Mango & Gnocchi Ep. 6: Yetti Pundi with Author & Journalist Priya Joi
This week, author Priya Joi brings us to Mumbai, where she received an unexpected grief prescription. We talk postpartum and parenting, and how to move forward with collective burnout in society.
Welcome, friends! Join us around the table with author, speaker, and science journalist Priya Joi. Our conversation is bursting with food memories of the flavors of Mumbai and Delhi, borne out of gravitating towards simplicity and support during grief and transition. Priya's vulnerable reflections on becoming a mother amidst a shifting identity and sense of home will be supportive to listeners in any stage of parenting. We also pick her brain about how to move forward in a post-pandemic world, where mental and emotional health care are lacking. Priya’s approach to health and grief inspire curiosity and inclusivity and leave us feeling hopeful for the future.
Enjoy the episode!
Priya Joi is a science journalist with over 20 years of experience, having been on staff at New Scientist, The Lancet, and the World Health Organization. She’s worked as a consultant for UNICEF, UNAIDS, Médecins Sans Frontières, The Royal Society, Nature, BMJ, SciDev.Net, BBC, the Guardian, and is on the advisory board of Global Health Film.
Her memoir ‘M(other)land’ on motherhood, race and identity was published by Penguin in March 2023. Priya runs courses to empower freelance science communicators to level up their freelancing, diversify their portfolios, and to thrive and not just survive in the world of freelance, and can offer one-to-one coaching.
Learn more at www.priyajoi.com and follow her on Instagram and Substack.
Roshni:
You're listening to the Mango and Gnocchi Podcast. I'm Roshni.
Rebecca:
And I'm Rebecca. And we're asking the question, what is your grief craving? We are both nurses, grief experts and avid home cooks. We’re the founders of Marigolde, a grief wellness platform rooted in food, culture and rituals.
Roshni:
We created the Mango and Gnocchi Podcast to highlight the power of our collective food stories. Stories that nurture us, bring us joy, and take us out of our minds and into our heart.
Roshni:
Hey, Priya, welcome to Mango and Gnocchi. We're so excited to chat with you today.
Priya:
Oh, thank you for having me.
Roshni:
I want to jump right into your book because I've been thinking a lot about homeland. And your memoir, which was so beautifully written, when it came out, I thought, was this written for me? And I felt like so many people were saying, this speaks to me, so deeply, so personally.
Priya:
Oh, thank you.
Roshni:
And I'm curious about the writing process and figuring out what stories felt important to tell, because I think that sense of resonance comes because we don't even know what stories we hold that we want to share. There's so much wanting to come out, and we don't have avenues, so when a rare book like yours comes out, there's just this resounding excitement and almost hunger to say, I feel similarly, or I have a story just like yours. So I'm curious about the process of writing it and figuring out where to begin, what to include?
Priya:
So my book is called M(other)land, and it's, the subtitle is, it's “What I’ve Learned About Parenthood, Race and Identity”.
I am British Indian. I grew up partly in India, partly in England. And so I grappled with my identity from coming from two lands, basically. This sense of identity, I think for all of us, it kind of fractures and comes together again through our lives.
I had my daughter nine years ago, and she's got Indian heritage through me, Bangladeshi heritage through her father. She was born in England, and then we lived in France, and now Spain. So it's like this beautiful kaleidoscope, but it also can mean that your sense of identity is nowhere and everywhere at the same time. So that was a starting point for wanting to write about how has my own sense of identity shaped me? And then how do I help her figure out who she is in this world?
When I came to writing the book, I really had to think about, I guess, like producing any kind of art, who am I speaking to? Who do I really want this to speak to? Whose heart do I really want to connect with?
And I felt like moving between two kind of communities. One, this sort of group, which is a huge group, not just the South Asians, but any immigrant who's grown up in a country that isn’t that of their ancestors. So you always have this feeling of like… Salman Rushdie puts it as like standing or sitting between two stools and sometimes you're comfortable, and sometimes you fall between the cracks.
I think that's like the perfect way of putting it, but then I also wanted to speak to people who had never had that experience because I didn't want this to be like this very exclusive club; like either you're in it, or you weren't. And I guess all of us hope for this world where we're more integrated and connected. So I wanted to speak to, for example, a white English person who's always grown up in England. What is their sense of what an immigrant’s or second generation immigrant’s life is?
I tried to speak to both of those people as if we were all sitting at a dinner table together. How would I connect with maybe someone like you, Roshni, who's had a similar kind of experience to me, or some of the friends that I went to university with. To talk in a way that doesn't exclude either group. And so that's sort of how I tried to approach it when I was writing.
Roshni:
You're kind of including everyone at the table and for them to reflect, what they don't know about your experience and how to get curious, right?
Priya:
Yeah.
Roshni:
That's kind of what stood out for me was a lot of generating curiosity about experiences and not assuming what you're doing. It feels like when you're reflecting, especially in a memoir, you're looking back so much, right? And making sense of so many different pieces, now, having that perspective.
