Some of my earliest memories are of kitchens, and my grandmother.
I was something of a picky eater as a child, not enough for it to be constantly pointed out, but enough for me to refuse particular dishes. Like when I wasn’t feeling like eating a particular meen curry because it had too many bones my tiny fingers couldn’t pick out, or mathanga vanpayar erissery because I didn’t like the texture of pressure-cooked pumpkin.
On these days, my Mummee would make me her special neychoru. It wasn’t the fancy one, with the kaima rice and dried fruits, but just some rosematta red rice mixed in with ghee, fried shallots and an egg. It’s one of my favourite foods in the whole world, and one of the first dishes I ever learnt to make. And everytime I make it — which is, admittedly, not often — I am transported back to that house in Kerala I grew up in. To that small kitchen. To my Mummee feeding me hand rolled balls of neychoru as I sat on her lap and played with the fabric of her nightie.
Evidently, most of, or maybe a lot of, my nostalgia about growing up in India comes from food, and the people who once made me that food. I reminisce about standing in kitchens, and taking in the smell — and small bites — of dried fish fry and beef koorkka ularthiyathu and vazha pindi thoran as they cook over the gas stoves. Food that is not easily accessible here, or can’t be found at all.
When I speak to my aunties over grainy Whatsapp calls they tell me about how they are making one of my favourite dishes, asking if I’m craving it and saying they’ll make it for me next time I go back. It does not escape my attention these days that it is always the female members of my family that talk to me about cooking; that when I call they are almost always standing in their kitchen. And of course, once you notice something, it is impossible to stop noticing.
It is not a new noticing of any kind, I know. Women have been standing in kitchens for millenia. Waves of feminisms have labelled kitchens oppressive, while others not impressed with these waves utter mantras of the ‘women belong in the kitchen’ kind. At age thirteen, when all I could cook was omelettes and rice, I would have unequivocally professed that kitchens were places of oppression. At sixteen, when I cemented my love of baking, I would have proclaimed that kitchens can also be places of liberation. At twenty-three, when I am just trying to keep myself alive, all I can say is that I have a complicated relationship with the kitchen.
So does my Amma.
She hates cooking, almost as much as she loves a clean room. Which is to say that for most of my life, Amma has been the one to do almost all the cooking. Unlike my grandmother and my aunties, Amma also worked. So the cooking and cleaning would get done in between shifts, on days off, in all her spare time. She likes to tell me that she prefers to go to work, because it’s less tiring than doing all the housework, because at least she gets paid for it: ‘it’s work at work, and it’s work at home’.
Of course, Amma having a job and doing the housework does not negate difficulties in completing the housework alone as the non-paid-working women do. On top of the cooking and cleaning, Amma tells me at the dinner table, my grandmother used to make her daughters’ clothes, tend the animals, and go to sell coconuts and other crops at the local shops. It’s just that the cooking was the most arduous.
See, Indian food is complex, and elaborate; but where there is flavour, there is labour. A single dish can take several hours, and as Arjun Appadurai notes, even for the most modest of diets, there is variety. Women in my family spend the whole day cooking, and spend the limited time they have completing other tasks around the house. Kitchens, I have come to realise, can only be a place of liberation when there is time to enjoy it.
And sure, I guess my aunties and my Mummee do enjoy it. They love cooking, showing their love through their food and feeding others, because that is one of the only ways they have to show it. There is no time for much else. I do not want to place my own feelings upon them, but it is hard to not feel a strange mix of anger-sadness when, whenever I’m back in Kerala, we go out for the day and around 4pm, Mummee starts getting anxious about needing to go home. Because around the time she usually makes chaya. Because she had been making chaya for my grandfather for nearly 50 years. Because he would get angry if his afternoon tea was late. My grandfather has been dead for over eight years now, but she still gets anxious. It is difficult to watch.
I do not like spending much time in Indian kitchens. I tend to duck in to steal a few bites from whatever is simmering on the stove, chop a few vegetables for the next pan, and then dip out. I only like cooking when it ends quickly.
I want time; to drag my aunties outside, and sit with them in the sun. I want them to stop asking me if I’ve learnt how to make sambar, and parippu, and biryani, so I can feed my future husband. I want Mummee to tell me what her favourite dish is so I can make it for her, as she has done so many times for me, instead of laughing it aside as if it isn’t important, because she can do it herself.
I want to stop nostalgising kitchens, and start recognising them for the paradoxical places they are: sites of love and culture, but also sites of grief, and labour, and rage.
