�In my family, the women never cooked, the servants were male and the women were not supposed to go into the kitchen. My mother could not tell cabbage from lettuce,� she admits. But then came an occasion, a dinner party for 22 thrown by her in-laws, and on the very day that Suneeta had fired her cook for bringing poor produce from the market! �It was also the day I decided I must learn to cook well,� she says.

BON Appetit, America�s food and entertaining magazine, writes in a nine-page article in its January 1985 issue on Suneeta Vaswani: Spending a few hours at one of the Northern Indian cooking classes that have made Suneeta Vaswani one of the most popular teachers in the Houston area is a little like being in a kaleidoscope. The images come out so quickly that it is difficult to catch a single one. First, there is the woman herself. She is small and vivacious, and as active as a hummingbird � though in her traditional dress of churidhar and kurta, she is far more colourful. If she seems to be doing a dozen things at once, it is not an illusion. At the same time she can chop an onion, stir another dish, direct her students at their various tasks and tell them the history and culture that lie behind the recipes they are making. �I don�t teach dishes,� she says, �I teach the heritage that led to this particular way of cooking.�

Suneeta has made a business out of cooking in the US. And it is amazing, she was not interested in cooking at all and did not so much as know how to make a cup of tea when she got married in Bombay in the late 1950s. �In my family, the women never cooked, the servants were male and the women were not supposed to go into the kitchen. My mother could not tell cabbage from lettuce,� she admits. But then came an occasion, a dinner party for 22 thrown by her in-laws, and on the very day that Suneeta had fired her cook for bringing poor produce from the market! �I called up my grandmother, who came from a generation where women were allowed to cook, and got some recipes from her. Then I called my mother and told her I needed to borow her cook. She was appalled. But between us, we made a dinner that was an absolute hit! It was also the day I decided I must learn to cook well,� she says. Suneeta hooked up with some other newly-married friends who were in the same situation. �Two Parsis, one Gujarati, and we would meet once a week and share recipes. I used to run to my grandmother and learn Sindhi recipes from her. We had so much fun doing this and actually learned cooking in those sessions,� she recalls.

Her cooking classes at Houston today are all about having fun, Suneeta says. Her husband�s job brought her to the US in the Seventies. And her first classes were at home, not conducted to feed the family, but for the benefit of American friends who had lived in India and were now missing Indian food. Soon Suneeta was going to cookery schools to give demonstrations on Indian cooking, and to departmental stores where people sat around and watched, while word of her speciality spread. People started signing up in dozens, and then hundreds, and today she travels across the US to teach Indian cooking to willing and admiring students in different cities. Her classes are as famous as they are popular. And they get booked in advance.

The enthusiasm and support of her students over 25 years of teaching encouraged Suneeta to come out with a book of recipes called Easy Indian Cooking. Some of these students have been with her for 14 years and have presented her with the challenge of coming up with 60 to 70 new dishes every year. All this is going into research on Suneeta�s next book on regional foods of India. �There will be recipes from North, South, East and West, I will explain what happens where, it will be a hands-on, usuable book, not a treatise on Indian cooking,� she says.