There are very significant, transformational moments that you talk about in your book, moving between so many places. That idea of home was shifting so dramatically, being with your parents, and then living in India with your grandparents, then coming back and making your own home. Even this idea of when we think of mother, that sense of home and nurturing has shifted so much for you.
I'm curious, if you look at it from a distance, what's that transformation been? I don't know if you have a memory that you can maybe point to? And that sense of, ‘I get to be curious about it’ and maybe like move from a deeply emotional state, to having more fullness around that experience?
Priya:
I think that's a really interesting question. I lived in India from the ages of 8 to 16. And then we moved back to England, my family. And almost every year after that, I went back to India to see my grandparents, who were still alive at that point, and my cousins, who I was very close to.
And I seemed to need this like annual sort of anchor with India. And if I didn't have it, it felt something wasn't quite right in my world. That might also have been like when you're a teenager, you feel kind of untethered anyway. So going back to a sense of familiarity probably really helped. I would say maybe through my teens, I think India probably still felt very much like my home.
When we moved back to England, I was living in Kent in a very white neighborhood. There were not many other South Asians, even Indian people. There was one other Indian girl in my class who— I talk about her a little bit in the book. She was not my friend, let's say. I seemed to remind other people and her that she wasn't completely English and she wanted to just pretend like she was. So she just pretended like I just didn't exist.
In my twenties, I still went back often. And I think there was a point in my thirties when I started to make my own home as an adult and I don't think that's a coincidence that I then went back to India and I kind of thought, this doesn't feel exactly the same. It still felt very familiar, but it didn't feel like somewhere that I needed to run to every time things felt tough.
Having said that, in my mid-thirties, when I got divorced, I did go to India. I had been living in New York at the time with my ex-husband, and then after about a year of living there, we got divorced and moved back to England, kind of on autopilot, really, to be with my parents and my sister. I spent a couple of miserable months in the flat that we’d owned, and I just didn't want to be there anymore.
My parents were going to India, as they always do in the winter, and I went with them, and I ended up just staying for a year. And it really was like a country that had been home from a distance suddenly became like this place of recuperation and renewal, and it just became a sanctuary.
It wasn't something that I really thought very consciously, I didn't think the plan through. I didn't really know I would be there for a year, I just knew that's where I wanted to go, and I stayed until I was better. Not that this recovery is linear. So that suddenly was like a new home. And I had a huge appreciation for having another home to run to when I really needed it.
Roshni:
And what did that home like taste, smell, and feel like? When you say sanctuary and recovery, can you describe, what was home like there, and the people in it?
Priya:
Most of my family are in Bangalore, but I happened to be living in Mumbai for that year, and I think that was deliberate because I did feel, although my family are fairly progressive, I did think they would feel that if I was living on my own, newly divorced, that it would be a tragedy, and everyone would want me to live with them, and I would kind of get brought into lots of family drama. So I decided to go to Mumbai, where I had cousins who would be near me, but they weren't going to force me to live with them or be overbearing.
So when I first got there, I went on this whole culinary— like culinary spa. I just immersed myself in Bangalore and I ate dosas and idlis, and lots of South Indian food that has lots of coconut and curry leaves. The food of my family, of my mum, basically, and my grandmother.
My mum's mum, my maternal grandmother, partly raised me when I lived in India for a few years. So the food that she made. And she made this dish, one of her signature dishes is a dish called yetti pundi. Yetti means prawns. And pundis are like these tiny, tiny little, almost like, miniature versions of idlis, made with rice and water, and they're steamed, and then they're mixed into the prawn curry. It's really comforting. It's almost like a stew in consistency. The little rice balls are filling, and almost slightly “kiddie food”, in a way. It's just easy on the stomach and on the body, but it's really nourishing and warming. It's always made, like the prawn’s always made in this very rich coconut and tomato gravy. And it's just, yeah, I love it. And my grandmother's really the only person— once she died, no one really made it until a few years later, my mum made it, and I was immediately transported back.
Then, I went to Delhi and I had kind of street food there, and lots of chaat and, and so like all of these flavours of these different cities have different things. And Indians are so obsessed by food because everyone is like, “you've got to go to this bhel puri guy, you have to go to this puri place, you have to go to the dosa place” and everyone's got their own favourite. And you know, then they go, “oh yeah, and that guy's not as good as he used to be”, you know? And so it's like this up to the minute, like Time Out of street food.
Rebecca:
I love that.
Priya:
And so I just hung out with my family, I ate, and then when I finally settled in Mumbai for a few months, I was staying with a friend who had a lady who would come in and clean a couple of hours in the morning. She would make breakfast, and I had the same, more or less, the same thing every day. And I think for me, this was part of my grief recovery from the divorce, which was that I needed nourishing, healthy food and I just needed not to think about it.
