Chasing a Vendor, Tasting Who We Used to Be
The vendor’s cart wheels screech against asphalt, that familiar symphony of rust and commerce that once meant nothing and now means everything. Fuchka, he calls out, the same nasal cry that punctured my childhood afternoons like an unwelcome interruption to more important things—cricket matches, homework avoidance, the serious business of being ten years old.
I hated fuchka then. The soggy shells, the way tamarind water would inevitably spill down my chin, the chaos of eating something that demanded immediate consumption before it dissolved into mush. Street food felt like an inconvenience, a messy detour from the clean predictability of home meals.
Now I chase that vendor down the street like a man pursuing his own ghost.
What transforms our relationship with the foods we once rejected? When did the inconvenient become irreplaceable, the mundane become sacred?
Neurologists speak of retroactive appreciation—how memory sweetens experiences that were originally bitter. But this feels more complex than simple nostalgia. The fuchka I crave now isn’t the same fuchka I refused as a child. That child’s tongue was calibrated for immediate pleasure: sweet over sour, familiar over strange, convenient over complicated.
But somewhere in the archaeology of growing up, we develop different hungers. We start craving not just flavors, but entire ecosystems of sensation—the crowded street corner, the vendor’s practiced hands, the democracy of sharing space with strangers over food that costs less than bottled water. We hunger for the context we once took for granted.
The French have a term: madeleine moment, named after Proust’s cookie that unlocked entire universes of memory. But Proust wrote about foods he had loved. What about the foods we had ignored? What about the anti-madeleines—the tastes that meant nothing until they meant everything?
I think we’re not nostalgic for the foods themselves, but for the version of ourselves who could afford to be dismissive, who lived in such abundance of options that we could reject entire categories of experience. The child who turned his nose up at fuchka lived in a world where tomorrow’s meals were guaranteed, where comfort was constant, where the future stretched infinite and unchanging.
That child couldn’t understand that taste is also geography, that every flavor maps a specific coordinate of time and place that can never be revisited, only remembered.
My nephew asked me once why adults always talk about “the way things used to taste.” He was eating a mango, the same variety I’d eaten at his age, from the same tree in our ancestral courtyard. But he was right to be confused—the mango tasted exactly the same. What had changed was the eater.
The mango I remember is seasoned with the luxury of endless summers, flavored with the arrogance of believing such sweetness would always be available, spiced with the unconscious certainty that this tree, this courtyard, this way of being in the world was permanent.
Every childhood food we now romanticize carries the same hidden ingredient: the assumption of infinity. We didn’t appreciate them because we couldn’t conceive of their absence. They were backdrop, not foreground. Wallpaper, not art.
But time teaches us the terrible arithmetic of finitude. The vendor who sold the best jhalmuri moved away. The woman who made perfect pithas during Poush Sankranti died quietly one winter. The corner tea stall where we gathered after school became a mobile phone shop.
And suddenly, retroactively, we realize we had been living in a museum all along, surrounded by artifacts we mistook for ordinary objects.
Perhaps this is why we’re nostalgic for foods we didn’t appreciate as children: because nostalgia isn’t really about the past at all. It’s about the present realization of what we failed to notice when we had the chance. It’s the adult’s desperate attempt to correct the child’s casual blindness, to honor what we took for granted by mourning it properly now.
The fuchka vendor has turned the corner, his cart’s screeching fading into the city’s white noise. I didn’t catch him today. But I’ll listen for him tomorrow, and the day after, still chasing the taste of my own unconscious childhood, still trying to eat my way back to the version of myself who could afford not to pay attention.
Some hungers, I’m learning, can never be satisfied—only acknowledged, like prayers offered to gods we no longer believe in but can’t quite forget.
