Yellow Dal

Can anything yellow

be dal?

Doesn’t it have to have

lentils and turmeric,

to barely qualify as dal?

Isn’t tadka essential,

like art is to life?

Dal is not the goop

that comes out of an Instapot.

It is precise, out of a pressure cooker

after almost exactly

five whistles.

Shouldn’t Amma touch it

with her hands that know

exact-ish proportions?

Crackling with flavor

that pliant texture

Dal is when it is ignored, eaten

and then inside,

an explosion,

the daily ingenuity

of generations.

I am forgetting original dal,

I am polymerizing, slowly becoming

another.

The smell of haldi

left my pits first,

my memory of taste

will be the last to go.

I see India from a distance:

the dal is less yellow,

more orange, like the lotus,

the last blighted, brilliant ember

of the setting sun.