My Pet Dragon

For 20 years, an angry dragon lived in my kitchen. Every time I entered the place, it breathed fire and roared.

The dragon upheld (still does) cooking as a prime artifact of female subjugation, a ceremony caught up in the patriarchal rules of “good girls should” and “duty.”  The dragon didn’t want me to endorse the injustice by participating in it.

This dragon’s wrath is justified, but for 20 years, it didn’t have the vocabulary to express the problem accurately.

UN has finally called it: “unpaid female labor” and “invisibilzation of female work.”

According to the UN, “from cooking and cleaning, to fetching water and firewood or taking care of children and the elderly, women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid work across the world.” In their estimate, in India, women put in 352 minutes (about 6 hours) of domestic work as opposed to 51.8 minutes (0.86 hours) that men put in per day.

Economists completely ignore the work put in by you, me, our mothers, sisters, maids, neighborhood aunties and women working in the fields while calculating the GDP of the country. UN says that unpaid care and domestic work is valued to be 10 – 39% of the GDP. 

UN is calling for policy changes to correct this. And as long as this inequity exists, that dragon in my kitchen will continue to breathe fire.

A Place to Roar

When I was 17, my mom had fractured her foot. The doc had prescribed complete bed rest for a month to heal it.

I had to step in to her shoes for that month and the sheer volume of work this entailed had slowly dawned on me as the month had rolled on. From 5:30 a.m.- 10:00 p.m., the stream of tending to a full house was unending. My sister had just delivered a baby, so taking care of their needs also was added on.

By the end of the month, I had decided, “never again!”

Never again had I wanted to be shackled to domesticity so much that one had to lose one’s identity/time/priorities in the pursuit of making the household run like a well oiled machine.

And I have stuck to this resolve ever since. I chose to be single, pretty much nipping the problem at the bud. But there was one unplanned collateral damage.

While roaring about shackles and domestic inequality, I had missed the softer, more tender aspects of domesticity, especially cooking. I stayed away from cooking for the better part of the 20 years, doing just subsistence-level stuff.

Not even when I became a diabetic. Not even when the diabetes medicines made my tummy very  sensitive. And I definitely didn’t cook for anybody else. Weird how we become prisoners of our own device!

Regaining the Balance

Last year, our office caterer took a turn for the worse. He started serving distinctly unpalatable stuff. There were weeks of indistinct orange goop that went in the name of food.

Finally it dawned on me that my food scene sucked. Had been sucking for a long time. At a deeper level, I realized with a sense of shock that having mindless food prepared by sometimes resentful cooks had been actually a direct form of self loathing!

One doesn’t need a Ph.D in psychology to see the obvious connections between my weight problem, chronic health condition that restricts diet, angry feminist ideology and my deep anger with food.

I realized that If I wanted healthy, tasty and creative food, I only had to change my mind set about cooking. I needed to start looking at food as a friend and cooking as an art and pleasurable activity.

But the watershed moment came when P, who was suffering from terrible GERD, mentioned that the aforementioned orange goop was so toxic that he might end up with stomach cancer! In a reckless act of bravado, I claimed that I can make food for him (and me) that would nurse us back to well being.

I steamrolled his objections and embarked on  a very special spiritual journey of cooking. It has given me phenomenal insights.

For the first time in my life, I paid attention to what I was cooking and thought deeply about the effect it would have on the person partaking of it. For the first time, I cooked to nourish, heal and satiate.

I understood, in a very “Chicken Soup for the Soul” kind of way, the key point of cooking is love. Or rather, it needs to be. You don’t cook because it is your duty or because it is a damn chore. You cook because you love–the food, the process and the persons who are going to eat it, including yourself.

And eating food also is an act of love. And gratitude. For the food and the person who prepared it. It occurred to me that I never thank food for nourishing me–I’ve always blamed it for making me sick! Like a lot of people, I too have troubled relationship with food and I’m mostly stressed, scared, and angry while eating.

Of course, cooking is also an art and a science. I learned that to cook, one needs to be mindful and completely present. One needs to feel the ingredients, channel their individual character and let them create a harmonious music together.

The key to cooking is the balance. Make it fine and you have a masterpiece. Make it wonky, and it becomes a vulgar wannabe. I understood that like any other art form, the meaning is in what is unsaid. Don’t overcook and kill the dish. Switch off the heat at the right moment. Knowing that right moment is where probably enlightenment is!

I am still a feminist. I can still stand on a soap box and deliver a scathing indictment on all the indulged, entitled, lazy men who think household work is strictly for women (my grandmom told my dad, apparently, that boys will lose their ears if they step into the kitchen!). But I am also a born again cook.

I am Annapurna.

Starting Afresh

I’m sure everybody wants to cook like mom. So do I.

I hound her everyday for recipes. I go for the simple everyday dishes and have learned that simplicity is hard work. Especially if they are classical dishes that are the cultural mainstay of the region (like sambar and rasam where I come from), then it is much like any other classical art form. You learn at the feet of a master, practice, practice, practice, get frustrated and almost quit and then in one blinding moment of clarity, you get it!

Here are four of my hard won victories.