We begin as guests, every single one of us. Helpless little creatures whose every need must be attended to. Creatures who, for a long time, can give nothing or very little back, yet who – in the usual run of things – nevertheless insinuate ourselves deep into the lives of our carers and take up permanent residence in their hearts.
Our early dependence is indulged in the expectation that we, in turn, will become dependable. Maybe reaching adulthood really means learning to be more host than guest: to take care more than, or at least as much as, to be taken care of. Implicit in this outlook, it seems to me, is still an assumption that each person will, eventually, become a parent – the ultimate role, at least in cultures where the nuclear family is considered the foundation of society. A role I decided to forego. A choice that left me questioning what my part can be in the life-play of hospitality.
Whether you have children or not, it is hard to avoid the general shift from guest to host, which is the hallmark of maturity. This switch is perhaps most challenging in relation to our parents, from whom we cannot help forever expecting certain protections and ministrations.
Nobody in the world welcomes us quite like our parents do. The reception, if we are lucky, is a simultaneous cosseting and taking for granted. An experience that is, at best, comforting and exasperating in equal measure, unique in its loaded history of give and take, its private parameters of permission and expectation.
The way we cook for and eat with others is one of the more tangible, quotidian ways of measuring generosity. The type and amount of food offered, how it is served and to whom – these things define hospitality at the table, and beyond. Around the world, more people may be spending less time cooking – in the UK, US and Germany, it is between five and six hours a week – and eating. In my family, the ratio of food-time to life-time remains high, but of course, we consider such a distinction spurious, because, for us, food is one of the most intense ways of living. We visit supermarkets as others do art galleries. We cook as others run marathons.
Our family line of food fanatics may well stretch back over generations: the greed gene honed over eons, mutated to fixate on the gratifications of grub at the expense of everything else. However, it all begins with my maternal grandmother, an ardent eater, force-feeder and devout believer in the stomach as the only way to the heart. Almost everybody calls her Mumji, the motherly moniker perhaps partly an acknowledgement of her role as arch-feeder. She wields ingredients like weapons, and has made food the front line in a fight for first place in the affections of the family. At her hob or her table, hospitality often holds hands with hostility. Both are birthed from the word ghosti, their ancient Indo-European root, which meant host, guest and stranger – the trio of roles through which we shift all our lives. It is so apt that this inescapable flux was once contained in a single word.
In English, to “cook something up” means to prepare food, but also to invent stories or schemes, to concoct something out of fantasy. When I first started writing, I also baked a lot, mostly on days when the writing wasn’t going well. It soothed me, alongside the slow and intangible creation of a novel, to cook up something that was quickly ready and edible. A cake can bring simple, instant self-gratification and appreciation from others, whereas writing – for all its rewards – is always accompanied by self-doubt. Moreover, the reactions of others, even when positive, are rarely enough for me. I am perpetually hungry for some extra validation, which nobody in the world can give. Only in the act of writing is that hunger satisfied, for I become, briefly, bigger than myself, capable of hosting the world and yet treating every single person in it as if they were my only guest. This feat feeds and sates my ravenous self, my need to be and to have everything.
Stories enact a form of mutual hospitality. What is story if not an enticement to stay? You are invited in, but right away you must reciprocate and host the story back, through concentration: whether you read or hear a narrative – from a book or a person – you need to listen to really understand. Granting complete attention is like giving a silent ovation. Story and listener open, unfold into and harbour each other.
A recipe is a story that cannot be plagiarised. Compare cookbooks and you will find recipes that are almost identical, distinguished by minor variations of quantity or slight deviations in procedure. Debts are gladly acknowledged, sometimes in the name – “Julia’s Apple Tart” – or in a sub-line – “Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi”.
Recipes represent one of the easiest, most generous forms of exchange between people and cultures, especially now, with food blogs abounding and once-exotic ingredients available at your local supermarket.
Recipes are the original open source, offering building blocks that may be adjusted across time, place and seasons to create infinite dishes. You only need to successfully make a recipe once to feel it is your own. Make it three more times and suddenly it is tradition.
