‘Venba’ and the Cultural Memories I Wish I Had
Venba is a game about cultural identity, specifically how that identity is communicated and transferred through food. One of the most overlooked indie gems of 2023, it took me longer than I’d care to admit to finally give Venba a try despite having it on my Steam wishlist for years. In no more than two hours, Venba captures an authentic picture of family life, the tension within raising children in countries other than one’s own, and the way in which cultural memory is transmuted through acts of service like cooking food for one’s family. Venba is one of 2023’s best games, evoking a phantom heartbreak for a childhood that I never quite had the privilege to experience.
My Relationship to Food
Growing up, I was raised by two separated parents who, for all intents and purposes, didn’t really know how to cook. Between frozen dinners, takeout leftovers, and an unhealthy penchant for processed snacks, both parents shepherded me into adulthood without the ability to make more than microwaved ramen noodles.
My mother worked no fewer than two jobs at all times during my childhood, often keeping herself locked in her office at night working on some third job’s payroll account. My father, who left my mother while she was still pregnant, decided to start acknowledging my fledgling existence around the dawn of elementary school; I think the only food he ever prepared was a ham sandwich, while other nights I was dragged around to a dingy bar called Harpoon Louie’s where I would sip on endless Sprite, ordering overly fried chicken fingers with honey mustard.
To escape one’s childhood without the ability to at least cook up some basic staples like mac and cheese, green beans, corn on the cob, etc., is a rather glaring gap for a young adult entering her own sense of self-sufficiency for the first time. It’s the sort of jaw-dropping oversight that leads the parents of your friends to put a concerned arm around your shoulder, leading you away from your friend’s bedroom and into their kitchen for some simmering pot roast.
Suffice it to say that I have no cultural memory of food. Since no one could cook, there was no way to pass down that relationship – that heritage, that story. It never seemed like a big deal to me, the fact that I couldn’t whip up my grandmother’s legendary mashed potatoes. I was healthy enough, according to my doctors, and I was keeping physically active, so cooking simply didn’t emerge as a priority for me. But as the years have elapsed and I’ve moved out of my mother’s house as well as the state I grew up living in, I have found myself missing those memories – grieving for the gaps in my upbringing that so many friends in my adult life seem to take for granted.
How Venba Uses Food to Demonstrate Family Bonds
Enter: Venba. Focused on the nuances of Indian cooking specifically, Venba is a game about an immigrant family who moves to the United States. In forging their new life abroad, it quickly becomes apparent to the player that the lead couple are pregnant with their first (and only) child. Soon, what is otherwise seen as a cultural universal – the joy of having kids – becomes something of an alarming dilemma: should the family return to India where they can seamlessly bequeath their cultural values to their child, Kavin, raising him in an environment where his peers and the media are all inculcating a unified message? Or should they live their lives in America, opening the door to greater opportunity and prosperity?
The couple in Venba, Paavalan the father and Venba the mother, decide to stick it out and remain in America to raise Kavin. Adorable infant memories quickly become elementary school garble, and Kavin rushes home wanting pizza instead of biriyani. While watching Kavin grow up, acclimating like any other American-born child, the player watches Venba and Paavalan grow increasingly distressed, despairing over the perceived loss of the culture to which their family belongs. The game drops breadcrumbs about the Americanized foods taking precedence over the more familially significant recipes, but the parents are steadfast in their commitment to carrying on the cultural legacy of their culinary tradition.
Venba, the mother, follows her own mother’s old recipe book – a recipe book that has been weathered, neglected, and damaged over time. Between scribbled instructions, unceremoniously torn pages, and indecipherable smudges throughout the recipe book, Venba’s own relationship to her mother (and her mother culture, as it were) is compromised, and sometimes spelled out to the player by the “flavor text” offered by the game. While Venba cooks for her son as a love language, we learn the ways in which Venba herself has received such a love language from her own mother. These recipes are special to Venba in a way that Kavin can’t possibly appreciate, offering a sort of vicarious grief to the player. Venba’s love is being lost on her son, but this lack of appreciation or acknowledgement reveals how unconditional a mother’s love truly can be.
