Ghee
By Avani Thakkar
Ghee /guh-e/
1. Put butter in a pot on low heat.
2. Watch it bubble until it gets the smell.
3. Yellowish color it will be.
4. Cool it.
5. Strain it.
Your Auntie Banu uses the gunk for a dish she mixes with flour.
I hear the clang of the shopping carts before I see them. I flinch away from the sound of metal and clutch my basket tightly as people rush past me. The air conditioning blows down hard on my bare arms and I shiver a little. I pull my body tighter and try to wear my bravest smile. The shelves swim before me, their colors taunting me with the promise of food. All I want to do is run away and hide. Go back to the days where my mom would do grocery shopping for me. Or at least to the ones before the ghost girl became transparent. Then we’d be braving this place together and I wouldn’t be standing alone in the crowded aisles of Trader Joes’.
In the stillness of my grandmother’s house, next to the wooden drawer full of spices and underneath the ceramic hanging avocados, onions, and corn is a dark cabinet. It can’t be seen without the switch of its inner light, filling the insides with an almost magical glow. The shelves on the inside are rounded, spinning like lazy susans around and around. At the bottom nestled past old oil used to make pakoras and a lifetime supply of white vinegar is a small unassuming pickle jar. The green paint on the lid is fading from repeated washes and the outsides are still a little sticky, from the label that refused to wash away. The creamy golden yellow ghee fills the jar just about halfway. Constantly in use, it never gets as close to the bottom. Each bit is lovingly scraped out to make dinner. Once for my grandparents, my dad, and uncles then just my grandparents, now just my grandma and the visitors.
Shaking, I reach for a bottle of something and falter and reach back. My grocery list is short:
● Greek Yogurt
● Pasta
● Soup
● Granola
● A cheesy snack
● Nuts
● Dried fruit
All things that are small and unassuming, that I can fit into the small recesses of my dorm that I’ve been allotted. Not anything larger that would take up space, make me be seen by the ghost girl that lives with me. She doesn’t speak to me anymore and I don’t speak to her either. Her
hazel eyes I would’ve said were once owlish with love now follow me like the bird of prey. I shrink away, putting away my tastes of home, hoping to avoid her talons
Nestled above the frozen section, there it was. Clarified Butter. In a shiny new jar with a bright blue label, holding what I knew to be ghee. I noticed my fingers trembling as I picked it up.
My grandma said it was just butter. Nothing special. Something so normal, yet so insignificant. She didn’t understand why I would want to know more because I know ghee, I know Indian
cooking because it’s not only hers, but mine too. In a world as big and scary as our own, there’s peace in the familiar.
Love like I do
Under the stove’s hood
Taste my warm embrace
With a wooden spoon
There are days like this one where all I want to do is scream and run away past the jars of commodified butter and frozen food. Home calls to me, the siren song of an old pickle jar and spices ground carefully, and a hot cup of chai made until the color was right. Comfort in being seen, comfort in being allowed to exist.
If I bought a jar of clarified butter, would I have been able to let it be visible? Would it have been able to sit in the kitchen? Would it have been enough to fit in with white girl neon orange Kraft mac and cheese because it was Trader Joes or would it be gathering dust in the back of a cabinet because it was mine and not hers?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines clarified as “freed from impurity”, as “refined”. The white and blue jar is elegant and refined, new and shiny from the factory. Untainted by pickle
juice, untainted by the necessity to hold something. Clarified butter has options, ghee doesn’t.
I’ve always known India was colonized by the British. It’s a story I’ve heard over and over again, since I first asked what the flag meant. The 24 indigo spokes of the bicycle wheel sang freedom
from colonial rule. The wheel runs through my mind, never letting me forget what it means. A country dimmed under the brute force of an empire, now free to flourish. The past twists the present, ideas traveling from one country to the other until they land in the heads of the unlucky, the ones who are trapped in the prejudices of a lost time.
To clarify butter is just the beginning of ghee. Clarified butter retains its yellowness while ghee browns to add a richer taste. Clarified butter seems sanitized in comparison, delicious yet much paler. Palatable for the wider consumer, yet unflavored and unfinished for a lonely girl cooking in her dorm room.
I didn’t buy the clarified butter. I watched butter burn across my pan instead, leaving a crumbly black residue across the bottom and soaked it in hot, soapy water. It burned my hands and I let the water run across my skin in flaming rivulets like the tears that wouldn’t come.
My memory tells me that it was a fancy jar, but the internet tells me that it’s one made of plastic with a white lid and font that’s wavy enough to mimic Hindi. With the label removed, it’ll fit nicely into a minimalistic kitchen. It’s almost not
(ghee)
College is supposed to be about redefinition, exploration, and growth. It’s supposed to be about finding yourself and becoming your truest version. The dorm, something I’ll reminisce about with fond memories. I’m supposed to say it was terrible, the elevators were always broken, there were rats, but hey it was home for that year. Right?
I see the ghost girl sometimes, her long hair falling around her face before her eyes can pierce me again and remind me of the broken girl who lived beside her. Of the burned butter and small snacks, of the hunched shoulders and heavy eyes.
but
then
I see through her
And there’s the clang of windchimes and the rich, nutty aroma of ghee and I’m home again.
Citations
“Clarified, Adj.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, September 2025,