No wonder different societies claim the same food as their definitive, national dish. In the Middle East, hummus may well be the most contested case in point. Fed up of the endless, inconclusive debates about the true origins of this popular chickpea dish, a group of Lebanese aficionados decided to settle the matter once and for all by setting the record for making the largest tub of hummus ever, in the hope that the feat would irrevocably associate hummus with Lebanon above all. The idea of consolidating their credentials by producing such an excess is fitting in the context of the famously profuse Arab hospitality, summed up in the half-joking warning to guests: you will need to fast for two days before and two days after eating in an Arab household.
Being asked how you made something is the ultimate compliment for most cooks. Recipes passed on this way come marinated in the memory of previous incarnations. Recipes can be both continuity and change. Stuck to, modified, lost, recovered … recipes are records of individual or national defeats and conquests. In this sense, little is strictly “authentic”: everything is influenced by someone or somewhere else. This is true for food, and for culture as a whole. The quest for authenticity is often more of a crusade for authority, an attempt to exclude, single out and thus narrow things down – the very opposite of hospitality.
Food was among the first commodities to be traded globally, and this led to many cultures adopting foods that originated thousands of miles away. I always thought of chillies and coriander as quintessentially Asian ingredients. Only recently, eating dishes rich in both cooked by Brazilian friends, did I learn that they arrived in Asia in the 16th century with Portuguese explorers, who had encountered them in Latin America. Before that, Asian cuisine used white or black pepper to add spicy heat. Chilli was substituted because it was easier to grow, and therefore cheaper.
The history of food is the history of globalisation. Every ingredient, however genuinely local it might seem, has behind – and, likely, ahead – of it a trail of travel and transformation.
Food can divide as much as connect. Even where a group is relatively homogenous, difference can suddenly sizzle, like water splashed on a hot griddle. I saw this in my father’s annoyance that our Muslim friends did not eat any meat dishes at our house – because they, rightly, assumed it was not halal. “That’s it! We’re not inviting them again!” he would rage as my mother put away excess leftovers of chicken. “Who do they think they are? I don’t want to see them any more. Do you hear me? Never!” Quick to anger, my father also calmed down pretty fast. Next time we were on the way to visit Muslim friends, he would swear that he would not have any meat they served – because he knew it would be halal. By the time we were around their table, his misgivings would have disappeared and he would tuck into whatever was on offer, extending compliments and having seconds. Years later, after my family moved briefly to London, my parents themselves sometimes bought meat from a halal butcher in Tooting. Certain dishes, such as lamb pilau or samosas, turned out much better made with the less fatty meat, which just happened to be halal.
There is nothing like desire – whatever its object – to help us forget our compunctions. Food can make some of us compulsive and thus push us past certain limits – of propriety, of decency, of sanity. Whenever this happens to me, my husband says I get “The Look” – a tense, hunted, frenzied expression that announces greed has taken hostage all sense. Often at pains to appear polite and decent, I have consigned manners to oblivion and chased canapé trays at parties, helping myself to handfuls at a time. Normally eager to avoid the cold at all costs, I have pulled on coat and boots and headed out into the midnight snow to buy a packet of crisps. Generally disposed to honesty, I have lied that there are no leftovers, only to secretly scoff them all myself. I never understood the restraint practised by believers whose faith imposed food restrictions. How could they resist?
If only my best friend tasted bacon, I was convinced she would be converted to pork, regardless of her loyalty to Islam. For a long time, the question puzzled me: how did ideology have the power to proscribe pleasure? Then, in my 30s, I became a vegetarian and finally grasped, in my own way, how a belief could not just curb but entirely cancel out certain cravings. The impossible happened: I could pass over food I had once adored without a pang.
Who are we? No society can avoid that destabilising question. It pealed through our daily existence in Kenya, vibrated in our veins, and would not be stilled either by efforts to ignore or answer it. How narrowly that “we” was defined! It was usually our Sikh family, occasionally our Indian community and, sometimes, at its widest, it was our British citizenship, with the associated personal advantages and aspirations. No wonder we struggled to work out our place in the world. We were caught in a strange bind, we British Indians in Kenya: colonised twice over, materially better off for it, but completely confused mentally about who we were, and therefore where we really belonged and what we owed.
Deciding what exactly is on your plate is one of the few seemingly autonomous choices some of us can make – and it is certainly easier to control than what goes on beyond your gate. The edge of the plate is like a border emphasising the specificity of a choice, the relations, traditions and dispositions that influence it. What we eat enters our bodies and becomes part of us in an intimate way. Food forms and reveals us. This is why discussions about it can get so heated.