She would make every morning, rotis, or parathas, and she would make boiled eggs, and then she'd cut up loads of fruit, and there'd be some yogurt, freshly made yogurt. And pretty much, with some lime pickle, that's what I ate for about 360 days— with joy. Like I didn't think, “oh maybe today I'll have something different”.
Roshni:
That's a good prescription.
Priya:
Yeah, it was amazing. It was protein, carbs. Oh God, it was so good. And she would also make a big pot of masala chai and leave it for me. She would cook in the morning for the rest of the day. And she only cooked vegetarian food because she was vegetarian, so she would cook things like really simple, but really tasty, like vegetable bahjis, like beans, and sambar, and rasam and all these things that have like pretty much every vegetable that you can think of, some daal or warm chapatis.
And that was what I ate, pretty much, unless I went out and I ate with friends. We'd go to the beach in Bombay, there's a little beach called Juhu Beach, and we’d eat fried fish. Or I'd maybe go to another bar that did amazing chicken tikka masalas, and I would eat those, but that was more like an occasional treat food, whereas the thing that I ate every day was super healthy and fresh and nourishing, and I didn't even really think about it at the time. It didn't occur to me that this was some kind of grief prescription. I really was just eating what she made.
The other thing that happened to me when I got divorced is I completely was unable to cook. I don't know why, I just couldn't engage with making food at all. And I'd cooked, I'd always cooked, like all my life, since I was about 14. I loved cooking. And somehow, it was like something in my brain was temporarily rewired.
And I just, I couldn't think of how to cook. And once about halfway through that year. I thought, this is ridiculous. I'm a good cook. I've got such great ingredients to work with in India, you know, I can go get any spice I want. And so I decided I was going to make a very simple chicken curry—it was the most disgusting thing I've ever made in my life.
Roshni:
Oh no!
Priya:
The kind of alchemy, the magic, just didn't work. And I was like, okay, I'm clearly not ready. So, it was the strangest thing, but just eating in that way, it was amazing. It really restored me.
Rebecca:
Yeah, I think everyone should get a 360 days of nourishing foods after a huge transition like that. It makes me think, Priya, of your own body as a mother land. How did you navigate that terrain during that year, and find ways to reconnect to yourself, even when you felt so alienated from the things that you had once known about yourself, like being able to cook? What was that like for you?
Priya:
I did feel very disconnected from my body in a way that I guess, it's sort of analogous to the cooking, in that everything that was once familiar to me suddenly wasn't.
And the only thing that I could still do with any skill or assurance was writing, thankfully—because I could still work, I could still do interesting work, I could still blog, I could still communicate through words. Words never left me, thank goodness.
But yeah, but I kind of became disconnected from my body in, not like a medically pathologized way or anything strange, I just— I think I just didn't think about it much. And, in a way, that's quite liberating as well, because I feel like, you know, many of us, especially if you identify as women, you’re just obsessed about your body, or you are told to obsess about your body. And it occupies so much space in your head, that actually not thinking about it for a while was quite liberating.
I remember someone commenting on the fact that, (this was a family member), she said, “Oh, you, you've kind of lost quite a lot of weight”. And I just go, “Oh…” I had not even noticed or registered, and it was a strange kind of thing. But I did always try and do some kind of movement like yoga, or something that would keep me in touch with my body in the sense of feeling where I was in my body, because I did know that that was important.
But all the other things that I loved to do, like I love to lift weights, and I love to run, and I love to swim, I love to walk. I just didn't do any of those things for that year.
Rebecca:
A total reset.
Priya:
Yeah.
Roshni:
I want to move towards when you transition and talk about becoming a mother and when Leela enters your life. There's such beautiful words, describing this almost out of body experience. The way you talk about seeing her, and motherhood, what it requires of you. Like you're giving up so much of your body your whole life, you're being reborn as you become a parent. And how we choose that, right? Like a lot of us choose to want to do that. Yet it feels so jarring, like you think, “why did I even enter this space?” And, you know, “holding both of us at that same time”, I thought it was such a profound way you talked about it, of seeing life come outside of you and existing, and mirroring, and this being is their own self. And then that feeling of powerlessness, but also great power, right? To influence and to care and take them through life, and what a gift that is.
Priya:
It was a tremendous experience, because when I gave birth to Leela, I ended up having to have an emergency Cesarean, and I was under general anesthetic for it. So I wasn't actually conscious when she came into the world. So the first couple of hours that she was earthside, I wasn't there. I mean, I was there, but I was, you know, asleep. And so that was a really strange kind of thing when I reflected on it, that, these minutes that she was breathing, and she was here, and yet I kind of wasn't there yet. She was with my husband, and we had a doula as well, it was amazing. So they were with her. When I woke up from my anesthetic, and she was super tiny, and she was kind of put on me. I still for the longest time felt like she was part of my body. And I think that's what I didn't really expect in this, what’s it called, the fourth trimester, I think, is it?
