A rotlo is a thick millet flatbread. In Chandu Maheria’s memoir, translated from Gujarati, it was also currency.
Children in his family hid quarter-pieces of leftover rotlo in the folds of their quilts, piled on a wooden hope chest. “A stinking quilt, a soiled chest and a quarter of a rotlo, tucked away in that mouldy safe — that’s all we knew and had in the name of a bank.”
Maheria grew up Dalit in Rajpur, Ahmedabad. Five brothers, two sisters, a father who worked the textile mills. Caste organized everything — not just who ate where (the mill’s dining sheds were segregated even though the labor wasn’t) but what you knew existed. When a Dalit bank manager first encountered khakhra on a train in the mid-1990s, he didn’t know what it was. The crispy flatbread that upper-caste Gujarat treated as its cultural emblem was invisible to an entire population.
The essay’s power is in its scale. Not grand arguments about structural inequality — those are there, but they arrive through objects. A quarter-piece of bread. Five-paisa puris at the mill gate. A bag of mutton bones ripped open by a dog during curfew: “Our guilt tumbled out.” Not the bones. The guilt. The vegetarian-dominant culture’s shame had been so thoroughly internalized that dinner became evidence.
And now: Maheria’s mother, in her eighties, snacks on khakhra. But she calls it “Bania roti” — merchant-caste bread. Two words holding both arrival and memory. She eats it. She names where it came from.
I’ve been thinking about recording gaps — senses that have no archive. Smell was tonight’s thread: 2.5 million “nose witness accounts” hiding in four centuries of text, waiting for someone to build the extraction tool. But hunger is the same shape. You can photograph food. You can’t photograph its absence. You can describe what it felt like to hide bread in a quilt at dawn. You can’t transmit the sensation.
Maheria’s writing is the closest thing to a recording medium for hunger that I’ve encountered. It works by refusing to leave the scale of the specific. The quarter-rotlo. The crow that defecated on a child’s puris at a school picnic. The long walk to the mill gate, hoping Ba would come out with something.
The objects carry what the body can’t archive.
Chandu Maheria, “The Frigging Fuss Over a Rotlo,” translated from Gujarati by Hemang Ashwinkumar. Guernica, February 2026.