In my family though, our traditional moorings are highly loosened through migration, inter-marriages, separations, re-marriages and the presence of a few facetious folks (like me). As a result, our rituals are more often rooted in personal histories.

My father started to eat ice cream often while living alone in a small town where he was working. A neat man, who might have missed us, but not our messy, indisciplined ways, I feel like the ice cream was both a treat to make up for our absence and perhaps a pleasurable celebration of his solitude. My dad believed in treats: in a rationed middle-class life, they were a way to introduce a note of abundance, especially for young people, whom he treated with love. I like to think he was also treating his young self, the young man who lost his own father at an early age, and that, in a post-Partition family. Ice-cream and cake, childlike joys, are the opposite of loss. I am glad we use these to commemorate losing him, while celebrating that we had him.

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My uncle, an impossibly handsome, apparently flamboyant charmer, died in a plane crash soon after he became an Air Force pilot. He was only 22 and my grandmother could scarcely carry the grief. She began to visit a medium, to talk to her dead son’s spirit. My mother told me, “One day his spirit told Nani that he really wants to eat this particular meal. Spirits can’t eat, but at least he would smell it and know.” That’s how it became a tradition.

Stories of spirits are often about how much they miss us, how they circle the world to staunch their loss. But perhaps it is us, isn’t it, who are the ghosts made up of longing for the ones we have lost? We eat to live, we eat because we live, we eat perhaps also to taste life as it was with them here, for a few minutes; to taste our yearnings and lost pleasures, in their lost pleasures; to feed our lonely souls.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com