Earlier this year, Veena Torchia was sitting in her garden in Pushkar in northern India, eating a very ripe mango. As she bit into it, she let the juice drip down her. If she had been in east London, where her family is based, she would have cut the mango into pieces on a nice plate. “But I wouldn’t have tasted it,” she says. Torchia’s senses have sharpened since she turned 60 last year and moved to Pushkar with her husband to open a vegan cafe – the first, she claims, in the whole of the state of Rajasthan.
It was in Pushkar that Torchia and Maurelio, who is from Calabria, Italy, became a couple 40 years ago, having travelled there as friends in their 20s. It was a very different India from the one Torchia knew from childhood visits to her father’s family, when it was all “big hotels, air-conditioned buildings, jewellery shopping”.
