Make food, feed food. Make food, feed food. Make food, feed food. Make food, eat food. Make food, eat food. Make food, eat food. Make food, eat food. This is what largely fills up our days now. The chorus of tedious repetition of this mundane task of making food and eating again making food and eating until night comes and day starts again and you are making food and eating all over again, just to sustain yourself enough to make you able to plough through another day of your miserable life. It is annoying. Until it is ‘you’ who has to do the cooking entirely and you feel the annoyance doubling up to a level way beyond your capacity to hold it.
The pressure cooker on the stove whistled once, then twice, now thrice ... do I need to let it blow 5 times? That should be enough for the daal to cook perfectly *another long whistle blows* was this the fifth, what if it’s a sixth.. oh shit the daal burned. I walk in quick steps before another whistle and turn off the stove and immediately prepare for making rice and frying the daal as my phone stare open-mouthed on the kitchen slab, carrying writings in process.
It is not so much the ‘cooking’ that really gets to me, but the endless dilemma of "what do I cook today?” You, as the cook, is made so weary of repeating and carrying out the same thing over and over again. Then you have to consider who you are cooking for, what they eat and don’t, what they like and don’t, how they like it and don’t. During the last few weeks that I have been responsible for the kitchen duty on the most part, I have noted significant growth in the (my) ways of being in a kitchen. Unlike other times, I’m more relaxed, less nervous, and a little more comfortable and confident in (my) cooking. One of the very essential particulars I am taking away from this duty is that, just like for everything else in life, in the kitchen too, you just “go with it”. For me, most of what cooking is, is about trial and error, about following my instincts, and about slow cooking. Well, at least for now. I think cooking is fun and interesting when you experiment, and I am waiting for that, waiting to have fun when cooking. But right now, I do it out of strong compulsion.
A male member in the family will never assume the complete responsibility for kitchen duty. Not partially, not occasionally, not ever. Mothers do it initially once a family is created, then if a girl child is born, it is merely passing on the baton of kitchen responsibility from one female to the other. The wheel just keeps turning on. Say suppose, the first born in a family is a son and he is fairly old enough when a daughter is born, the boy will not be asked to work or help in the kitchen still. The mother will juggle many things besides also caring for her daughter, and the father still won’t help in the kitchen. However, once the daughter reaches a certain age, she’ll be told again and again to learn to be in the kitchen, to go help her mother. Slowly the daughter takes over the kitchen. In case, a daughter is the first-born, well, you know the obvious scenario. What so much bothers (also really baffles) me is that a man will NEVER fully take up kitchen duty, like how we have to do three times a day meal cooking for the family, everyday, day in and day out, sweep and mop the house, make the rooms, fill water, buy groceries, do the laundry, wash utensils, not even make their own cup of tea. A man will *never* do it. A much younger girl will be made to do it, but an adult, grown up, capable-of-caring-for-self-and-others man will never do it. No. Rather, he need to be looked after, taken care of, fed on time, basically, behind every man is a woman waiting to clean up after him and his shits.
While I have practically moved my life into the kitchen, Aayi spends all her mornings and evenings in the farm with her cows, chickens, and pigs. Aabu goes to the school and my brother help our Aayi. I miss my online classes everyday. Can’t tell how time really goes by but it flies out the window and it runs with the wind. And drilled into this routine are moments we steal, at times sneak, or barely manage to make room for, for ourselves. Nighttime is my time, just after dinner is served, it is the only time that’s really mine. There is stillness, my words, and the distant occasional chatter from the TV that I keep on for company. Mostly but there is room for my thoughts and sometimes I wish the nights would never end. I finally start my life here, truly, in all sense. Here, I reclaim my space, I read, I pull the internet in a certain position from a certain direction and try to hold it; the slightest movement of the phone thereafter means a disturbance of the internet, I can finally unplug my thought machine, empty it before me as I sit and consider how to place them best in the writing. And hovering over this private territory like mosquitoes in a preying mode is Aabu repeating what he said the other night, and the night before that, and the many nights preceding this one, about sleeping early sleep sleep sleep 10 PM latest by 11 PM sleep sleep sleep otherwise I’ll have to be shown to a doctor. I’ll have to be put on medication. Sleep sleep sleep. Thus, eventually destroying that one moment that took me the whole day to build and save up, that I look forward to the most, that I consider and keep safely aside as only mine.
