Usha was tender and methodical with her baking. Each day the wooden dough board came out, as did a big knife for cutting butter, and small bowlfuls of ingredients—apples, nuts, plums, and on a rare occasion even chocolate.

In 1962 my grandmother began stealing, every other day, from the cash register in my grandfather’s pharmacy.

Armida cooked for an army’s worth of people on Sundays. Thirty or forty locals would come for lunch, bringing goods to exchange with one another, and lingering for hours over her food on long tables set under the olive trees.