Roshni:
Mm hmm, postpartum.
Priya:
Yeah. I remember, for example, like going out for lunch with friends, maybe she was only about two weeks old and my husband, Shabby saying to me, another friend of ours just wants to kind of hold her, and at that point I just didn't want to let go, and I couldn't explain why. And I just said no. He didn't understand why, and you know it was like, “oh, he'll be really careful with her”. And I said, “no, no, it's not that. I just, she's not leaving my body right now”. It was such a strange kind of feeling of another consciousness outside of my own, but that also felt like my own. And there was nothing that really prepared me, I think, for that.
But on the flipside, motherhood and giving birth is so brutal on the body and the emotions. And I do remember a few months, maybe up to about three or four months after Leela was born, of feeling like I just couldn't do this. And that was even though I had huge support from my husband, my mum. But I just had this sense of complete, kind of impotence, and just thinking, I'm just not capable of doing this. I just, I don't know what to do now. And now I had this baby, and I can’t really look after her and… there was no logic to it because this isn't a logical time.
And then the hormones kind of eased, and she grew up, she got a little bit older. As she became a toddler, there were just so many moments that I could see of myself in her, both in how she looked; she looked really very much like me when she was very small, like about two, three, four, but also kind of mannerisms— she would look like my sister, or my dad, and I guess it kind of hit home the connectedness through blood. And I suppose it kind of made me feel closer to the rest of my family in kind of an unexpected way. Because when you can see your own father in your baby, it just reminds you that actually we're all like these connected balls of cells that just happened to be divided at certain points.
As she's gotten older, she still very much feels like part of me, but a part of me that's like, I don't know, like another country that's got independence. And she obviously has own thoughts, and her own feelings and values. And that is very much influenced by me and my husband and the people that we surround her with, but she has, also, her own personality and her own ways of looking at things that are so distinct, and I think probably all kids do.
I mean, I've got Leela and then I've got two older stepkids. So it's hard to know how much is you, and how much is just them. This soul that's already formed. It is quite extraordinary, and it is an exercise in restraint to just sort of hold back a little bit and not dump all of my feelings and sensibilities and my values and everything onto her. Because I mean, I have a responsibility, but it's not also in my power, I think to—I don't have the right is how I would put it. I don't have the right to completely shape and define everything about her, because she's her own person. Even now at age nine, I think she very much is her own person.
Rebecca:
From your postpartum period, do you have any memories of a food that kind of helped to ground you in that liminal space? It's such a subtle but ground shaking transition during the postpartum period. And we feel that foods really can ground us and take us back to earth when we're feeling like we're floating away. And like you said, “I can't do this, I just don't know if I can do this”.
Priya:
Definitely, I would say very simple Indian food. So things like daal and rice and vegetables, so not too dissimilar to what I was eating during my 365 days of divorce recovery, it kind of was a similar sort of menu, where my husband cooked, and my mum cooked. She would come over every week and I just kind of tried to eat a lot of that food.
There was also, because I was living in Brighton, in England where there's lots of cafes and there's lots of cakes and coffee. I do remember gathering with other mothers, new mothers, and we would eat cake together and it wasn't so much about the cake, it was more like the connectedness, and about all of us feeling like, okay, we're in this together, we're going to get through. And lots of tea.
Because Brighton's by the sea, lots of memories of sitting on the beach and just having snacks with us as well. But food was very grounding for sure. While I was pregnant, I really couldn't eat much Indian food at all. Like any spice or anything, I just couldn't handle it. And so I ate very basic, kind of like British school dinners, like jack and potatoes, and beans, and my husband was like, “Oh, God, I just don't know how to cope with this.” I was just like, the more basic…
Roshni:
12 year old school boy diet (laughing)
Priya:
Oh, my God, like fish fingers and peas and, you know, super basic like. And I had eaten that food before. I didn't have some, like, huge obsession with it, but something about pregnancy, I don’t know, it was wild. And then luckily, that passed after I had Leela, and then I returned to Indian food. And I do remember needing lots of energy because I was breastfeeding, but it was very challenging. Leela was breastfeeding all the time, and I just seemed to be hungry all the time. And so food was very, very important. I remember it just making me feel like it could make the difference between feeling okay or not feeling okay.
Roshni:
I wanted to ask you, in the book, you're writing about your mother, you're writing about yourself, and Leela, and all of you have kind of moved through those stages of being someone's child, someone's parent. And I was reflecting on how each person is sort of changing spaces. And when you're, within those relationships, someone else is mothering someone in a different moment, or someone else becomes the child and how there's that interchangeability, and there's a fragility to, just maybe reflecting on your mother's relationship of how she became a mother under those circumstances and what she has done and given you, and that you're now carrying it on and building on it.