Cultural Othering & Indian Cuisine in Venba
As Kavin grows up, we learn of the ways in which he has both naturally and through coercion abandoned his cultural roots. From a very young age, Kavin has been bullied by kids at school about the homemade Indian lunches he brings; as is true for many immigrant children in America, this unfamiliar “foreign” food is seen to be less-than: smelly, gross, and weird. Kavin naturally feels this peer judgment and his parents, worried, notice the way in which Kavin keeps bringing his lunches home, uneaten, himself fearful of scorn and ridicule.
The narrative of Venba alludes to this darkness through Kavin’s bullying, but the game takes a serious turn around mid-game, where Kavin’s father doesn’t return home from work. After a worried night searching, they discover Paavalan on a bench at the local public park. Paavalan has clearly been assaulted, from his broken glasses to his dour expression, and this is the moment that Venba constricts around the discomfort in the gut of the player. This cheeky little game about how we bond via food becomes a severe commentary on how cultural othering works in America. Those who are seen as “other” are the first to pay for the injustices we all endure. Kavin, if he learns anything from his father’s assault, must hide his identity even more if he is to safely blend into American life.
Venba never lingers on the assault of Paavalan, but this horrific event never quite drifts out of the mind of the player either. We watch Kavin leave for college, ignoring his mother’s desperate attempts to contact him and maintain their bond. It isn’t until much later in his adulthood that Kavin returns home and begins to appreciate the way in which food, cooked by mom, has always been her way of saying “I love you and will protect you no matter what, even if you aren’t ready to receive that love yet.”
Kavin, detached from his culture in terms of food but also language, cannot read his mother’s (formerly grandmother’s) cookbook – symbolizing the way in which cultural assimilation has thorny prongs, not just advantages. Kavin does his best, cobbling together familiar-looking words and ingredients, remembering how his mother would show him the precise techniques for foods like puttu. This visible cultural loss, however, is evident. For both the player and Kavin, it’s very possible that the lineage that Venba tried to pass to her son has been permanently damaged – broken by generational gaps.
How Venba Evokes The Death of My Grandfather
Watching Kavin piece together his best attempt at mother’s recipes struck a chord with me – someone who, as aforementioned, has no cultural memory of food to speak of. I think of two summers ago when my grandfather passed away from pulmonary fibrosis: deterioration of the lungs. Growing up, my mother’s parents were as important to my caregiving as my mother herself. My grandparents would babysit me, bring me to church, take me on summer vacations, teach me to love reading and writing, show me how to ride a bike, and cook delicious grilled cheeses to my heart’s content. But somewhere between my newfound atheism at 14 years old, my ever-increasing left-wing political tendencies, and my sheer independence as a young adult, my relationship with my grandparents dwindled into nothingness. As a kid, my grandparents were people I would call like best friends every week; in my early 20s, they felt like Emily Gilmore – it was an ordeal to see them more than Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Still, I did my best to keep up with appearances, despite the atheism, socialism, and autistic reclusiveness. I would hug their necks, make time for them at family gatherings, and do my best to maintain that bond even though it felt rather severed. But in my mid-20s, I decided to come out as a transgender woman – something that the many scornful comments offered by my grandparents towards the LGBTQIA+ community had trained me to hide like my life depended upon it. I couldn’t bear to come out to them as a woman because I knew more certainly than I knew gravity’s downward pull that I would be met with rejection.
I hid my identity as a transgender woman, despite everyone else in my life knowing, for two full years after coming out. When my mother informed me that Papa, my grandfather, was diagnosed with a terminal illness and had but weeks to live, I had to make a choice: see him as myself or hide. Despite everything I knew in my gut, I found myself driving out to their house of 50 years – alone and trembling.
