Every snack here carries a small piece of someone's home. Here is how ours began — and why we are still doing this, one pouch at a time.
Ours begins in a small bylane in central India, where the air smelled of mustard oil and yesterday's rain, and a tiny corner shop sold golden sev wrapped in old newspapers.
The shopkeeper called every customer "beta". He weighed each pouch on a tin scale that always tipped a little in our favour. He never let us pay in full.
That shop is no longer there. The lane has been re-tiled. But the taste — somehow, it would not leave.
Our grandmother's kitchen had no clock. The chai knew when it was ready. The laddoos rolled themselves.
She would say, "jab tak mann na bhare, tab tak banao" — keep making, until your heart is full.
Most of what we know, we learnt watching her hands. The rest, we are still learning.
"Some flavours are not flavours at all. They are addresses — to a courtyard, a grandmother, a Sunday morning that is now far away. We pack those addresses into golden pouches, and we send them back to you."
— a note from our kitchenTo Bangalore. To Bombay. To Boston, Berlin, Brisbane. The country grew and so did we — out, away, into bigger cities, into colder winters, into homes where we knew nobody.
And on the longest train rides, between paragraphs of work emails and goodbyes that were too short, what we missed most was strangely small — the crunch of a sev, the smell of besan ghee, a kulhad of chai pressed into our hands by a stranger at Ratlam Junction.
We thought we were missing places. We were missing flavours.
Apartments with electric stoves and instructions on the wall. Tiny one-bedrooms in cities where the rain fell wrong. Microwaves that hummed where mothers had once hummed.
You could buy bread. You could buy cereal. You could buy noodles in a hundred languages. But you could not buy the small handful that comes between meals — the little crunch with chai at four in the afternoon, the bowl set out before the doorbell rings.
For some of us, this absence sat quietly for years. For others, it became a small, daily ache. Either way, it was the same shape — a missing pouch on a kitchen counter that did not exist yet.
Three steel tiers. Tightly latched. A note in shaky handwriting that said only — "thoda khao, fir likhna".
Inside: ghee laddoos, masala peanuts, a small twist of paper holding green chutney. The kind of food that travels a thousand kilometers without losing a single memory.
That day, we understood what we wanted to do with our lives. We wanted to be that tiffin box. For everyone who could not have one anymore.
A small kitchen. Two copper kadhais. A handful of recipes — some written, most remembered. We named it Riddhim. In some old languages, it means rhythm — of stirring, of festivals, of coming home.
We tied each pouch by hand. We slipped a note inside every parcel. And we made one rule: no batch leaves the kitchen until someone in the family has tasted it that morning.
That promise still stands. It is the only one that really matters.
We are stirring slowly, the way we were taught. The diyas are lit. The tulsi is watered. The first batch of the morning is cooling on the steel thali.
You — wherever you are reading this, in whatever city, at whatever hour — this was made for you.
Somewhere, in a city we may never visit, you will tear open a small golden pouch. The light from your kitchen window will fall on a handful of sev. And for a moment, just a moment, you will not be far from home.
That moment is what we make. The pouch is just the envelope.
phir milenge — pouch ke saath. ✦