And at least for me, what I took away as I was reading the book was this feeling of, you know, at some point we have to accept the best our parents could do and then build on it, educate ourselves, and what maybe they couldn't do for us, we have to offer it to ourselves. And I wanted to ask what is your sense of that relationship now? Like, how has that shifted from the way you saw your mom, you know, right after she had you, in your early childhood years to the kind of mother she is to you now and grandparent to Leela?
Priya:
Well, after I had Leela… there's lots of reflections that I have about that. Immediately after I had Leela, my mum really wanted, like I guess a lot of mothers do, wanted to come over and live with us and cook and all of this stuff. And I did want her to come over, but I also wanted me and my husband and my daughter to have our little mini-family bubble as well. So I definitely pushed back on some of the support that she was offering and I welcomed other support with open arms, and I think she was a bit confused, because when she had me, her parents were living in India, she was living in England. She had almost no support.
And so she was just really delighted to be giving me the support that she didn't have. Whereas for me, I felt and I was emotionally in a very different space, and I think I have always been very independent, because of the fact that I went to India by myself when I was a child to live with my grandparents, and then I lived with other relatives and then I came back to England. So I've always kind of been very independent and have figured things out by myself. So I sort of wanted the opportunity to figure it out myself a little bit as well.
And now, when I look back now, I think, what an idiot. I should have just taken all the help I could have got because, you know, it's a very time limited offer usually. But I was responding in the way that felt natural to me. And I did it in a way that didn't upset or offend her, like we didn't have an argument about it, but she did say, “oh, well, you know, I mean, I'm around if you want it”. And so what what we did in the end was she would come over every week for a couple of days, stay with us, and then she would go back. So that gave us the space and independence we needed, but she could also come and support us, and we could go and have a shower and just be by ourselves for a little bit. So it worked really, really well. But it also made my mum remember a lot of stuff from when I was a baby.
The first time I went to India was actually when I was four months old. She was 25, she was living in England with my dad who was a doctor; he was traveling all over the country. He was a junior doctor. She was working, and she was working very long hours. He was studying. So she was the main breadwinner. And at around four months, I think probably now in retrospect what she had is postpartum depression. But it wasn't diagnosed very much in the seventies. And so she just couldn't cope, and she would keep going to the doctor’s, and he would prescribe two weeks’ rest, and then she would keep trying to work again because if she didn't work, she didn't earn money. And she basically just kept having these series of breakdowns.
And so my grandparents, her parents, lived on a farm in Mangalore at the time, in South India, and they said, “why don't you send Priya to us for a few months?” Which is kind of a common thing in lots of Asian families that grandparents would look after their grandchildren. She said yes, so I went with my aunt when I was four months old, and then she didn't see me again until I was about a year old. That was another eight months later, because air travel was incredibly expensive at the time in the seventies.
When I became a mum, I found this memory and this part of my family story really difficult to come to terms with because I just had a baby, and I couldn't imagine sending her to India, even to live with my parents. It really took a lot of understanding, and trying to, and talking to her about it. And there were lots of arguments, and there were lots of tears, and there was a lot of intense emotion.
It was only when my daughter was a bit older, when she was maybe about four or five, that I could actually have the conversation in a more understanding way, and that wasn't driven by hormones. But it did give me a huge empathy for my mum because she just had this baby. And pretty much every mum's instinct is to be with their baby and look after their baby. She had to sacrifice that time with me, and I really feel for her, and I still do. And through Leela, I think she's kind of re-lived that time a bit. They’ve always spent loads of time with my daughter. She's looked after her a lot from the time when she was a baby. So in a way, I think, she got a little bit of that time back. But you can never time travel, so that loss remains there, and other things have grown around it, but it's there, nevertheless.
So there's lots of sadness, in a way, for her. And then gratitude for my own experience, because I had so much help from my husband who worked at home, so he was always around. I never had that feeling that I think a lot of mothers do, where they're with the baby by themselves and they just are exhausted, and they haven't slept, they feel very unmoored from anything and they just can't really cope. I do think so much of postpartum depression can be inherited, but so much is contextual. It depends on what's going on around you, and how much support you have, and I never had to be in that position. So I feel immensely grateful for that.
Rebecca:
Reflecting on both sides of those stories, is there anything that you would share with other people, like tips for having a kind of well-rounded postpartum experience?
Roshni:
It's a tricky thing in a way, because the support that's available to new mothers is sometimes so limited by the kind of employment that they're in, or their partners are in, or where they live in relation to their friends and family. But as much as could be done, I guess, in advance of having a baby, would be the best way. Even that means maybe compromising other things and going to live with your parents for a bit if you need to, or near your parents.
For me that was really foundational in how secure I feel as a mother and how confident I feel. It’s not that I'm an amazing mother and I just happened to be. It's also because I got so much support around me that I had this massive safety net in which to be sleep-deprived, in which to, you know, just kind of like go away for a night. I went and gave a talk when my baby was three months old, I went from London to Edinburgh for a night. And I could only do that because my husband was there, and my mum was there, and so that meant that my mental health was so strong that I could withstand so many other things.
