After work one evening, some colleagues and I ate at a restaurant called Dosa Royale. It was strange being in a trendy dosa place. All Chennai locals know the best dosas are in kadais (shops) that serve meals on or food packaged to go in banana leaves. There’s a feverish pace to dosa joints in Chennai, with the sounds of busboys yelling to one another across the room and high-traffic footsteps. Dosas cool so fast the only way to enjoy them is to scarf them down, lower arm moving mouth to plate mouth to plate with mechanic celerity. At sleepy Dosa Royale I paid $11 for an item that in India costs less than $1. “Vegan and gluten-free,” the menu nudged. The dosa was cold, with worry lines; the chutneys lacked a centrality of flavor. In fairness, it was 10:30 in the evening in Cobble Hill. Electricity in India is so unreliable that many shops don’t bother with refrigerators, so the ingredients are delivered fresh daily. Many Indians joke that what makes our dosas so good is the fry cook’s sweat.

I worry dosas will become their Western definitions—“lentil crepe” or “lentil pancake,” that sanitized screen. It’s hard for me to see dosas through the virtuous lens of “vegan and gluten-free” because I was raised thinking of them as an indulgence—slick with oil, spicy because of their condiments, labor-intensive if you lack the finesse it takes to know exactly when and how fast to flip it. Unlike rotis, dosas do not negotiate with cutlery; they are too crispy.

Seeing dosas outside of India or Tamil Nadu disorients me, veers me away from the East. I forget what they actually mean to me. I see them as vegan and gluten-free, not the meal that my maids made me because it was one of the few things that made me happy. I was a very sad child. “Born scared,” my father once described. I wonder if my maids knew I was depressed and helped in the only way they knew how: by serving me more dosas. Tamilian physiology often lends itself to paunchiness and I was no exception. Dosas were my only indulgence not shadowed by a guilt no seven-year-old should have. I use cutlery for most foods, including pizza and burritos, and especially for Indian food, which people in India always eat with their hands—but for dosas I get my hands dirty.

I moved to New Jersey when I was 10. At first, we’d return to Chennai as a family every summer; then every two or three summers, with one of us arriving later than the rest; now, it’s whenever any of us have the time. On these flights, I hear people speak Tamil and I can recognize only flickers of what they’re saying. From the airport, Subramani, our driver since I was five, picks me up and takes me to our apartment, where Sarala, the only maid we had growing up who did not leave to get married, insists on making me a dosa, no matter what jagged hour of the morning I arrive. She scoops the batter, drops it in the middle of the hot pan, and smooths it outward in a spiral with the back of the ladle, until it is expansive and crackling; “mora mora” is the Tamil term. Sometimes she cracks an egg on it. Dosa pans need to be flat and have very short elevated edges, about a quarter-inch high. Sarala slides the dosa onto my plate straight from the tilted pan when she’s done. If there is no leftover chutney or sambar or curry or even muluga podi (chile powder mixed with oil), I eat it with sugar.