Venba: Home Cooking & Familiar Conversations

Starting a family overseas, or moving your family abroad, is a huge decision. Venba captures the weight of that choice, distilling twenty years of family life into a couple of hours by focusing on a handful of key moments, all of which involve home cooking. It's charming, touching, entertaining, and refreshingly brief.

Venba and her husband, Paavalan, have left their home of Tamil, south India, to start a new life in Toronto. In an early scene, we see them agonising over whether this decision to uproot was the right one. They ponder the opportunities and challenges their new life presents, and what it will afford their unborn child, Kavin. They talk about their struggles to find work befitting their experience, the difficulties of mastering a new language, and openly wonder how this will affect their soon-to-be expanded family. 

These are conversations I know all too well, as I've had them with my family many times. My wife (Japanese) and I (British) had lived between our two homes for several years, before finally committing to staying here in Japan. We'll never know whether we made the right choice, but I can't complain. We committed, just like Venba and Paavalan, and millions of other families just like ours who must choose one home over another, or find a new one entirely.

For me, the greatest challenge has been communication - Japanese is a bastard language and I'm a hopeless student - and the feeling that my career has never quite taken off here as I hoped it would, or how it might've done back in the UK.  Had we stayed in England, my wife would've been asking the same questions. But more importantly, you wrestle with the opportunities that your children might have been deprived of. Venba and Paavlan are no different. 

They are at great pains to encourage Kavin to speak Tamil, which he does not welcome. He wants to fit in with his Canadian friends, and clearly feels uncomfortable with his "other" status. Besides, he's already the most fluent English speaker in the family - a dynamic that will be familiar to many mixed-language households. Ensuring that language acquisition doesn't feel like a chore for kids is an ever-present challenge in a multi-lingual household. You need to find the joy in being communicative, but that's not always easy.

Hand in hand with language retention comes the desire to keep your "culture" alive. In Venba, cooking is a huge part of this, and this is where we feel the mother's connection to her homeland the strongest.  While Kavin may have an overwhelming desire to eat pizza, food is one of the few areas where he and his family come together to celebrate and enjoy their heritage. And when your culinary heritage is this delicious, you can only resist it for so long! My version of cultural preservation is slightly less colourful, as I cook an array of brown British foods for my daughter and bake far too many cakes, while ensuring I use bad language and sarcasm at every possible opportunity.

Venba also features some uncomfortable moments, including the loss of loved ones. Anyone who has lived at a great distance from the people they care about will know the sense of helplessness and guilt you feel when they're sick and you're not able to be by their side. It makes you question your decisions and can lead to a feeling of isolation. This can encourage you to reconnect, but it can also cause you to switch off and distance yourself further. In her darker moments, Venba struggles with this.

With each moment, happy and sad, we return to cuisine and the restoration of recipes in Venba's mother's cookbook, each of which are in some way obscured. As connections to their homeland gradually erode, food becomes increasingly important for Venba and her family. People die and memories are misshapen, but her book of recipes remains a bridge between generations. As a young adult, Kavin finds a sense of pride in these dishes and becomes surprisingly protective of them.

I'm strangely proud of the fact that I still use the pastry recipe that my mum gave me. She got it from her mum, who I assume probably picked it up from her's. And on it goes, further down the family tree. I get a kick out of my daughter, the newest generation, tucking into an apple pie that has its roots several generations deep - another connection to a previous home. Food sustains us in more ways than one.

I have spent more time thinking about Venba than I did actually playing it. That's the mark of a great game. Whether it speaks to your own experiences, or provides a window into lives very different to your own, I highly recommend checking it out.