So yeah, trying to anticipate, I guess as much as possible, is probably the best thing. But with the acknowledgement that sometimes it's just, you have to kind of make the best of what you have.
Roshni:
I'm thinking about the story when in the book you talk about how Leela and you have your rituals, like of going to bedtime, and you really talk to her like this being that totally ‘gets’ the world. Like, you're not talking down to her. Her world is different. It's not the same as you, but that is her reality. She's having experiences that are real, the things she's seeing. And you talk about so many things with her and there is a snippet about you talking about your previous life with her. Like boyfriends before Shabby. And she's like, “you were in New York?!” Like she was upset about you being in New York without her, but not that you had this whole life before her, and I just thought it was funny, like what yeah kids focus on.
Priya:
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
Roshni:
And I'm wondering, how do you talk to her about how to care for herself in the world, how to navigate difficult things? How do you convey, these really big themes that even we're grappling with like, how do you sit with suffering, with loss? You know, that's still such a practice for us. And we had so much time and opportunity. And for a little one, how are you contextualizing it? How are you speaking in a way that makes sense to her without making it seem, oh, wow, the world is, especially, you know…. What's happening in the world right now, I know a lot of kids are scared. They don't know what to make of the world. There's just so much fear. And I think parents are also under so much stress. How do you offer that stability, but also hold space for the fact that it is a difficult place to be in.
Priya:
So I thought about this a lot from I guess when she was about three or four years old. When kids start to expand their world beyond them. I mean kids, they're still the center of their own universe until they're a little bit older, but they then start to look outwards, and start to relate concepts and the outside world to themselves. And that's just how their brain is developing at that time. I knew I really wanted to talk with her very openly about emotions because when I was growing up, we didn't really. I'd say maybe more now as a family, my parents and my sister, we talk to each other a lot about how we feel. When we were growing up, I don't really ever remember my mum or dad admitting that they were sad, or acknowledging that they were angry, and why they were angry.
And I really wanted to talk to her about that because I also think you can’t teach a kid emotions and the complexity and the nuances around it if you're not willing to be vulnerable about your own. So if I'm feeling really sad for some reason, and she notices in as much as I can tell her for her age, I will tell her why. It might be that I've had a bad day at work. It might be that I've argued with my husband. It might be that I'm really missing my sister. And so I do try and tell her why I'm feeling that way.
If I'm really angry or really irritable, again, I try and explain why. And even if it's something like I'm premenstrual and I'm really snappy, I do explain, not in so much as an excuse, but for her to understand, because she will be going through this as well anyway. You know, I will say things, like she knows broadly what hormones are. She doesn't really know the ins and outs, but she knows there's something in your body that can affect your mood and various other things. So I say, you know, “my hormones are a little bit out of sync right now, and so my mood is a little bit not like I normally am. So just please be patient with me for a day or two”, and when she goes, “okay”. And so I always try and share what I'm feeling because kids know anyway when something's up.
But if you don't explain it to them, they just won't know the details, and sometimes they'll think it's them, or something that they've done. I try and explain to her her own agency and autonomy in the decisions that she can make.
For example, we were swimming once, me and her, and it was very quiet and relaxed, and Shabby, my husband, was with another group of friends and there was some kids there with him and he was messaging me, saying, “oh, you know, we're going to this street party thing, and there are some Leela's friends here, you know, I think they’re quite keen to see her”. And I asked Leela did she want to go, and she said, “I'm not really up for street fair, I just want to swim”. And then he messaged me again, so I asked again, and she said, “I don't really want to, but, you know, if you really want me to…” and I said, “No, I don't really want you to. If all you want to do is to stay here and be relaxed and be calm…” and that was kind of what I wanted as well, and so I said, “let's just do this.”
And so, trying to teach her that it's okay to put your needs first sometimes as well, that other people are important too. So for example, if it was a birthday party and she didn't want to go, which has happened sometimes because kids are mercurial in their moods, then I've explained to her, “well, these are things that are really important for our friends, and we do need to show up. It's important to show up, but that could be you just turning up, giving them the birthday present, you know, wait until the cake’s cut, and then leave.” Like, you don't have to stay for the whole time, but you do need to show up. So trying to have a balance between saying your needs are important, but not trying to convey that her needs are more important than anything, and that's where my own values come in, which is that the individual and the communal need to be in balance so that no one can can be more important than the other.
And so, through that, she then develops and figures things out herself, and sometimes comes to me to talk about things, and sometimes has said that she might feel really annoyed at someone, but she doesn't want to say anything. And so she just sort of goes for a walk and then comes back. So then I say, “well, it's okay, if you don't say anything if you want to, but maybe next time you feel like you could say something, but gently and in a nice, friendly way, but express yourself. Because if you don't, then that feeling that you have doesn't go anywhere. It just kind of stays in you.”
