Cooking and ilish

When you stay alone you do all kinds of jugaad with food. You have a sandwich for a lunch. A pizza for dinner. A cup of tea for breakfast. Somehow you just don't want to cook for yourself. Normal meals are of the least importance to you when you are the only one in the house. Shopping for groceries is another deterrent.
I think this is because cooking is always for someone. What incentivises you to go through the process (if not being paid) is to make your loved one taste your invention and the pleasure of sitting down with him/ her and savouring the food, talking about how the day went and warming your ears now and then about how good you cooked.
Cooking with mothers is always fun. I realized this partly a few months back. When at home, I used to be indifferent when I used to hear gossips about how some didi had called up her mother thousands of miles away to know when to put the shorshe(for the Bengali challenged,shorshe is mustard) in the ilish(ah well..no one can translate ilish unless you taste one..I'll just tell you what it is..it is THE MOST DELICIOUS fish to eat among the Bengalis, Oriyas, Gujaratis and the national fish of Bangladesh) or how much water to put when boiling spaghetti and how are the number of whistles of the pressure cooker and the potato's tenderness related to each other.
On this note let me narrate a curious incident to you. I was at the Subhash Nagar mall's(New Delhi) retail SPAR that day with dad and bon. We were in the fish market and looking for spiced dried chicken that just needed frying since we were too lazy to cook. We went to the place where all fishes were kept in line. Without the walls and with some more fishy smell, you would feel like you are standing in some fish market in Kolkata. All childhood memories returned when dad and I would go the nearby fish market to fish fish! I was in such a reverie while dad was checking out the prices. There was pomphlet, rohu etc. Suddenly a sardarji came up to dad and started asking which one tasted what. I was smiling. Bon said " How lucky that Sardarji is. Getting a Bengali to answer questions about fishes". She was actually right. Back at home, dad had a few Punjabi friends who would come to dinner and ONLY HAVE ILISH. Gosh I used to get so angry. Ilish would be bought specifically for them and my share would reduce to only 2-3 pieces.
Ilish has gotten very expensive now. Last monsoon it was Rs. 1500/kg at Delhi's Chittaranjan park. Someday when I have the money and patience I will buy 1 full kg of ilish, all the required spices, I will call up mum thousands of kilometers away to know the recipe of the fish that had enchanted my taste buds in almost all the monsoons of my life.

I hear ilish is about to be extinct ..given  the high demand from all over the world. I don't pay heed to such rumours. I know there will always be some big healthy ilish waiting for me to get cooked and to enchant my taste buds again, nomatter in which part of the world I reside in.

P.S. Ilish was not what I had in mind at all. But bon's returning from Kolkata tomorrow and she's bringing only fried rohu and not ilish. Last monsoon's ilish were missed by me. I guess a year and a half of separation from your favourite fish does this to you.