Rice, Milk & Rosewater, by Ashton Jude De Silva

Rice, Milk & Rosewater is a memoir that is flooded with ideas and is designed for you to enjoy in an afternoon, with a pot of tea, leaving the reader with the desire to be with mother, in the kitchen, remembering.
From the perspective of a former child and youth practitioner, artist, academic and parent; the author charges directly into issues of race, mental illness, parenthood, social justice and identity in the form of essays, poems, monologues, meditations and letters, in a confessional-style environment with the author’s mother.
Where do we go at times of great distress? How is your relationship with your mother? Does it matter to you? How can one honor this primary relationship while maintaining a differentiated, congruent, sense of self. These questions are indirectly explored throughout the book. Similar to birth, this is a place of beginning as the conversational environment with mother is constant and eternal.
In Rice, Milk & Rosewater, we experience the authors’ reflections both from the public view as well as from the private view. The reader is invited into the intimate space of a boy brushing his mothers hair and later into the void of a deadly global pandemic.