If you ask me who I am, I’ll probably start with a smell. The smell of mustard oil heating in a koda, the first hiss of phoron, the way it fills a room before anyone even sits down to eat. That’s where my story begins — always with food, always with home.
My name is Rusha, and by day, I run our family led manufacturing business my father started several decades ago. It’s a world of drawings, steel, and noise ( a lot of it) — a world I’ve learned to love in my own way. There’s something grounding about it — the hum of machines, the smell of metal, the feeling of being part of something built by hand and heart.
But when the day ends, when the factory quiets down and the city slows its breath, I come home to the other part of me — the part that still believes comfort lives in a bowl of dal and the smell of fried onions. Besides my day job and the ‘other part of me’, I am a full time dogmother.
I grew up in a house that was never quiet. Ma yelling from the kitchen, Dida humming to herself during ‘kutno kata’, someone arguing about who ate the last mishti. It was noisy, cluttered, full of overlapping lives — and it was perfect.
Those women — my Ma, my Dida, my jethima — they didn’t just feed us. They built our world with every meal. Dida cooked like she was praying, Ma cooked like she was planning, and I, somewhere in between, learned that food is never just food — it’s love, disguised as something ordinary.
Every time I stand by the stove, I feel closer to where I come from. My kitchen has become my calm, my rebellion, my inheritance. It’s where I remember who I am when everything else feels too fast.
That’s really what this space is about — a way to hold on to the world I grew up in, where luchi was nuchi, lebu was nebu, and lonka was nonka. Small words, big comfort. That Ghoti rhythm — familiar, funny, and full of love — still sits in my speech, and maybe even in the way I stir my food.
I’m not a professional cook. I don’t measure or plan too much. I cook the way my family did — by feeling, by instinct, by memory.
So if you’ve found your way here, welcome. You don’t need to know the recipes. Just bring your own stories, your own small hungers. Maybe together, we’ll find that all our homes — no matter how far apart — smell a little like phoron, and sound a little like love. May you find your nuchi nebu nonka here.
Nuchi Nebu Nonka 