The Beauty of Borrowed Pieces

Hi my people,
I recently had arbi ki sabzi after ages, and it hit me with a strange, gentle nostalgia. Growing up, arbi was never made at home. I think I was 19 when I tasted it for the first time at a friend’s place and I instantly bacame a fan of it and it still is a part of my most loved dishes list.

And it struck me that, so many tiny things from other people’s lives have quietly slipped into mine. Some people leave a huge impact in just a few seconds, and we don’t even notice it happening. If we think about it, we are made up of people we meet, places we have lived, habits we have picked up unknowingly.

Like how I now make matar ke parathe for my son, a recipe I must have eaten a hundred times at my best friend’s house while growing up. It was a part of her home, and now it’s a part of mine. 

how an ex-colleague used to fold her hoodie by neatly tucking the hood inside. I saw her do it once, picked up the habit without thinking, and now every random afternoon while doing laundry, the hoodie in my hand feels like a soft reminder of her. We haven’t spoken in years. I don’t even know where she is now. But every time I fold a hoodie there she is, popping into my head.

We keep seeing quotes like “find the extraordinary in the ordinary,” but honestly, nothing is ordinary.
Everything has history, roots, a story behind it.

My six-year-old uses pure Hindi words because he hears his great grandfather speak them. he will say something like “mumma kya main yeh “istemaal” kar lun or aaj mausam suhana hai na! All these words are now forever a part of his vocabulary, his personality, his way of talking. In a way, he will always carry his great-grandfather with him. He also loves having milk with banana pieces cut into it, garnished with a little kesar which was my dad’s absolute favourite. He never met my dad… and yet they share something.
Isn’t that beautiful?

Maybe this is why we Indians are so obsessed with food. It’s never just to fill the tummy….. it fills the heart. Food carries legacy, love, memories, and generations inside it.

Even language does the same.
My mother tongue is Marwari. I speak Hindi every day. But when I bump into something or get frustrated, the first thing that comes out of my mouth is “aai ga!”  a Marathi expression I picked up growing up in Maharashtra. And even now, living in Bangalore, when I spot an MH-12 number plate, something inside me lights up.

We don’t realise it, but we’re stitched together with these tiny threads, foods we tasted in someone else’s kitchen, words picked up from here and there, habits borrowed from friends family or even strangers, expressions collected from cities we’ve lived in. Sometimes it’s in the way we cut fruit.
Sometimes in a phrase we didn’t realise we’d adopted. Sometimes in a recipe we cook without thinking.
Sometimes in the way we react, smile, or sigh.

Its almost like our brains are storytelling machines. They link everyday actions with memories, emotions, scents, and moments from our past. A taste, a gesture, even the way we fold clothes becomes a tiny bookmark in our mind. We may forget the person, the year, the city, but the habit stays. And through that habit, they quietly return, again and again.

Life is full of these invisible threads.
We carry pieces of people we loved, people we met briefly, and even people we’ve lost to time, all stitched into the way we live today. Well, if you think about it, Maybe this is what a life truly is: a mosaic of everyone who ever touched it…

If this reminded you of someone or something, share your moment in the comments, let’s connect through our borrowed memories.

Love & Ice creams
Sneha Singhvi