Unperturbed by the camera around her, Sushila Dodani, who "has been approximately 80 years old for a while now", goes about shallow-frying vegetables and roasting besan in her Ahmedabad apartment, engaging in endearing banter with her filmmaker granddaughter throughout. As she extracts tamarind pulp, she talks about how manual processes in the kitchen used to be people's workout until they started paying others to keep them in shape. While slicing lotus root into uniform chunks, she reminisces about how the tuber, an ingredient typical to Sindhi cooking, used to be "so much thicker in Pakistan". And at the end of the film, the hearty dish looks every bit the effort Dodani has taken to carefully imbue it with flavours, even as she has nonchalantly let viewers into her life for a brief eight minutes.

A photo of Sushila Dodani and husband Bhagwandas taken in a Bombay studio in the '60s