TRIAL BY FIRE
Around the age of twelve, I expressed a desire to learn cooking. “Want to learn to cook?”asked my mother, as she handed me a damp yellow kitchen cloth. “Start with learning how to clean.” I held the cloth like it was radioactive and wiped the kitchen counter with such disgust that I didn’t graduate beyond cleaning duties for the next decade.
For a long time, my mother’s kitchen was a place of authority and rigid control. If you wanted to help, you had to do just as she wished, or not at all. My mother has always ground her masalas from scratch, detested spillage, had a personal vendetta against crumbs,and stored her linens with one sachet of sandalwood powder and three moth balls per shelf. Nothing ever changed, no matter how many houses we moved. Any mess or broken crockery would create a cloud of tension that began in the kitchen and swiftly engulfed the house.
This is probably why I felt comfortable in my grandmother’s kitchen, where Paati liked to talk as she cooked, her soft voice drifting across the shelves, asking me to hand her this or that. I felt comfortable enough to lean against the counter, often taking in the smell of decoction or dipping my hands into a steel vessel full of karuvadams, while listening to a sermon on the benefits of bananas or a sturdy handbag. I loved how Paati made cooking seem effortless and inclusive, like your presence was just as important to the food as a jar of salt.
