A handful of green chillies and a spoonful of life

Ironically, I have been having this inclination to observe and learn from our life in Kolkata (India) every time I’ve visited in the past couple of years, than I have had in all those years I lived there!

After school I wanted to move out, but didn’t quite get the opportunity (so I pushed my brother to move out after school, much to the dismay of my parents). So all the time that I did stay in Kolkata, before moving out eventually, I was always looking for the exit sign!

Maybe that’s why I missed the little nuances. Or maybe I internalized them unconsciously and now they are a part of my system, in the cells of my body and reveal themselves in opportune moments!

a bit of green for your eyes!

Now back to my observation from the last visit during the winter of 2025 -

We live in a two bedroom apartment smack in the middle of a busy intersection.

Both me and my husband have to answer questions like, are you crossing the road? Are you in the middle of some chaos?? everytime we take our morning work calls from my home! 😜😜

Our apartment is cocooned by other equally stocky apartments and our windows overlook the adjacent buildings.

All this is to say it’s a tight space, with decent sized windows and a small balcony, bearing all the signs that a family of 4 has been living there for more than 20 years!

Every year the first thing I do on reaching home from the airport is walk straight into my room to inspect what has changed and how much of ‘’my space” my parents have captured.

But this time something else caught my eye.

My window was a canopy of green with tiny specks of orange and red.

A mature kitchen garden had erupted on the window where once was only an iron frame! Chillies, tomatoes, baby capsicum among others were growing, allowing just the right amount of sunlight in, and making the room cooler than it used to be.

When I showed my disbelief and interest in that tiny window kitchen garden, my mother immediately turned me towards the balcony.

There amidst the everyday nicks nacks of a Bengali house hold — a bucket, two towels, an Amazon delivery cardboard box, another green canopy had bloomed becoming a part of the “Bangali ecosystem”… Green chillies, mini capsicums, lady fingers and some flowering plants to give them company!

This was not all… in another 5 minutes I was dragged to the terrace where I experienced an even bigger bounty on our side of the terrace— brinjal, pumpkin, bottle gourd and a variety of edible leaves and flowers!

The Kolkata apartment is my home…

It has given me my growing up years, countless memories with my family, my brother, my friends who often came for sleepovers and my first days of romance with my partner who would come home often to play video games with my brother!

But never had I ever imagined that a box apartment in South Kolkata could offer us the luxury of eating fresh, organic produce straight from the soil.

The rest of my days, almost everyday we had a vegetable that came from our very own vegetable patch, growing gently amidst all the concrete and quietly offering us its deliciousness!

And the best thing happened one afternoon!

We were all having lunch and I wanted green chillies with my rice and fish curry. I took a moment, went to the veggie patch on the window, broke a few green chillies and had it with my fish curry and rice!

It is one of the most precious meals of my life!

I don’t know why the kitchen garden has made such an impression in my heart.

Maybe because I never expected a barren iron window to turn into such a green gorgeousness. I never imagined such life and warmth could spring from those wriggly iron rails. I never imagined eating food from our own garden would feel so luxurious and priceless!

Recently I was watching a Netflix cooking show and Alice Waters (pioneer of farm to table and slow cooking movement) said something on the lines of — a man who grows his own food is a rich man!

And it is so true!

And this humble kitchen garden showed me something about life!

So many times we dismiss a quality, especially in ourselves saying this skill is not worth it, or that nobody would be interested in what I have to say… but that is not always true!

There might be some real potential hiding in plain sight… all we need to do is believe, just like my parents believed that they could grow an entire vegetable garden in a 850 square feet flat in South Kolkata!

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Until next time!

The other images are from Unsplash