My parents must have mentioned that the langar at the temple was a communal meal open to everyone, not just Sikhs. Yet the significance of this did not register for me until my grandfather, Papaji, explained it.
“Anyone can come and share in the langar,” he told me, when I was nine or 10. “Langar means ‘community kitchen’, and anybody can join the community.” I was stunned. “Anyone?”
The practice of offering a free meal to which all are welcome was part of Sikhism from its inception in the 15th century. The langar, implemented by the founder, Guru Nanak, was a way of expressing two central tenets: equality between all human beings and service to the community. A meal was prepared and served by volunteers, and all those who wished to partake of it sat down on the floor together to eat. The idea that anyone could help cook the food and anyone could consume it was especially radical in India, where for centuries caste distinctions manifested most obviously around food. In Hinduism especially, there were, and remain, taboos against eating with – and sometimes even eating anything touched by – those outside one’s caste group, of lower caste, or of a different religion. The Sikh langar is vegetarian so as not to offend other religious sensibilities. Sitting together was a way to bring everyone to the same level, regardless of rank, class, gender or denomination. Across the world, some Sikh temples, or gurdwaras – including at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikh’s holiest site – still follow the original custom of eating seated on the floor. And, across the world, gurdwaras still maintain that everyone has an open invitation to the langar.
Of the more than 15,000 initiatives started in Germany since 2015 to help arriving refugees, a significant proportion have been based around cooking and eating together as a step towards fostering community. Many of the gatherings seek to unite long-time local residents with the newly arrived, to introduce strangers who may not even have a language in common. They meet in neutral spaces, such as youth clubs, school halls or sports centres, where all can be both host and guest, contributing however they feel able: chopping vegetables, playing music or clearing up.
Early in 2016, I was invited by a friend to join one of the monthly gatherings that she, as a member of the Klausenerplatz refugee initiative, helps organise at the Stadtteilzentrum Charlottenburg-Nord in Berlin. Hers is one of many such vereine (social or political “associations”) that exemplify German civil society. There are more than 600,000 vereine in Germany – every second citizen is a member of one, which accounts for the joke that if three Germans meet, they found a club. Around 24% of vereine are focused mainly on assisting migrants or refugees. Whatever their purpose – culture, sport, social integration – vereine are registered as charities. They are led by volunteers and financed mostly through private donations, though some also qualify for state funding.
The group I visited works to help newcomers feel at home through get-togethers and language courses. It was set up in 1999, but was never busier than in 2016. On the day I went, I sat at a table with Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and Germans – there were at least four mother tongues between 10 of us – and only two people capable of translating a tiny fraction of all that was waiting to be asked or said. At the surrounding tables, too, more people seemed to be looking or nodding at each other than talking. I was glad to be there, yet a little frustrated by the limited exchange. I was also having weird pangs – not of hunger exactly, at least not hunger for food. It took a while to recognise the old childhood throb of insecurity, the craving for certainty. I felt odd because, 15 years after I had started living in Germany, I was, for the first time, aware of not being in the minority: there were way more brown than white faces in the room. I blended, on the surface at least, into this throng of displaced persons as I never had in any other public space of this city. Yet, at that moment, I did not feel particularly at home. Quite the opposite – I felt like the outsider, awkward and with no clear purpose or role.
Then my friend came and took me on a tour of the place. In the kitchen, a dozen or so helpers were preparing a feast, collaborating through hand gestures and intuition to create specialities from Kerala, Kurdistan, Kabul. In the back rooms, musicians from all over were improvising, practising what they would soon play to entertain everyone.
Children ran shouting in and out of the garden: I had no idea what they were saying, but their squeals were perfectly legible. Delight and despair sound the same everywhere. Teenage boys leant, with practised casualness, against the walls of the corridor, watching the proceedings with seeming indifference. Others wove through the tightly packed tables in the dining hall with bottles of juice and soda, topping up glasses and flashing awkward smiles at the thanks that came in different tones.
When the food was ready, the fragmented crowd of hundreds suddenly cohered, and I was briefly part of that convergence. Words did not matter. They learned a new lexicon of largesse and loss, longing and laughter that could pave the way for the exchanges of the future. That was a defining moment: the synchronous sense of otherness and likeness, the discomfort of not knowing if I was more host or guest, and the relief of finding common ground at the table, realising the equalising potential in breaking bread as strangers.
