Dastarkhwan

“Some recipes are not meant to be forgotten. ”

When Nargis rediscovers her fascination with history and disappearing food traditions, an old friendship returns, tinged with uneasy hope. After four years of struggling in the US, she returns to India in early 2022 to set up a digital archive. A personal project involving a journey across the subcontinent to preserve culinary traditions and the stories of the people who carry them.

She arrives in Delhi without informing anybody at home, a place where nostalgia and uncomfortable truths force her to confront estrangement, grief, friendship, and interpersonal conflicts with her mother. Bhavin, her former best friend, accompanies her on an unexpected journey that takes them from the Konkan coast of Alibaug and the Southern forests of Karnataka to bustling metropolitan cities and the hills of Uttarakhand.

But their personal project takes a whole new direction when Bhavin has to visit his ailing grandfather, Samundar, abruptly. A Partition refugee who built a life between Sindh and the Himalayas, Samundar carries a history in which food, love, and home are inseparable. As his memories surface and his health declines, Bhavin is forced to revisit the wounds he has spent years avoiding, while Nargis begins to question what it truly means to preserve something when everything feels fragile all at once.