With 'Tell My Mother I Like Boys', Suvir Saran Comes Home

Midway into his memoir Tell My Mother I Like Boys, Suvir Saran grieves not just the disappearance of a lover but “the idea of love he had stolen from me”. He goes on to reminisce about how he dealt with that heartbreak — “always giving away parts of myself as though generosity might fill the cavern inside me,” he writes.

It's a feeling most of us know only too well.

It’s one of the most relatable passages in the book, not just because it captures the queer experience of searching for belonging in a world that insists we don’t, but because it speaks to something almost universal: the longing for someone who cares.

Someone who doesn’t touch their coffee until yours arrives. Someone who, through the smallest of gestures, tells you that you belong. For queer people especially, this kind of tenderness isn’t just nice. Sometimes, it is proof that we matter.

Saran’s memoir is, at its core, about that search.

One of his earliest memories is a ritual he shared with his grandfather, Bhagat Saran Bhatnagar, who would give him his blessings — and a biscuit — every morning. Soon after, following his grandfather’s death, his grandmother gently instructs him to feed the birds outside their home. “They carry our love to the heavens,” she tells him. He doesn’t understand how exactly they achieve that, but does as he’s told, eventually realising that rituals such as these teach us that life doesn’t end with death. Not as long as we remember those who’ve passed away.

He speaks fondly of the clatter of utensils in the kitchen of his youth, of their cook (fondly called panditji) preparing dishes with devotion because, after all, isn’t every dish served a prayer?

It is not hard to understand, from these early nuggets of his life, why Saran chose to become a chef or why Devi, the restaurant he co-founded in New York, became the first Indian restaurant in America to win a Michelin star. It wasn’t because it tried to reimagine our cuisine or make it palatable for the West, but because Saran’s idea of Indian food is that it should remind you of home. It should offer solace, a comforting hand, a warmth that blankets you. In his memoir, he mentions how cooking became his salvation because it allowed him to grieve without words — “to create something beautiful from the broken pieces of myself”.

Yet, despite all of this, Tell My Mother I Like Boys isn’t just about cooking or finding oneself through cuisine — though naturally they form a large part of Saran’s story. The book is also a kind of social history, offering snapshots of the worlds he’s lived through. The plural and vibrant India of the seventies and eighties, of a Manhattan that allowed him to indulge in nighttime dalliances, the contrasts between Mumbai and Delhi (something that exists, almost word for word, even today) and of the realities of running a farm on Chamberlain Mills Road where immigrants — grateful and respectful of the opportunity that America and her economy presented — came to the rescue when local workers wouldn’t.

Saran’s memoir also presents a host of figures we are familiar with — Gitanjali Kashyap, Angela Miller, Carol Guber, Madhur Jaffrey, Rohit Bal, Manish Malhotra, Ashok Rao Kavi — but he doesn’t speak of them the way celebrity memoirs often do; that is, as proof of glamour or access. They are his friends, people who touched his life in myriad ways, who continue to populate his memories. There is no glitz in these segments, just a deep sense of care and responsibility.

In fact, if you’re coming to this book expecting glamour, you’ll be disappointed. What Tell My Mother I Like Boys offers is a deeper look at success — it aims to explain why a Michelin star doesn’t arrive with confetti but the dread of responsibility.

It doesn’t absolve Saran of his mistakes, but it is also not an exercise in self-flagellation.

What it does do is deliver hope upon hope, even during the most difficult segments. A teacher with a kind word amidst the cruelty of school. A lover as bright and comforting as sunlight over choppy waters.

But perhaps more importantly, it is the realisation that this world, despite its grave injustices and hardships, provides a home for everyone if they have the courage to keep searching for it.