As someone who had rarely heard a good word about the EU in England, I was initially smitten by my experience of it through Germany. Some friends cautioned my rather starry-eyed view of the EU: just remember, they said, there is another Germany, another Europe. I had an inkling of what they meant. I had glimpsed it in the question put to me most often, and most innocuously: where are you from? Words that, in their benign inquisitiveness, revealed an utter narrowness about who was or could be German.
‘I would like to invite you …” The first time I heard those words in a Berlin restaurant, I didn’t know what to make of them. While I was still puzzling over the seeming half-sentence from a friend, waiting for the next part, my husband, seated beside me, smiled and said thanks. Instantly, something appeared to be settled. Everyone went back to perusing the menu, and the friend exclaimed over the listed variations of white asparagus: “Have you tried it?” Her eyes fixed on me. “No? Then you have not yet truly arrived in Germany!”
How many times can you arrive in a country? I have lost count. Again and again, you reach a new part of the place, again and again you are not completely there. For me, this is the case not just in Germany, where I have now spent most of my adult life. It is the same with the UK, where I am still a citizen, with Kenya, where I grew up, and with India, where I have never lived, but which is the land of my ancestors. I have not yet truly arrived anywhere. And perhaps that is partly because countries, too – for all their declarations of certainty, their favoured versions of history, their flaunting of national boundaries – have also not reached any fixed, final state.
In the summer of 2015, Angela Merkel had signalled a national “I would like to invite you” to the refugees arriving on Europe’s south-eastern shores. It was a powerful sign, issued in the face of reluctance to take in refugees across much of the rest of the EU, and despite ambivalence in Germany itself and outright resistance in her own party. Indeed, some accused Merkel of acting unconstitutionally – not asking parliament, but simply unilaterally deciding to keep Germany’s borders open. Others hailed her choice as a humanitarian act, and a momentous stand to uphold the fundamental principle of open borders within the EU. Perhaps because of the fraught context in which it came about, and the highly charged debate about immigration that followed, and which persists, Merkel’s really was a half-sentence that still remains incomplete: I would like to invite you – but I can’t say for how long, or with whom, or on what terms.
“Be my guest.” This common English expression means “Do as you wish, feel free”. Yet this is rarely how we treat a visitor. Every invitation contains an unspoken code of admission. Sometimes, as is happening with Germany’s judicial process for asylum, the code is made deliberately obscure, so complex as to confound the very notion of welcome. In order to keep the coalition government intact, and appease its more reactionary elements, in 2018 the German parliament agreed to the creation of the so-called Ankerzentrum. The word, which also means “anchor centre”, is an acronym for Ankommen Entscheidung Rückkehr – “Arrival Decision Return”. The centres are intended as mass transit hubs to accommodate all asylum seekers, effectively immobilising them from the moment they reach Germany until their applications are approved, or they are deported – a process that can take up to two years. This reverses the previous policy of placing new arrivals in communities across the country, an approach that helped people connect, adjust and settle even as their claims were handled. The plan – apparently hatched to win back voters who have drifted to the far right – is driven by the belief that if the whole asylum process is streamlined this way, deportations can be speeded up. But all the new system actually does is anchor the state’s target of “return” to the fact of “arrival”: anyone who comes must, ideally, go back as quickly as possible. Thankfully, most of the country’s 16 federal states have resisted the establishment of such centres within their jurisdiction. Only Saxony and Bavaria accepted the plan, and so far only Bavaria has centres in operation – one in each of its seven administrative districts.
The hospitality of international law, defined by the Refugee Convention agreed in Geneva in 1951, is being undermined the world over through constant amendments to national laws, which proliferate with ever more clauses and sub-clauses that subvert the status of the stranger and narrow the scope of their rights.
Hospitality, were I to draw it, would be a series of potentially endless concentric circles extending outwards from each of us. In their crisscrossing and overlapping, in the expanse of their reach, might be the critical pattern of our time. A pattern revealing – just as contour lines on a map indicate the gradient of the land – the true topography of a society: its landscape of reciprocity, its borders of generosity, its peaks and depths of give and take. Yet, however far those circles spread, unconditional hospitality remains outside their furthest perimeter. It lies, for the most part, in unknown territory, off the map.
This is an edited extract from Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity by Priya Basil, published by Canongate and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk
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