The Kitchen enters the work of Dhiruben Patel’s work like a tree of lights. The dark patches borrow from the shadows of light. The tree is rooted in memory -- of mothers, aunts and grandmothers. It is open to change, yet, smells, sights, love, warmth and desire to nurture form its journey, its continuum.
The Kitchen Poems is no metaphor, it is itself. There’s no shying away from the excitement of the bhakri , the mango, fenugreek, mustard, fresh vegetables, and the annual pickle making ritual – it is a world in itself, and it makes for the world too. Dhiruben Patel -- the 90-year-old outstanding Gujarathi writer – in her English work Kitchen Poems , pays a quiet tribute to the women who love their kitchen, and subsume their selves becoming caregivers and nurturers. With its unmistakable Gandhian overtones of community taking precedence over the individual, Dhiruben, without fuss or feminism, makes the everyday woman an activist in her own right. She keeps homes together.
In what could be called a perfect transition to stage, Padmavathi Rao’s solo performance of the Kitchen poems , directed by Naushil Mehta for Aantarya Film and Theatre House, was striking to say the least. The stage metamorphosed in our minds to become kitchen, dining and drawing rooms of different time periods, Padmavathi Rao glided smoothly in and out of these time frames to being the old woman, the little girl, a young woman, married woman and mother. Playing different age groups, she captured different perspectives on food and kitchen – something that changes with age and context.
Sample these lines:
I was a child no longer
I was growing fast
I had to raid the kitchen
At all unearthly hours
How a kitchen changes its colours
When the day ends and night begins
It is a different sort of place
The literary text, as well as the performance text, is subtle and textured. It creates a vast canvas for various kinds of feelings and responses, without romanticising or being hard on any of these many women. You could be this, you could be that, you could be a hybrid of this and that – defying types, Dhiruben creates a complex melange of emotional landscapes. Underlying all these is a vulnerability of the instinct to nurture. Her emotions are often conveyed by what her kitchen dishes out.
You almost begin to think that Dhiruben, in the initial parts, is holding aloft the “quintessential woman”. Read these lines:
Cooking is a wonderful thing
If you know it well
You need no words
To tell someone how deeply you love
Eyes widen with surprise
There is a flicker of a grateful smile
When he says “How nice!”
Communication is instant and complete
With no misunderstandings
No hurt feelings
The pleasure is plain and mutual.
However, you revise your opinion not just about the literary text, but also about many straight-jacketed ideas within you, when you encounter:
Why don't I ask him the same question
With an enticing smile?
Let us see what he says
Whether he realises what he wants
Three square meals a day
Every day of the week
With hardly a break
How many human hours does it mean
Of toil and moil without respite?
I think I'll say ‘No’ to his innocent question
Asked with an audacious smile
And scream till I'm all red in the face
“I don't know how to cook
Nor do I want to learn!”
The strength of the performance was clearly how the poems were rendered. Structurally, the poems are in free verse, but the actor was at remarkable ease with the text that it flowed unhindered by the form. Padmavathi, through her fine rendering, blending it fluidly with performance, not only captured the textures of the text, but also the inherent drama of the mind. She could with amazing precision capture the multiple selves of the woman. There are dark moments, ups and downs even in this believer, the kitchen woman.
This man of mine
His eye wanders at times
Enticed by a pretty face
I am not anxious
He is sure to come back
He cannot resist my food
Yet sometimes I wonder
Should I open the door for him?
Or just whisper
“Please go away?”
Sadness, sarcasm, irony and wit form the contours of the play. There is no “sthayi”, a fixed emotion, Dhiruben seems to say, for, the very manner in which the kitchen woman defines herself is by what she does for others. And so, the kitchen woman draws strength from memory, goes back to the kitchen of her childhood, a good old recipe, a hand-me-down sari so on and so forth. Like nature, there is that natural instinct to further, but the kitchen is also her inner space, a freedom and joy that exists on its own.
Microwave Ovens
Two-minute noodles
Pre-cooked food
Frozen fruits and greens
Man's never-ending crusade against time
Squeezes the skill out of my fingers
And solace from my heart
The performance, studded with old Hindi film songs work beautifully with the narrative. Kitchen Poems makes a deep impact on you because it refuses to intellectualise. It very quietly celebrates the ordinariness of the life of the kitchen woman and her inconsequential victories, so to say.
