The couple lingering outside the British Library after attending a literary event were planning to dine out in one of Indiranagar’s gazillion restaurants. “Three words every woman loves to hear,” the wife said to me, laughing. “No cooking today.” All you progressive, gender-sensitive people out there are probably armed with a rebuttal: “Why only ‘every woman’, why not ‘every man’? Times have changed, madam.” True, true (says me, thoughtfully stroking my imaginary beard), but not really, not that much. For all the social change that urban spaces have wrought, the kitchen is still viewed as a primarily female domain. A man amidst the pots and pans is a bonus or an aberration.
Even as I speak I must acknowledge the many men I know or know of, who literally (and not just idiomatically speaking) put food on the table — food they have cooked, let me hasten to clarify, and not what they have excavated from plastic and foil. In the time and place I grew up, a husband at the stove was an object of pity and mockery. I remember an aunt who met with an accident that immobilised her. While she lay in bed with steel pins in her lower limbs, my uncle furtively dished out meals for the family, closing the kitchen windows so that the neighbours wouldn’t spot him! In a bygone era, stern and even tyrannical husbands were commonplace; they expected to be served sizzling hot food and tongue-scalding beverages at scheduled hours, and if their rigorous standards were not met, they would give their women an earful and leave in a huff. Heads would roll when a wayward stone found its way into the rice or dal. Traditional kitchens and their equipment were designed to enslave their users.
Most urban middle class dwellings these days have picture-perfect kitchens but I suspect they’re spotless because they’re so little used. I don’t mean to criticise — that would be like the pot calling the kettle black, for I am a minimalist who spends as little time, energy and material as possible to produce food on a strictly need-to-eat basis. Who can blame working couples for having more restaurants than relatives on speed dial? I would hazard a guess, however, that the modern woman continues to be under subtle if not overt pressure to be kitchen-in-charge. Although househusbands are the exception in India (and the rest of the world), urban bachelors share living space and kitchen duties without a qualm, but the moment they marry they get their culinary memories erased a-la “Total Recall”. The new husband says generously to his working wife, “Let’s just order, na, if you’re feeling tired.” Please note that he does not offer to do the cooking himself. The takeout is the easy way out for the guilt-edged husband.
Times may have changed, but how many men do you see in the cookery section of a book fair? Times may have changed, but when I say to you, “I have a friend who doesn’t know how to cook,” you’ll assume it’s a man. (It’s a she, and even I, the minimalist, did raise half an eyebrow when she first announced that she’d never cooked in her life.) If a man goes shopping and cannot tell mint from coriander, or gram dal from toor dal, you would smile indulgently, but the same ignorance in a woman might make you frown. My domestic employee S got a call from one of these ‘ignorant’ women one morning. “Hanh, hanh,” I could hear her tell her employer impatiently. “I will come, I can only come by 10.30 or so.” She could barely conceal her outrage when she reported to me, “This madam wants me to go and turn on the gas for her.” I gaped. Her voice dripping with contempt, she continued, “She doesn’t know how to switch on the cylinder. Her husband usually does it for her. She has software kelsa! What is the use of education and degrees if you cannot do such a simple thing? Even poor, illiterate people know how to switch on the cylinder.” I agreed perfunctorily but later thought, if a man had made the same request to S she would have treated it as a joke.
The audience’s response to a performance at a bookstore-cafe reminded me that the association between women and cooking was an enduring one. It was an enactment of “Kitchen Poems” written by an eminent Gujarati writer when she was 76, held on August 15 (freedom from cooking?). Women in particular (and of all ages) reacted with spontaneous joy and recognition although the poems reflected the values of an older generation. I think everyone in the room started recalling their mothers! You might have dismissed the poems as charmingly old-fashioned but for the embers of discontent glowing within the warm memories. The poet described the conflicting emotions of the woman in sole charge of the kitchen: pride, satisfaction, exhaustion, frustration.
Why is it, asked the poet, that men entered the kitchen only when a feast had to be prepared? The implication — that men preferred the chef’s hat to the cook’s apron — set off knowing laughter among the young women in the audience. Maybe it is still she, not he, who rules over the province of the hearth.
(Send your feedback to ckmeena@gmail.com)
