Dr. Anitha Devi Pillai’s

What the Tongue Remembers

, launched in Singapore, traces the lives of Malayalee women through food, love and inherited memories

SINGAPORE

A familiar flavour can carry the memory of a childhood kitchen, an absent loved one or a homeland left behind. In Dr. Anitha Devi Pillai’s What the Tongue Remembers, food performs precisely this work — crossing generations and geographies while revealing what her characters cannot always express in words.

Minister of State Dinesh Vasu Dash formally launched the book at The Pod in Singapore’s National Library Building. Paul Thoppil, High Commissioner of Canada to Singapore, attended as the distinguished guest.

Published by Penguin Random House SEA, the book brings together 11 short stories about Malayalee women in Singapore. Its characters confront love, jealousy, betrayal, faith and loneliness while preparing dishes rooted in Kerala’s culinary traditions.

Food, however, is more than a comforting cultural backdrop. It nourishes and connects people, but can also convey sacrifice, resentment and desires left unspoken.

Explaining how the collection took shape, Dr. Pillai said she recognised the recurring presence of food only after stepping back and looking at the stories together.

“Food plays this role here; food plays a different role here,” she said. “And that’s why it became a collection of food fiction. I think I cannot write without writing about food.”

In a fireside conversation with writer Daryl Lim Wei Jie, Dr. Pillai reflected on the ideas behind the collection and offered the audience a glimpse into its opening story. The session also marked her first public reading from the book.

The launch opened on a nostalgic note, with Malayalam songs evoking Kerala and its culinary memories. Students from Nanyang Technological University followed with dance performances, bringing a youthful cultural energy to the occasion.

Another conversation featuring Dhershini Winodan and Vidhya Nair explored the recipes and personal memories behind the stories. Together, the sessions underlined that the book is not simply about what people eat, but about the relationships, histories and silences that gather around a dining table.

Mr. Thoppil’s presence brought another meaningful Malayalee connection to the gathering. A proud Malayalee, the Canadian High Commissioner presented tokens of appreciation to the book’s contributors.

For Singapore’s Malayalee community, the collection holds particular resonance. Dr. Pillai is a fourth-generation Malayalee in Singapore, and her work reflects a cultural inheritance that has travelled, adapted and taken root within the island’s multicultural landscape.

A writer, translator and applied linguist, Dr. Pillai teaches at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. Her writing frequently explores identity, heritage, language and the lives of Asian women.

Her earlier works include From Kerala to Singapore: Voices from the Singapore Malayalee Community. Her English translation of the Tamil novel Sembawang was shortlisted for the Singapore History Prize and the Best Literary Work Prize, while her short story Lost in Translation was longlisted for the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Beautifully organised and marked by music, dance and literary conversations, the launch reflected the spirit of the book itself: memories shared across a table and cultural inheritance passed gently from one generation to the next.

People may travel far from home, the stories suggest, but home continues to live in the flavours the tongue remembers.