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Your Hands Are Your Greatest Kitchen Utensil
Even in the hardest, strangest times, they’re there
In Nilesh Patel’s documentary film, A Love Supreme, his mother’s fingers dance with the elegance of a silver screen star. Her hands cradle an onion, her nails tracing the edges of its papery skin and disrobing it in one deft movement. We see a flash of henna-stained palms as delicate fingers pop peas from their pods or juice a plump lemon. Fingers fix into a claw shape to whisk flour with water; later, they cup softly around samosa skins as they are filled. With the rhythms of cooking drummed into her muscle memory, every movement is performed by heart.
As a child, Nilesh watched transfixed as his mother’s hands spun magic in the kitchen. But by the time he started filming A Love Supreme in the late ’90s, rheumatoid arthritis was already creeping across his mother’s knees and shoulders — Nilesh wanted to record her hands in case the arthritis spread. As such, the film is less about food than about the hands that make it — about Indumati’s endangered dexterity and the traditions that came alive through her hands’ work.
In the years since, Indumati’s arthritis has spread — at points, she could barely turn on the tap — but still, she cooks. In the film she made with her son, she has a record of the intricate jobs that her soul…
