Five minutes after I met her, I wanted to bring her home with me. Jaya Dwarkanath doesn’t look a thing like my late, sorely missed grandmother.

Nana was not overweight, but her German ancestry showed in her sturdy frame. Her prim and proper mother always bought or made Nana’s dresses a size too large because she “had long arms.” She laughingly told me, “I’d been married for years before I realized my arms weren’t especially long — mother did that because my bust was big.” Dwarkanath, in contrast, is tiny. A braid of silvery grey hair hangs down her back. She’s swathed in a beautiful silk sari that Nana would have thought both strange and intriguing. Like many other Hindu Brahmins, Dwarkanath is a vegetarian, a concept foreign to my grandmother.

Dwarkanath was a disciple of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (probably most famous in the west as the Beatles’ guru in the ’60s) and spent four months at one of his Transcendental Meditation centers 30-plus years ago before emigrating to the United States.

Why did she remind me of Nana? Maybe it was the independence. “I am 84 years old and I live by myself,” Dwarkanath told me proudly.

(“But only a few minutes away from me,” her daughter, Aruna Weberg, added). Maybe it was the beaming smile of a fulfilled woman at peace with herself and the world.

“Home cooking is best,” she told me more than once. “Old recipes — family recipes, handed down from generation to generation.”

That was it. That was the connection.

I’m not the only one to feel a connection with Dwarkanath. She and her daughter have come to seem almost like family to Charles and Loneth Soares, owners of the Gateway to India restaurant. At first they were just frequent, enthusiastic patrons of the restaurant.

“Charles makes the best biryanis [an elaborate rice dish that can be made with or without meat or seafood] I’ve ever had,” Weberg told me. I agreed. Although I’ve never been to India, I’ve eaten at Indian restaurants in San Francisco, New York and London. I’ve eaten frequently at numerous restaurants in Chicago’s Indian neighborhood surrounding Devon Avenue, especially when my daughter lived just minutes away. Because I love Gateway to India’s biryanis, I’ve ordered them elsewhere many times but never yet found one that’s equaled Soares’. Incidentally, biryanis are a good first dish to try for those unacquainted with Indian cooking.

To many Americans, “Indian cuisine” means curry. But “curry” in India merely denotes different combinations of spices and flavorings, and, in fact, the term is rarely used there in the context we think of it. The yellow spice powder most westerners think of as curry, and dishes made with it, are actually as much British as Indian, adopted by colonists in the days of the British Raj. It’s only the merest fraction of the flavors, ingredients and preparation methods of “Indian cuisine.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise. The Indian subcontinent is home to a vast panoply of peoples with multitudinous religions, languages, cus-