I’ve always hated when people say, about finding love, “When you know, you know.” I cannot think of a more unhelpful tautology than that one. My friend Veronica and I discussed this at length earlier this year. I strongly believed that people just said it because they did not feel like sitting with their complicated thoughts and trying to articulate, to themselves or others, how it is they really “knew.” Vee firmly believed it was simply people trying their best to come as close as possible to describing something fundamentally indescribable.
This Kozhukatta Saturday, as I finally tried my hand at making these rice dumplings in a desperate attempt to preserve tradition while also learning at the feet of masters, my mind wandered back to this conversation. A few weeks ago, I coerced my rather unwilling 80-year-old grandmother (Ammachi) into teaching me how to make them so that I could be the one to actually do it when Kozhukatta Saturday came around.
Ammachi, being old, was just trying to be done in the kitchen. She is used to being much quicker because of the razor-sharp instincts that come with having spent 60 years in the kitchen, whereas I, who am the opposite of an instinctive cook, needed everything measured in cups and teaspoons. This, let’s say, difference in opinion found us at loggerheads quite often during the two-hour lesson.
We managed to make it through with a batch of ten kozhukattas and were still talking to each other — a win, in my book. The work we put in that day bore fruit yesterday. In what can only be described as a beautiful coincidence of fate, Kozhukatta Saturday fell on Ammachi’s 81st birthday. Fitting, as every memory I have of this day is inextricably associated with her.
This time, I tried my hand at it. While I did not have the same level of instinct as she does, I saw little bits of it beginning to surface. I noticed an error in my written version of the recipe when I saw the filling come together and realised we did not have enough grated coconut. Watching Ammachi mould the dumplings was equal parts mesmerising and frustrating. As much as she could show me how she did them, she could not make my hands “know” how to do what hers did. However, about six kozhukattas in, I started noticeably getting better and faster.
I find myself thinking about the conversation with Vee and the conversations with my grandmother about her instinctive cooking, both echoing with similar flavours of “When you know, you know.” I think about them in the context of my life, especially this year. I remember the years between 26 and 28, when every birthday felt like I was walking towards a sentence. It was painfully obvious that my twenties were ending and that I was running out of time to do all the things I wanted to do.
The strange thing about these existential dread spirals is how alarmingly quickly they take hold of you, and once you are in the whirlpool, it is such a task to pull yourself out of it. This meant that I basically sat with the feeling of “I’m running out of time” for two years, coping with it, but mostly trying to fill my days with noise and avoid the fact that, sooner than I knew it, I would be turning 30.
So explain to me how one morning I wake up and decide enough is enough. About five or six days into the start of the year, I felt a switch flip in my head. The panic transformed into calm execution. I’d been talking for about a decade about how I wanted to work on my health, try to publish my poetry, get better at standardised testing, learn how to cook better, and take over some much-cherished family traditions. Yet, in my twenties, I had basically run my health into the ground with bad eating and sleeping habits, written poetry and done nothing else with it, ordered takeaway constantly, and written down but never practised the food-based traditions around the holidays that my grandmothers had spent decades building.
It’s not like I had not wanted to do any of these things sooner. In fact, I remember that on New Year’s Eve in 2024, I desperately prayed and wished that 2025 would be the year everything changed, and it wasn’t. I suppose the more I overthought and planned, the more I kept getting in my own way. There is something to be said for trying to break out of a long period of inertia in certain aspects of your life and “just doing it.”
While I remain incredibly proud of myself for finally rolling up my sleeves and setting off on editing my poetry to submit for a class, for actually practising the recipes that are the cornerstone of holiday traditions in my home, for working on my health with tangible results, and for signing up for a class to help with my testing, I also remain in incredible awe of the power of divine timing. While it is true that this year I was ready to make some changes, it was definitely helped along by the people and circumstances around me that lit the match that started the fire. The pragmatist in me realises that simply starting on these things is not the same as finishing them or maintaining them, but the momentum does fill me with hope. It feels different this year — I feel it in my bones.
Funny thing is, though, if you asked me to explain what exactly changed in me this year, or what it is that “feels different,” I would struggle to find the words to describe what is fundamentally indescribable.
What can I say?
When you know, you know.
The Big Smokey Apple 