Ma sends me cooking directions by e-mail. Yes, cooking directions, not recipes but cooking directions. What does that mean? It means like Yahoo Maps say turn left, go 1.1 miles, turn right, my mother writes cooking directions, only never as precisely -- cut two medium onions and a large tomato into small pieces, can grate if you like, make golden-brown in a little oil, then fry chicken, and put into pan along with salt, chillies, ginger, garlic, and simmer until cooked. How much oil? A little. When do the tomatoes go in? After the onions turn golden-brown. How much salt, ginger, garlic? Just enough. When is the chicken cooked? When you see it is. How does this work? Memory cooking.

I walk into the Indian store in the suburb and a riot of smells brings alive the bazaars of Old Delhi. When I was a boy, my mother was young and very particular; we used to walk up and down the lanes of the bazaar, buying spices and foodstuffs at wholesale prices after many comparisons, haggling and bargaining, arguing and laughing. I used to carry her shopping basket and it would get heavier and heavier by the half-hour. Finally we'd go home, and I would hold her hand while crossing the road, and her hand would be redolent of all the spices she'd sampled. Later I'd compare my hands -- one with faint scents of spices and soap, the other sweaty and imprinted with marks left by the hard plastic handles of the shopping basket.

Now I walk the aisles of the store myself and I don't know the names of the things I need, but I can see and smell my way around. I pick up the packs -- ginger, cloves, cardamom -- and I smell and slot them into the cooking directions she sends.

Later at home on weekends, there is time set aside for cooking explorations. I try my hand at all sorts of dishes -- chicken curry, beans, cabbage, peas pulao, mutter-paneer, rotis. I recklessly throw stuff into the cook-pot. I smell. I taste. I have her cooking directions taped on to the wall in front of me -- it has no cooking time specified, no precise measures, nothing. I have never made this before. Who cares? I follow the directions, improvising where there are none. How does it work? Memory cooking.

She would tell me that as a boy I used to hang around in the kitchen while she ground spices and prepared meats, simmered and sautéed, whipped and basted. But when I was 20 and preparing to move to another city, I refused to learn any cooking. She would stand at the kitchen door and keep an eye out for me. If I were passing by, she'd exhort me to come in, see what is being done, “learn something, boy, else you'll starve out there or sicken, eating at cheap restaurants everyday.”

“No,” I'd say, “I don't have the time. Besides, I'll manage somehow.” She never gave up asking, though.

Now? Well, it just works. I can close my eyes and see her leaning over the cook-pot, squinting through the steam, taking a look and saying authoritatively, “another 10 minutes and we'll have dinner.” Or the cook-a-thons that would happen when she, my aunts and my grandmother got together some Sunday. By eleven in the morning, there would be many discussions on what's to be made for lunch. The menfolk would be consulted on what they wished to eat, their desires balanced off against what the women wanted to cook. Ask for whatever you want as long as it's interesting to cook, they would laugh at my father.

Vegetables being cut, chopped and grated. Meat and chicken being washed, cut and cleaned. Spices being ground, bought fresh and whole from their sacks in the store. Grandmother deciding she wants to make kheer, rice pudding, for dessert. Father being sent off to the market to buy many litres of milk and pounds of sugar. Later, while Ma and the aunts did the rice, vegetables and meat, my grandmother would sit at the woodstove in the corner and stir the kheer for hours.

“Come and taste,” she'd call me, “see if the sugar's enough.” I had a sweet tooth.

“No, more is needed.”

Ma would say, “Don't ask him, it'll be too sweet for the rest of us!”

But grandma would refuse, “He has the right tongue for kheer,” while giving me a spoonful. “Just right for him will be best for us.”

I would swell with importance and roll my tongue over the spoon with my eyes focused into the distance, like the wine-tasters I'd seen on BBC… a little more, I'd say, about half a spoon. Later after the meal was over and many assessments made about the food, everyone would agree -- the kheer was the best ever so far.

I thought I was unique in some way. But this was not so. In college I became friendly with a fellow who used to invite me to lunch almost every Saturday. I was really happy to go over to his place despite his parents and all, because in hostel we were all perennially hungry. Quantity was important, as regards food. Everything else came second. But at his house, things were clearly different.

We would sit and chat, listening to music and drinking Bloody Marys through the afternoon till lunch was ready. The cook would appear periodically, asking for his opinions on the meat, the soup, the vegetables, the dessert. He would bring in spoonfuls on a plate, my friend would pick up a spoon at a time, close his eyes for a second or two -- and indicate precisely what was needed -- a little more salt, some more time simmering in the cook-pot, a dash of coriander. Impressive. But not very different from my grandmother's ritual with the sugar in the kheer. What was really great was the way in which my friend would call out warnings to the cook at times, having smelt that the curry was being over-cooked. Now that's something, I would think, specially if you consider that the kitchen is five rooms and a long corridor away.

By the time lunch was ready, my head would be swimming in vodka. Everything would be very tasty and we'd have wine with the food. After an enormous, hugely tasty lunch, we'd have a little sherry as a digestive and smoke cigarettes in the front lawn sprawled on planter's chairs, big old wooden things with fold-out arms the size of my legs.

Many years later, when I visited his apartment, we had an excellent meal -- grilled fish and sautéed mushrooms, followed by chocolate soufflé. He used no cookbooks, no recipes, nothing. But he had a repertoire of dishes stored in his head, how they looked, smelt, tasted. Memory cooking. Later on, when his girlfriend moved in with him, she confided in me that she found this to be one of the most frustrating aspects of living with him. She would labour long with cookbooks balanced next to the cooking range and end up with just-edible results. And then he would enter the kitchen, almost casually throw things into the cook-pots as he bustled about and voila! Food fit for a king.

We'd talk about this sometimes. It's almost a guilty secret, when you can do this. It's a secret joy, a touch of magic, this power to conjure up good things to eat. Sometimes, when the week's been particularly difficult, I'll turn on some music really loudly, opera maybe, or some really old Steely Dan. And cook up some stuff I just remembered the taste of -- with or without cooking directions taped in front of me. How does it matter? I just need to remember bringing food out of the kitchen to the table; a peek into the dishes as I placed them on the trivets, remember waiting while Ma served it out, remember the fresh steamed rice, the tang of coriander in the curry.