The cooking is seemingly ordinary. What made this issue particularly interesting was exploring how cooking interacts with the scope of dhoop’s bigger picture. We aren’t just talking about cooking in isolation, we are talking about how cooking interacts and engages with nature, culture, sustainability, and design. 

Nikita Biswal takes us into her kitchen, where she cooks alongside a lyrical, melodious companion. When Devi wrote about the chaos in her kitchen mirroring the chaos in her head, attacking and comforting us. Nabilah Noorani’s writing held up a mirror, filled with the rotten veggies in the corners of the fridge. We got lost into an unfamiliar world through Sanjana’s writing, only to find a world of my own making, which mostly always starts with cooking familiar foods in unfamiliar, sometimes faraway lands. Mahek’s words weaved a circle of life, ending on the certainty of food rituals that come with the grief that accompanies bereavement.

Each of the stories in this issue renewed my understanding of cooking—as a practice, sure, but perhaps more importantly, as an understanding, as a language, as a memory, and in transit.