Besides the Auntie scandal, one of the highlights of the Mamdani campaign for me was the western revulsion to pictures of New York City’s mayor eating rice with his bare fingers. It’s hard to understand the fuss, especially if you’ve grown up tasting the microbiomes on your caregiver’s fingers as they ushered customised morsels into your mouth. Eventually, we learned how to do it ourselves — to form globules of rice with trails of dal or curry, incorporating into each one a portion of meat or fish or egg, and a bit of vegetable. It was unsurprising to witness the racist tenor of the western media’s response to the circulated image of Zohran Mamdani eating rice without cutlery… the invocations of ‘savage-mindedness’ or low hygiene standards. Maybe this resonated with me, because ever since I moved to South Tyrol five years ago, I have had to re-negotiate my relationship to this inherited gesture of eating with my fingers, besides re-navigating the realms of my kitchen pantry and re-orienting my culinary proclivities. It goes without saying that this whole affair is compounded because I am married to someone who is white and whose family is South Tyrolean. There are many immigrants of South Asian descent who live in the same town as us, but most of those households are not mixed, like ours.

In January 2019, when my partner visited me in India and we evolved an expansive travel itinerary that spanned Delhi, Khajuraho, Ajanta, Ellora, Aurangabad, Mumbai, and Goa, I steadily recognised that I would have to learn a new language in order to access the parts of him that are inherently more articulate in German. He speaks English fluently, but when I’d hear him converse in both in his native tongues (Standard German and Dialect), he seemed different, like his brain was being activated in a whole other way. I sought intimacy with those elements of his personhood. I wonder if he felt the same way when, at some point in our travel, possibly in Khajuraho, I unthinkingly began eating with my fingers. I asked him if he had ever tried it. He told me that growing up, he was conditioned to believe fingers needed to be clean, and my gesture felt like the opposite of his set of inherited gestures. But some minutes into the conversation, he went and washed his hands and returned and asked me to show him how it’s done. I showed him my technique of taking in bits of rice and mixing it with whatever else was on my plate, pressing in certain ingredients to maximise flavour. He mimicked what I did, even though I could see him struggling through this lesson in decolonisation.