In my third year of college, one of my courses was called Post-Colonial Literature. In one of the classes, my professor mentioned how her kitchen had become a symbol of her layered identity. It held ingredients and utensils from her mother’s kitchen in Mysore, her husband’s kitchen in Chennai, and her daughter’s growing palate shaped by Bangalore. Her shelves featured everything from freshly ground sambar powder to store-bought salsa mix; her utensils included a paniyaram pan and a wok.

That image has stayed with me. Kitchens, she suggested, are never neutral spaces. As someone who had been living away from home with a flatmate, cooking for myself, this idea really resonated with me. My flatmate and I came from two entirely different cultures: I was South Indian and she was Marwari. This caused a confluence of sorts in our kitchen. “You are what you eat,” they say, but in reality, our kitchens often show us who we are becoming. For young people, these new kitchens become emotional barometers of migration — places where you learn to balance independence, memory, and community.

I spoke to four other young people about what their kitchens look like after moving away from home — two of whom live by themselves, while the other two share an apartment.

Shivangi Dey, who has been living alone in Bangalore for the past five months, spoke about how starkly the comfort of being provided for disappears once you leave home. “When you’re at home, because someone else is cooking, you have the privilege to request and eat whatever you want. Only after living alone do you understand how much effort goes into cooking. Now, when I crave something specific, I’ll only make it when I have time, usually on a weekend.”

For many young people like her, cooking is a skill you learn on the battlefield of this newfound territory — your new kitchen. You ease yourself into it by starting with something like dal-rice (the college kitchen starter pack) and substitute ingredients for dishes you’d have easily found at home. Shivangi, for instance, speaks about missing the abundance of fish in Kolkata. Meanwhile, Sanvi, who has been living away from home for the past four years, spoke about missing her Sunday morning ritual of chole bhature, a tradition in her Delhi home. “It took me a long time to get used to my eating habits here. The first difference I felt was in the masalas, but my body slowly got acclimatised to the food.”

Now, after sharing her kitchen with two South Indians, Sanvi has taken a particular liking to dishes she never imagined she’d crave — one being beetroot palya (a South Indian beetroot stir-fry).

Nandini, who recently moved to Singapore to pursue her post-graduate, said that when you live with flatmates, disagreements in the kitchen are bound to happen. “Some food items just get eliminated. For example, I am allergic to soya, and even though my flatmate really enjoyed it, it just couldn’t be made in the house. It’s a give and take.”

Now that she’s moved outside the country, the feeling of staying tethered to home has become even more urgent, by trying to hold on to small rituals, like making the pulao she used to cook with her dad. These small attempts are, for many, the only way to stay connected to home, because it’s easy to get lost in a sea of unfamiliarity — people, language, culture, and, in turn, food.

Nandini calls her kitchen “borrowed.” Sharing it with people from other cultures, with their ingredients stacked close to hers and cutlery she isn’t familiar with, often creates a sense of disjointedness. Her kitchen isn’t the only thing she has borrowed; it’s also the food she eats. She talks about borrowing pages from her old roommate’s recipe book: cherry tomatoes on toast, avocado, and pita bread have now become staples.

Borrowing, adjusting, eliminating — these are the quiet negotiations of every shared kitchen. Sometimes, they spark blends that go beyond recipes, shaping the small rituals that sustain us. Kavya, Sanvi’s roommate of three years, put it simply: “Cooking with someone else always ends up teaching you something. Sanvi taught me that in a stroganoff it tastes much better to use packaged cream of mushroom soup, and I went back home and made it with my mum too.”

Moments like these turn kitchens into spaces of cultural cohabitation — places layered with traces of the homes we’ve left behind, and hints of the homes we might one day build.

When I moved into my first “big-girl” apartment four years ago, one of the first things I did was cover the fridge with magnets, photos, and little mementos, anything to make me feel like I belonged in that space. A jar of pickle my grandma sent me, the habit of sprinkling bhujia on aloo sabzi — something I picked up from my roommate — and even the looming absence of foods I once took for granted, all of it began to shape the way I ate. These kitchens may look mismatched or temporary, but in their quiet negotiations they hold something lasting: the beginnings of identity, community, and the comfort of knowing that home can be made, unmade, and remade — one meal at a time.

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