Sometime in 2016, when chef Ragini Kashyap invited guests to a dinner pop-up on food from Punjab at the London home of a friend, she remembers one seemingly unfriendly-looking woman joining them at the table. As she took a seat, she told the host, "If the meat isn't halal, I am not going to eat it". Fortunately, it was.

Kashyap's anxiety levels had just begun to drop, when she informed the other guests that she had a problem with Indians. "I was taken aback," Kashyap recalls. It was only as the evening progressed, that the guest opened up about her Partition story. "Her relatives had been killed during the time, as was the case with hundreds of families, which had created a deep resentment." And yet, she had chosen to come for the dinner, hosted by someone with an undeniably Indian name. "The idea behind my meals is to step out of our personal experience to contextualise the politics and violence of the past."

This was one of Kashyap's first attempts to share and talk about the histories and food from conflict-ridden lands, or what she calls the Bordered Series. She holds this as part of Third Culture Cooks, a multinational supper club that she started the same year. "The idea was to present the facts [from these regions] as I know them to be. And I am very conscious about the way I do it, because I want people to draw their own conclusions," says the 31-year-old. At the end of that meal, the woman came up to Kashyap. "She told me, 'I probably can't get over a lifetime of resentment, but tonight was the first time that I heard another side of the story. I realised that there is a possibility that I wasn't resenting the right people'."