My best friend cousin, the other day we were talking on phone discussing what/how we each imagined the characters of the books we read, their features or do we really? And if we do, how much of it is influenced by what we have already seen, what we have gotten used to, or how much of our imagination is limited by our lack of a certain culture’s knowledge, revealed that while reading Sohn Won-Pyung’s Almond, she kept imagining the young boy as a White, repeatedly by default. It annoyed her and she had to remind herself that it’s an Asian story written by an Asian (SKorean) writer about Asian characters. Both of us made a strong angry sound at once and immediately announced how badly she (we) needed to cleanse her (our) mind(s) aka decolonise our minds. Regularly. Twice a day, or even more if necessary.
Where annoyance mounted now, there used to live guilt before. The guilt, at times turning so extreme and strong it became hard to function, of not helping in the kitchen. Of being reminded I was not helping in the kitchen. The guilt of writing instead of helping in the kitchen. The guilt of trying to protect my moments of passing writing epiphanies against the hustle and bustle of a tribal household. The guilt of spending time alone in the writing room for long stretches of time and not spending it with family or accompanying my cousin(s) as they worked in the kitchen. The guilt of waking up at noon on most days because I stayed up late into the morning, writing in my best & favourite time. The guilt of knowing people (who don’t know better) that are waiting for when (if) there’ll ever be a book. The guilt of not being able to explain at home what I am doing and why I do it. The guilt of not having a “valid” answer for why I want to write and read so much. The guilt of not being able to express to anybody how the only time I was not feeling guilty (for once!) for writing was at night, just as the entire house slept, no body cooking or working in the kitchen, no body beating hard on the wooden floor downstairs with their walking stick calling for someone, no body lecturing, no body re running their old expired stories, no body calling to come down for dinner or lunch, no body waiting silently for when I’d wake up and come down to help in the kitchen, no body that I had to come down to feed, no body awake for me to have a conversation with them, no certain moment no certain exchange no certain words said to me to disturb my state of mind but the stillness, just the stillness, only the stillness and my room on the roof with big windows that I could see the moon through as I sat writing, and all these time and space waiting for me to write in them. In those moments, I’d never want to be anywhere else on earth. I finally had my space and time, and that was it. Oh, and I also had my computer.
It is not to say that I wrote as satisfactorily as the moments of writing arrived, I mostly was not able to. Some days I’d prop myself excitedly before my computer to write, open it and go, oh this thing is all dusty I’ll need to clean it up first, and I’ll shut it down and get to cleaning it passionately like my life depended on it. It will be done so fast I’d wish it took longer. Sigh, now I really have to write. What if I go back and read what I wrote many many many days ago for motivation (you don’t want to be told if it’s always motivating though). Then I will get so angry and disheartened how something that took me days and months to write, only took me few minutes to finish reading and that too almost absent of any sort of satisfaction. Let me check my mail and scroll through daily news digest, many promotional mails, stupid advertisements, daily poems, advertisements for multiple job opportunities that are all international, sometimes there would be a new post from a blog or newsletter I follow, some that I stopped opening, some that I immediately open and read, some I visit the website for, to leave a heart, then I go to sent mails and re read something I wrote at a time that was never coming back. Now I should really write. What if I got too involved writing (my Ass!) that I had no time to stalk people and catch up with people online, I’ll quickly visit Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and peep through just a little to see what people are upto and that’s it, I will come back and write having left nothing to distract me towards. Few hours later, I’ll be deep into a stalking chain hole, drifting from one account to another and yet another, I won’t be much on Facebook because I don’t like it and I don’t have much to see there that interest me. Land on YouTube and I am there catching up on my favourite tarot reading that runs an hour long, and on days that I’m really in the mood I’ll search up my favourite writers and listen to them talk, then I’ll play new songs, old songs, new videos, saved videos, and read people’s comments about what they say about my favourite people on the internet and then get emotional and serially like strangers’ comments, and also write a comment myself, you make me so proud, markboi. By the end of this supposed-to-be-brief visit, I’ll be so spent that I will think, no way I can write now, tomorrow as soon as I wake up, I’ll write and I’ll write about distractions and how much I hate it but also how much I think that I don’t want to get rid of them entirely but learn to work beyond them, I’ll write about a small place for my newsletter, or I’ll finally start this essay on trying to forget and also remember someone, oh and I also want to write an essay on waiting and what makes great love stories great. Suddenly lines and sentences and ideas will appear and swim before my eyes and I will be so struck by them and think how I will use them someday in my writing. Mostly I won’t write them down right away because I forget to in the moment, or because I think there’s no way I am going to forget it, or because I’ll write it down first thing in the morning, or sometimes I actually write it down.
