For most Indians, the word Kargil evokes the memory of the 1999 Indo-Pak war — a landscape defined by conflict, broadcast through television screens in grainy, urgent footage. But for its natives, Kargil is home: a place of culture and memory that deserves to be understood on its own terms. Stories from a Kargili Kitchen by Yash Saxena is an honest attempt to look at Kargil beyond what lives in popular imagination. The 31-year-old author, a food researcher by profession, tells the stories of Kargil’s people through the lens of what they eat. Written in collaboration with Roots Ladakh — a local responsiAble travel organisation founded by Muzammil Hussain and Tafazzul Hussain, whose decade-long work of cultural preservation and community storytelling in the region shapes much of the book’s spine — the work is the result of a three-and-a-half-year journey through the district’s villages and kitchens.…