So that's why I kind of try and explain it to her in ways that make sense to me as well. But I don't overcomplicate things. And kids just are remarkably intelligent about these things. I think they're actually much more in touch with their emotions and their immediate needs than adults are. Like they immediately know when they're hungry or thirsty or uncomfortable. They don't want to wear something because it doesn't feel good or they're too hot, too cold, like they have such a finely tuned thermostat.
And then as adults, we could be somewhere that's really stuffy and we’re just like, “okay I won’t say anything.” And we like, deliberately disconnect ourselves from these feelings, and this kind of GPS that we have about ourselves. And so actually I don't sometimes have to explain a whole lot to her, I just have to slightly tap into that frequency that she's already in tune with, and just kind of have a conversation at that level.
Roshni:
Yeah. I definitely want to be a nine year old. (laughing)
Rebecca:
…Raised by Priya! What a gift to be raised in that way, where you're able to express what you're feeling in the moment, and get reflection from your mom and guidance on the best way to handle it.
Priya:
Thank you.
Roshni:
And that complete sense of acceptance right? Like for her to not feel like she has to please you or she'll be reprimanded. I think for so many of us, we had our own emotional experience and then we had to think about, oh, how is my emotional experience going to affect, how it's perceived by my parents, or by others? We focus so much on everyone else's sense of how we were and what we needed. So, yeah, we did sacrifice and cross our own boundaries for so long. And to be raised in a way where what you feel is true, and do what serves you best, that's so beautiful. A gift.
Priya:
Thank you. There are, I mean, there are some times— there is one really difficult kind of moment that we've had recently where she had a very good friend, and I was very good friends with the mum of this kid. And then me and the mum had a major falling out in a way that I don't usually have with people. But she behaved in very unacceptable ways many times with me, and so I've had to completely cut contact, and as a result, Leela has had no contact with her friend, who was a very good friend of hers, who is this person's child.
And so for the longest time I kind of stayed in touch with that person so that Leela and her friend could still see each other. And then after a while, it became untenable. And so I did have to explain to Leela what was happening, and that I'd had an argument with this person and it wasn't reconcilable, and it was just not something that I could actually stand to be in contact with this person again. And I said to her, “I'm really sorry, but you’re not going to be seeing your friend. If she was older and you could meet just the two of you, that would be fine, but there's no way I can organize this without being in touch with the mum.”
That was a challenging thing to do, because there I was actually putting myself, ultimately, before her friendship, and my own needs. But that was something that felt important to explain, and to say I did really try for a year to put your friendship ahead of my own feelings and, but then I just couldn't for these reasons. And I didn't go into great detail because it was a very adult argument that I've had with mum. But yeah, so she's now having to deal with these things. And you know, I acknowledged to her that it's not fair because she did say, you know, “well this has nothing to do with me and I did nothing wrong, and it's really not fair, and it's not fair for the other kid.” And it really isn’t, and it really sucks. But that is life sometimes, unfortunately.
Roshni:
Yeah, I'm just looking at the time. I'm like, can we keep talking?
I do want to ask one question, because you are a science and health writer and you're looking at sort of global issues, and really personalizing it to how does it affect people. You've written so thoughtfully about COVID, vaccination, all the restrictions during the pandemic. I feel like there's so much like politicization, of just basic facts sometimes. And I think that even emotional health and how we support each other through different life experiences, and grief. And that affects people very differently depending on where they are, what culture they're from.
I think even what kind of care is available, it's still minimal. I'm wondering as a science and health journalist, what are you seeing that needs to be changed in how do we offer support to people when it's needed, just in time, and ongoing as well. And that's, broader than maybe, just like going to see a therapist. That's very important, having psychiatric care or therapy, those are important. But, looking at it more broadly, that's more cultural, that's more individualized to how people navigate emotional wellness and grief. I wanted to get sort of your professional perspective on this.
Priya:
I mean, I think we're sort of in this epidemic, kind of worldwide, where collectively our nervous systems are just completely fried by so many things. And, you know, we've been talking as a society of things like burnout for so long, but now, it seems to be kind of reaching this extreme crisis point, where for so many reasons, either because people are experiencing extreme discrimination and racism and they're seeing other countries literally being obliterated. And it can sometimes feel, if you allow all of this to enter into your world, your daily world, it can feel impossible to carry on because of the tragedies that are happening, and have almost always been happening, I think.
But it's just maybe the scale of it, but also the scale of what we are now exposed to because we're completely connected with everything that's going on, everywhere in the world. And that is a challenge that I don't quite know how we fix yet, because we can't completely shut ourselves off to what's going on in other countries in the world. We are all connected as human beings and we know what's going on, we can mobilize support, and rally help, and fly in extra support when it's needed and so on. But, on the other hand, I don't think it's sustainable the way that we are exposed to 24/7 news and the way that people will literally post, live videos of people being killed, murdered, or like extreme graphic violence on social media. That is just not something that our brains and our bodies are designed to support witnessing, and then just carrying on.
