Peppery Pigeon Peas with Garlic and Cumin

Jyotsana Rayadurgh—petite, sharp, highly intelligent, and very friendly—handed me a piece of paper in the parking lot of our children’s school one nippy day. “My mother used to make this all the time when we had a cold back in Karnataka,” she said as she chased after her beautiful daughters, Shruti and Aditi, into the warm school building. (Karnataka, south of Maharashtra and north of Kerala, is home to Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley.) When I felt the onset of a stuffy nose a few days la