the things we inherit that aren't in our blood

the scent of coriander, and others.

Mar 16, 2025

I have my mum’s curly hair, though I straighten it these days. I have my dad’s restless hands, the same impulse to create, though sometimes I wonder if I’m using it as he would. I have both my grandmothers’ love for literature, tucked into the margins of books on a bookshelf far, far away. But these are not all things written into my DNA. They are learned, absorbed, carried forward in ways I never quite noticed until I started paying attention.

We speak of inheritance like it’s just a matter of blood, a series of traits passed down in strands of genetic code. Eye colour, bone structure, the lilt of a laugh. But there are other things, quieter things, that are handed down in gestures, in habits, in the rituals that shape our days.

I think about my grandmother sitting on the kitchen floor with me, plucking coriander leaves from their stems with the same patience she brought to everything. I, too young to care for patience, was dedicated to finding a shortcut, running my fingers up the stem to try and strip them in a single motion - and inevitably snapping the stem in at least 3 different places. She laughed, soft and knowing, and taught me how to do it - not just the motion of separating leaf from stalk, but how to do it with care. “Gently beta, like you’re handling something sacred”. And maybe I was. Maybe I still am. Because today, for the first time in years, I find myself peeling coriander leaves from their stalks, my hands moving with a care I did not know I had inherited. The scent carries on my hands, green and unmistakeable, curling around me like a ghost. It smells like the kind of love that does not announce itself but lingers in the background, the smell an heirloom in and of itself, passed down since the beginning of time.

Some inheritances are deliberate. Recipes passed down, traditions carefully preserved. Others slip into us without us noticing. The way I twirl my hair around a finger when I’m thinking, just like my aunt always does. The way I pace back and forth when I talk on the phone standing up, like my dad, as if I must move for my thoughts to keep up. The way the jingle of a set of bangles or the glint of desi jewellery ignites something deep and ancient in me.

Perhaps we spend so much time searching for ourselves in our bloodlines that we forget how much of who we are comes from elsewhere. The phrases and gestures we pick up from friends, the way a teacher’s belief in you can still echo in your head years after you’ve left their classroom, the way a city can hold so much of your life that you never want to leave. We are mosaics of every hand that has ever shaped us. Every kindness, every story, every lesson.

I wonder what I will pass on without realising it. What small habits, what unconscious gestures, what little pieces of myself will linger in someone else’s life long after I am gone. I see it happening already, in the way my flatmate has begun to mirror the way I sit in a chair, all twisted limbs and feet tucked up beneath her, as if the shape of comfort itself could be contagious. Maybe one day, someone else will pause to breathe in the scent of coriander and they will feel something familiar, something warm.

Maybe inheritance is not just about what is given, but about what lingers. The things we leave behind in the air when we leave a room, the echoes of our laughter in someone else’s breath. I think about this as I watch my flatmate on her chair, limbs folded in a way that once felt distinctly mine, but now belongs to her too. It’s a quiet kind of haunting, this passing-down of the ordinary. No grand declarations, no deliberate teachings - just the slow seep of a habit into another life, unnoticed until it has already made its home there.

It makes me wonder how much of myself is borrowed. How many gestures have come from people who never meant to leave their mark? I catch myself sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, and realise I am using my friend’s phrasing, her intonation rolling off my tongue. Or I hear myself laugh, and it is not mine at all, but a laugh I have cloned from my mother’s.

What else have I taken without realising? The way I bite the inside of my cheek when I think, the way I fiddle with my sleeves. I wonder if someone, somewhere, sees themselves in me the way I catch glimpses of others in myself. And I wonder if we are all, in some way, unknowing mirrors of one another - reflecting, refracting, carrying each other forward in ways we will never fully understand.

I do not know what parts of me will outlive me. But I think, perhaps, that is the nature of inheritance. Not just the stories we tell, the lessons we pass down, but the unnoticed things. The way a certain scent can summon an entire childhood. The way a gesture can feel like coming home. The way we are never truly gone, as long as some part of us remains in the way someone else moves through the world.

And maybe, years from now, in a place I will never see, someone will sit as I do, knees drawn up, feet tucked up beneath them. Or they will pause in a kitchen, coriander leaves pressed between their fingers, and breathe deeply, without knowing why.

stir the pot

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