And until not that long ago, these videos, which were called snuff videos, were, I mean they were illegal, to actually show someone being killed on screen. And yet now we're just like on a daily, hourly, by-minute basis exposed to this. So in some way, kind of like individually being able to mitigate that a little bit, while still caring for everyone, for things that are happening, and giving money where we can, and supporting and helping. I think that is something we do have to be conscious of, that it's not even ‘do we want to be exposed to that’ is, I genuinely don't think that we've evolved in a way that can support that.
But on a daily individual level in terms of how we work, I mean, this continued drive towards productivity is just burning every other bridge, burning our mental health. It's burning the relationship we have with food because so many people I know say, “Oh, I just don't have time to cook” or “I just can't cook”. And then we literally have pre-packaged, fast food being delivered to our sofa. So you can spend your entire day working and eating, and only just getting up to go to the bathroom. And that could be your existence.
Rebecca:
Seriously.
Priya:
Like if you were, I don't know, working in tech, or not even tech, but like just working in any field. So connecting back I think, to what we are, which is human beings. We are living organisms, and like plants and other animals, we need fresh air— and it's so basic, but increasingly, even as we've had these conversations in society, and we're so aware now of the mental health toll that that modern life is taking on us.
And not just modern life, I mean, we always frame these in very western ideologies of like “burn out”, and people go, “oh, don’t villages in India burn out? Obviously they do, just no one is writing about it. Either they're not living long enough to burn out or they're, you know, like farmers in India, taking their own lives in hordes sometimes, and it's horrifying. But it doesn't make The Wall Street Journal because they don't really care about it. So, I mean, I think one thing would be to not think about this as a “Western thing”. And there is a tendency to look to this idealized version of the East as, “oh, they know how to do it”, you know? And no one has the solution.
Rebecca:
Right?
Roshni:
They’re just meditating all the time….
Priya:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. They’re all just eating nutritious food, and like meditating and yoga, and you know, everyone's fine. And, no one is fine, really. And I don’t think anywhere, maybe in Bhutan, or maybe wherever the “happiest place” is, maybe they are. But yeah, remembering that we are actually flesh and blood human beings, and regardless of AI, regardless of tech, we have evolved in a certain way and we need to live in a way that supports our bodies because everything else is irrelevant otherwise. If we don't look after what we are inherently, then everything we create, whatever planets we go and colonize next or whatever, none of it is going to be possible because we ourselves will have just kind of like burnt out in some, I don't know, like neural overload or something. So looking after ourselves is what it comes down to. Nourishment, and just kind of nurturing ourselves. And that it isn't decadent, it isn't a luxury. It is actually a necessity.
Roshni:
And it's such an art and a science, right? Knowing your body, what works with you and like you said, it doesn't have to cost any money at all. And you're one of the people I look up to, you're so good at it. And it seems effortless, but I know that you work very thoughtfully around it, about creating that sense of nourishment and ease. So maybe before we leave, do you want to share a little bit about your “happy place”? I think I have a little bit of an idea of what it looks like, but… (laughing)
Priya:
Oh yes, my happy place…
Roshni:
What does it feel like, what does it taste like?
Priya:
My happy place is absolutely the sea, and it’s being in the sea, near the sea. Walking along the sea. I like to think it's because my ancestors come from fishing villages in South India, and so they were fishermen and they lived with the tides, and they lived right by the sea. I feel like people who live in coastal… like they just have salt in their skin somehow, I don't know. And every time I go to the sea, I feel immediately calm and immediately, it's like, the rest of the time all my atoms are swirling around and then I go to the sea and it all kind of like stills for a few seconds or a few minutes or hours. So however long I can give it, and the more I give it, the more kind of positive feedback I get from my own body going, “Well done! We enjoyed that.”
Rebecca:
We have one last question, because we love to ask everyone who is a guest on our show, when you tap into your body, and your food memories, and everything that makes you you, and all the experiences you've been through, what does your grief crave?
Priya:
I would have to say it is my grandmother's yetti pundi, her prawn curry, with the rice balls in it; it is, 100%. I remember being ten years old, and shelling the prawns by the way, before it went in the curry because kids always have to do work in Indian families. So eating those prawns that I had shelled with my own hands, yeah, that's absolutely my food. It comforts me a lot.
Roshnni:
So you're going to make it for us? (laughing) very soon?
Priya:
Yes, I will one day. Yeah, I will.
Roshni:
With my own self interest at heart.
Well, Priya, thank you so much. This has been such a wonderful, heartwarming, but also such an important conversation. Thank you for making the time, just to share your story, with so much heart, but also, for looking ahead and, you know, making sense of the world for us too, I think our listeners will really appreciate that.
Priya:
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
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