me. She laughed and said there was nothing to teach — she just knew. But then she sat down and talked for three hours. About the village she grew up in. The drought that changed everything. The women who fed an entire neighbourhood from one kitchen during partition. The dal was almost incidental.

That afternoon, I understood something that no history textbook had ever taught me.

What lives in older women's stories

The women who came before us — our dadis, nanis, great-aunts, the aunties who have lived in the same neighbourhood for sixty years — carry entire worlds inside them. Worlds that are not written down anywhere. That exist only in memory, in gesture, in the way they fold a sari or salt a pot.

These are oral histories. Living archives. And they are disappearing quietly, one generation at a time, because we are too busy to sit down and listen.

Why this matters for girls especially

For teen girls growing up in India today, there is often a gap between who they are and who came before them. The old world feels irrelevant. The new world feels like it was built for someone else. And in that gap, something important gets lost — a sense of rootedness, of being part of something longer than your own life.

When you hear your grandmother's story — her actual story, not the sanitised version — you discover that she was once your age, and uncertain, and brave in ways nobody recorded. That changes how you see yourself.

How to start

Ask one question. Just one. Not a big philosophical one — something specific. 'What was your school like?' 'What did you want to be when you were my age?' 'What is the best decision you ever made?'

Then be quiet and listen. Really listen. Record it on your phone if you can. Write it down later. That recording, that notebook page — it will be worth more than you can imagine in twenty years.

At Daughters of India, this is sacred

Intergenerational storytelling is one of our core missions. We believe that preserving the voices of Indian women — across generations, languages, and lived experiences — is not nostalgia. It is resistance. It is identity. It is power.

This work is also connected to Spin A Yarn India, our storytelling initiative dedicated to preserving indigenous languages and oral traditions across communities.

What is one story from an older woman in your family that you will never forget? Share it in the comments. We want to hear it.

— Daughters of India