As much as it pains me to say it, I rarely eat Indian food. I hate the way that restaurants prepare it and the way I cook it never quite feels right. Yet, whenever I visit India, I find myself enamored by the most basic home cooked dishes.

It’s been nearly a month since my last trip to India. This time, it was pickled garlic that captured my attention. “It’s the easiest recipe there is,” my grandmother promised. But, like always, I returned to find that the version made in my own kitchen tasted like a bastardization of the original.

With each passing day, the guilt of watching the garlic pickle rot in the fridge fermented into a creeping feeling of loss. It was more than just the garlic pickle that I couldn’t bear to throw out. It was the realization that it may have been the last time I ever taste garlic pickle, and curd rice, and every other household staple of my family in India.

I linger in this thought often. That one day, every person who has ever shared their home-cooked Indian food with me will die, and with them, every dish of theirs I ever loved. It’s not that these dishes are complex, but rather, that when these people pass, I will become a foreigner in India, no longer privy to the meals a family composes out of fragments leftovers and neglected vegetables on an average day.

One day, my connection to my culture will pass, and like a changing of the guards, so too will my identity. My heritage lingers in my periphery, threatening to disappear at any moment. In some ways, I think this is a universal experience for immigrants and children of immigrants. When your experience of culture is exclusive to your family, it will decay with generations as they pass. By the third generation, you are very likely at the end of the line, where the garlic pickle fails to survive and the curd doesn’t set quite right.