Kitchens in both communities are compact and utilitarian - tomatoes for the evening meal soak in a pool of Bisleri water and red onions rest under a shelf carrying plastic containers of rice and soya chunks. Metal utensils and dishes dry upturned on a blue cloth spread across a wooden table and baby eggplants, long beans, and bitter gourd are collected in a basket for tomorrow’s sabzi. A pouch of turmeric, left corner snipped for easy tadkas, leans against repurposed plastic bottle filled with Ruchi Gold palm oil.

An Odia couple, Digaambar and Lata, lament the lack of a variety in the vegetables available at the nearby markets.“Here, you have to just stick with one type of vegetable - potato or cauliflower. Over in the village, you get different kinds of vegetables, like kunduru (scarlet gourd) and patol (pointed gourd),” says Digaambar.

Manisha recalls the food of her hometown Rourkela, Odisha. “The chicken and mutton in my village tastes good,” she says. “The flavor here is not ours; the flavors back home are better.” Sonali reminisces about pakka (parboiled) rice. “Here, the rice is kaccha (raw). We boil the water there; here, we don’t boil the water. The water in pakka rice has a lot of vitamins. When we make khichdi (lentil and rice dish), we use this pakka rice,” she says.

Back home, whole spices are ground against a stone. Manisha gestures at her stone, which sits tucked away in the corner of the kitchen, having been replaced by powdered packets of cumin, chili, and coriander. The stone emerges from hiding when Manisha has the time - her luxury - to collect, roll, and smooth into a potent zinger of a paste.

During the week, she sticks with one-pot basics - long-grain rice and a pot of masoor daal or a vegetable curry. “We usually make masoor daal, because the rate is lower,” she says. Such calculations, including the rate of each ingredient at market or the availability of a cheaper alternative, determine the meals for the week. Many report steeper prices for produce, meat, and pantry items in the city compared to the village. In this community, as in many other non-Kannadiga communities, ration cards from other states aren’t accepted at the public distribution center. Every staple, including rice and daal, needs to be purchased at the market on Sarjapura Road. Families from North Karnataka, on the other hand, receive 10 kilograms of sona masoori rice at the local public distribution center through the One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC) scheme. Disparities in the portability and enforcement of the scheme, which guarantees continuity of rations across state borders, determine the degree of food insecurity experienced by different pockets of migrant communities.

Rations serve as safety nets in the face of income insecurity, climate change, and debt. “When people come here, they don’t get good work, it rains, [and]sometimes you get work and sometimes you don’t. Whoever gets rice from the ration store, it becomes easy for them to eat. They don’t have to worry about asking someone for food or takin on a debt from someone,” says Mangala.

“Rice, lentil, oil - everything from the outside store is expensive. For people receiving rations, they don’t have to pay a single rupee for rice. It’s free. For one person, they give 10 kilos of rice. For five people, it is 50 kilos of rice for one month. That’s a lot for one month - they can eat that much for two months. 50 kilos, from the outside store, is 3000 [rupees],” she explains.