I’ll never forget the silence in the house. The dread of seeing my grandparents’ house wind around the corner that used to feel like home. The empty knock on the front door and the eventual melodical clang as the chimes of the interior door yanked open. I don’t remember the hug with my grandmother, only the silent footsteps as she muttered her thanks for coming, leading me back to my grandfather’s room, a space that filled me with wonder as a child but now felt like an impending mausoleum in my adulthood. I saw Papa, sitting upright in his chair, oxygen tubes reluctantly plunged into his nostrils, scrawnier than I’d ever seen him.
He passed not long after. It was the only time I got to visit him.
When my grandfather died, my family sifted through his belongings. I was once again invited back to their house. The three remaining women of the family had diligently arranged his belongings, plucked of their cherished mnemonic objects. My mother asked me what I wanted to keep to remember him by; Papa’s belongings would be sold and donated soon.
I exited his vacant room with three things: a book, a painting, and a print of our family’s crest – the existence of which was a surprise to everyone in the room, a rare secret object kept by my grandfather. Contained in a cheap plastic frame, buried under a dusty pile of theology texts, I saw my family’s coat-of-arms for the first time, evoking a shared history that I never knew I wanted to be a part of.
Holding this family coat-of-arms, I thought of my upcoming appointment with a judge – the final step in legally changing my name to match my chosen one: Flora. At the time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep my family name. I had no allegiance to the things that made my family mine: the religion, the politics, the southern traditions. I had buried so much resentment about my inability to express my chosen gender identity that I resented being a part of this family in the first place. I resented what my surname signified.
As I held my coat-of-arms, I thought of the miraculous way that my grandfather had surprised me.
Radical Acceptance & The Path Towards Moving On
Despite everything, my grandfather croaked out from his oxygen tubes, “Flora?” Hearing my name from his voice, and the corresponding several hours where I broke down crying on his concrete floor for the final time, will never leave me. In a radical moment of defied certainty, I grew to find love for my grandfather again. Not from pity, the universal kind we all feel when seeing a shrunken, weaker version of a formerly vigorous loved one, but the real kind of respect one develops when feeling like judgment has fallen by the wayside, irrelevant in the face of a lifelong forged bond.
I don’t have a cookbook, or the equivalent thereof, to remember my grandfather by. There aren’t recipes, literal or figurative, that I can return to when I seek comfort. For the dishes my grandfather cooked were conservative, Christian ones, the kind of values that I often revile when geopolitically manifest. These aren’t ideological recipes that can offer me comfort in the way that Kavin can find such solace in his mother Venba’s well-loved recipe book. All I have is a coat-of-arms, a gesture at a history that I can’t ever feel complete solidarity with because so much of my identity is tied to fighting injustice.
Why Venba is a Beautiful Game
Venba is a beautiful game for innumerable reasons, but the sorrow evoked by Venba’s brief story is profound enough that I relived the passing of my grandfather – a testament to the artistry with which each component of Venba is crafted. Venba also features astonishingly charismatic 2D art coupled with simple animations that convey emotion more effectively than some fully-fledged AAA-style games can boast. The gameplay, though incredibly simple in execution, challenges the imagination and borders on the non-fictional insofar as you actually learn some Indian recipes along the way. And the music, though the soundtrack is a mere seven tracks long, absolutely knocks it out of the park; for a game about cooking, I caught myself jumping out of my chair to dance while I proceeded through the story. But the focus on family is something that Venba masters above all else, and that alone makes it a must-play.
Venba is a game that loves food as much as family, and unlike any game I can think of, treats its subject matter with utmost respect and reverence. In parts, Venba reminds me of Firoozeh Dumas’ charming memoir, Funny in Farsi. In others, I’m reminded of the eclectic Indian cafe I lived next-door to when I first moved out-of-state, one of the rare senses of home and comfort after I was forcibly yanked out of my home culture by violently hateful changes in the Florida legislature. Indian culture isn’t my culture, but the way that Venba tells its story makes me nostalgic for a cultural feeling that I simply don’t have, and that alone is profound. Venba, for me, is a perfect game, even though I am missing so much of what makes this game feel like home.
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