I stand as I spoon the milk while it boils and later in the evening, I’ll start a fire to boil drinking water, bathed in sweat, even though I just had a bath. My irritation will have crossed a new high and it will start to appear on my mood, manners, and face. The heat will have burned my words and I’ll have nothing to spare ... you don’t want to think in the summers because if you do, all you think is how much you hate the heat. All you think is how much you don’t want to face the day, or start cooking, and just how much the heat affects your moods. You only think how much the humidity makes you want to kill someone or how much you don’t want to see or talk to anyone. All it makes you think is how sticky you are made and how you want not to be touched even by your clothes. All you think about is how summer is bitchy, and moody, and bad-mouthed. And you think how fucking uncomfortable it is to bleed in the heat. You also don’t want to fall in love in the summers because then you have to think twice the amount everything, and there’s nothing romantic about the heat or skins touching in the heat. I only tolerate summer because I get to wear almost nothing and the only thing I really enjoy in the summers is that afternoon siesta where the sleep is so deep and so delicious, you never get enough of it. Work can wait, responsibilities can wait, the heat can wait, but the sleep — in a cool room, right under the fan, clean sheets, just your mother’s touch if you spread a little from your spot, your limbs free of its duties, no dreams barging or hijacking, nothing but this short slumber that feels as close to a cool and clear spring in the mountain, flowing without a care, without boundaries, without discrepancies, never knowing where to, but always flowing — can come, once, twice, and as many times as it wants to.
Spiralling rather quickly and unexpectedly, the days rolled out into months, and I had more losses than I had any gains, but I also had more learnings than I had losses, so maybe it’s not all that bad. Our family became half, my cousin finally discharged from the duties she were bound by, and my computer gave up too. It took me a while to build myself a new life of responsibilities from the life I was used to. It was not easy, mainly I hated it. Time only kept finding it’s way of slipping away, fast and definitely. Time passed and passed in this new way of life, and time also simultaneously passed against the life I wanted. And with time, the self I took long miserable years to finally understand, I lost too. I lost everything I knew, everything I understood, everything I learned, everything that was mine, everything I loved. And in their stead, there began to grow a hole, a hole that was made larger and deeper by grief, by loss, by loneliness, by pain, by fear, by hopelessness. The only thing that I came the closest to yearning were the words, the writing; my very own words. The stories that I wanted to write, the worlds that I wanted to create, the people I wanted to tell about. Maybe what I also wanted a lot, was love. A certain kind of love. But I had lost everything, the will, the interest, to ask for it. I fell into silence, instead and all I have been doing still, is, hoping I find my way out of this place someday. I don’t feel like it, and I don’t want to admit it, but my thoughts tell me that I am still occupied by someone.
I have found my way of working in between the work I am now bound by and I also enjoy this setting. There is a lot more mind exercise than if I only spent time actually writing/trying to write. I get to see myself in the kitchen and learn and think and improvise. I get to observe closely how someone reacts, why someone say certain things the way they do, how much anger affects and hurts. I get to observe how cooking happens so that I can write about it a lot and very soon. I get to check my patience and how long I can hold my anger and how much I can manage (to not show it at all). I get to think up so much to write, and say, and add in my writings. I don’t get to do a lot of things but I’m richer in my ideas and my words. And the best set of change has been, writing on my phone. This device that fits comfortably into my palms, that I can easily carry *literally* everywhere, and write on anywhere, at anytime. It is not like writing on a computer but it’s been life changing. Maybe I’ll do this until the computer is well and back, but maybe I love it better this way. Meanwhile, in set of threes on each side of my pillow, I’m bracketed in books to which my brain cultivates the foolish hope that maybe, suspended between these books I’ll be closer to the words, written and the many that are yet to be.
NOTE : This is for only if you’re interested. I say this after a lot of thought and consideration. If you like what I write, not necessarily this, or you’d ever like to support me and help me buy books, save up, or help me with my admission, or simply would like to buy me some snacks to munch on while I write, please do reach out. Anytime. Otherwise too, I am so grateful you pay me with your time. Please share!
I love everything you write. Simple and relatable.
Its refreshing to read and loved it.