Seeing my mother hate the kitchen and my aunt love it, I was very confused. Growing up, I couldn’t decide if liking it would betray my mother, or hating it would distance me from what I admired so much. 

* 

Why do you enter the kitchen? 
“To check what’s in the fridge,” Armin, 9 (cousin) 
“To see what my grandmother’s making,” Riza, 13 (cousin) 
“To make coffee,” Nitin, 41 (uncle) 

“To make tea,” says my mother. It wasn’t always so simple for her – this change from worrying about what to feed her family of four to simply making tea for herself and nobody else. Married at a young age, Umma was given the responsibility of cooking for her husband, and helping out in the kitchen (her’s and her in-law’s) the second the Mahar was exchanged. She was doing her B.Ed, taking care of my infant self, adhering to all the new rules of married life, and cooking meals for everyone in the house. 

“I found this lady who sells home cooked meals,” Umma tells me one day.  She herself was free from the shackles of her dreaded kitchen routines. It had been a year since Papa and her separated, and my sister and I had moved to Bangalore. It made perfect sense that she’d shed the responsibilities she never had a say in taking up. 

While I tell people that my first memory of Umma is of her reading a Bruno the Bear book  to me, it’s actually one of her rushing to the kitchen from her B.Ed class. It’s of her frantically kneading chapati dough, sighing as her cup of tea went cold on the cool black marble counter. Coming from a long line of food enthusiasts, Umma was far from being one. Her disinterest in food fascinates me to no end – especially since she makes delicious food. Whichever recipe she follows, she seems to know exactly what to add and what to omit to make it hers.. 

My aunt, on the other hand,  enjoyed the kitchen since she was a little girl, watching her mother hum as she cooked for whoever stopped by for a meal. This, she carried on to her adulthood to start a homestay with her husband for weary travellers. Here, she reigned her little paradise, choosing what to serve her guests and even teaching them the intricacies of Malabari cooking. However, she has since retired to an ancestral home in Calicut and her kitchen has transformed from a place of comfort, to one of restriction. 

You see, her husband is a very demanding person when it comes to food, to the point where he sets  a menu for himself  every week. No matter that she’d rather have puttu for breakfast, it is his decision and that’s final. Unless she wants to do double the work and cook something else for herself. This paradox of freedom he gives her is good, in his opinion. “After all, I am not restricting her from making what she wants. It’s just that I have to get what I want first,” he says one day. 

“Sometimes I miss cooking for guests,” Ammai admits to me. In her kitchen in Thalassery, where their homestay was, she could make whatever she felt like – paying tribute to her mother, cooking what she craved for that day, going for something easy and non-fussy; anything and everything she was feeling on a particular day dictated what went on the table. 

Ammai is very particular about who cooks in her kitchen. Every time Umma and I have been there for special dinners or lunches, we always set the table and ask her if we can help out – only to be met with an almost ecstatic shake of her head. So we resign to our duties of wiping the fancy china and placing the perfectly plated dishes Ammai carefully hands to us. Biriyani, petti pathiri, beef stew, you name it – we always watched from the sidelines as she prepared these delicacies. I think this was her way of holding on to her kitchen, any way she could. 

I cooked with Ammai for the first time a few weeks ago. We made muttasurkka (rice egg fritters), one of her favourite things to make for her guests’ breakfast. She taught me like she was giving  a class to one of the foreigners in her homestay – Armed with tons of tricks to make things easier, and near-scientific reasons for why we do something a certain way, Ammai was gracious enough to make me feel like her kitchen was mine for the hour. 

It came out perfectly; she was proud. I was ecstatic. 

When I moved into an apartment with my friend, I was automatically deemed the chef. K couldn’t cook to save her life and I had the genes of the women in my family  coursing through my veins. So armed with the cookbook Ammai wrote, I stepped into our kitchen for the first time. Cooking with someone else in mind is a strange feeling. You’re not allowed to fully listen to what your body is asking of you. I move differently depending on the dish – the way I move when I’m making dal tadka and neychoru and stew is very different. Sometimes I want to dance to k-pop and prep chicken for the stew. Some days I want the laborious task of just watching the dal bubble or chapatis rise. What was once a personal act of care now turns into a chore, a responsibility, a standard you must uphold. 

The first proper meal I made for K and I was bibimbap. Granted, it’s more chopping than cooking, but it was one of the first meals I was proud of. I recently moved to a new place; a place of my own. It has everything I’ve ever wanted – a yellow accent wall, space for my bookshelf, wall space for my postcards and pictures. A beautiful kitchen. Going from cooking for my roommate and myself to just me is jarring, to say the least. Having full creative freedom in the kitchen is more stressful than I thought it would be. She wasn’t the biggest fan of chicken, and the first thing I ended up buying for my new place was a 250g pouch of fresh curry cut. And then calling my mom, close to tears, asking about her chicken curry recipe. 

My mother always valued large kitchen spaces and I get it now – she was cooking for four, three meals, every day. The kitchen featured in ‘The Bear’ wouldn’t be big enough if that were me. Having to think about what  three other people like, keeping your own preferences aside – I did that for one person for a little over a year and  felt its demands.. What do the women and mothers who cook for their families feel on a daily basis? Compounded with the laborious tasks of cooking, what of their emotional labour in charting preferences, ensuring their food brings joy and connection on top of sustenance. Maybe that makes me selfish, but I think it would be a lot easier if everyone were in the kitchen, fending for themselves or caring for each other like my Ammai and Umma do. 

Making tadka (and spluttering over empty vessels) 

I love making tea. It lets my thoughts settle like the dust in a freshly brewed cup. But I hate it when people ask me to make tea for someone. Why is it that when other people come to your house, the first demand men have is for women, “Oru chaaya itta,” (make tea)? Why is this automatic relegation not questioned more? 

I’m tired of seeing my aunt sigh instead of hum a tune as she stirs her curries. I’m exhausted thinking about all the times my mother had to run to the kitchen as soon as she got back from her teaching job. I’m grateful, thinking of my father making tea for the guests instead of expecting me to do it now. I’m smiling every time I remember my uncle and my aunt-in-law embracing as they made khichdi. 

Cooking after all, can be an experience of deep connection and skill—why don’t we let it?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I do wish we were better friends with our kitchen spaces. You say your hello’s by finding the chaya pathram, you ask the usual questions as you immerse a spoon of tea powder into the bubbling water, you laugh at a joke when the milk is poured. There is joy when the chai is finally ready. You say your goodbyes and promise to visit again. 

Most food comes from the result of a lot of pain – pain of the communities cast aside, pain of the women forced into kitchens as girls, pain of not having access to enough edible ingredients. 

I don’t want my story to be just one more in that pile. 

I want mine to be  of a happy community, one that overcame their pain and fought for their place on the table. Literally and metaphorically. I want women to have the freedom to only make tea for themselves. I want men to fight for the chance to wash the dishes so their wives can rest, like my uncle does. I’m glad my maternal aunt is teaching Armin, my baby cousin, that cooking is a life skill everyone should have. I smile every time my dad runs to the kitchen when  we have guests over. 

For it is when people come together that stories emerge, much like the beginnings of sulaimani (spiced black tea). 

Oru chaaya ittaalo? (how about we make a cup of tea now?)