Staying with friends while visiting from my home town I was met with a laughing accusation. ‘How come you don’t cook so much in our kitchen? Look at all your photographs on Facebook, where at home you’re constantly cooking something or the other! Here, all you do is cook eggs for breakfast.’
In my defence I suggested that I was still getting used to their kitchen, their set of pots and pans, their knives and other implements, where they stowed their spices and so on. Meekly I put to them that from the baby steps of breakfast will come the bigger strides of lunch, the marathon runs of dinner and meals for large parties. ‘Nonsense! We’ve also seen pictures of meals you’ve made in other people’s kitchens in other cities! No more excuses, get cooking!’
Now, it’s not that I’m any sort of great cook, not at all, but I do like the activity and all the mess and busy-ness that goes with it; I like taking pictures of food, stuff I’ve made (including regular disasters) and dishes produced by others; I like thinking and talking about food, more than perhaps I should; so why this hesitation around my hosts’ culinary cockpit? As I began to peel the potatoes and boil the arhar daal for a proper meal, I was obliged to give this some thought.
There are a couple of kitchens, including my own, in which I feel completely at home. Then there are others in which I can manage, and in this I would include my current hosts’ kitchen. And then there are places where I wouldn’t be able to lift a kadchhi . As to this last category, it’s not about the kitchen being too small or ill-equipped—though that doesn’t help with a limited skill-set like mine—it could also be that a kitchen is too large, too fancy, too daunting, and thinking of cooking in such a space one could feel like a pilot licensed for single-engine light aircraft being asked to ready a jumbo jet for take-off. Maybe it’s the difference between amateurs and professionals.
Think of one of those amazing women in Bombay who go from kitchen to kitchen, producing meals for up to seven or eight families in a day. Or think of the crew commanded by X Maharaj that came and settled down in the parking lot, tasked with making a massive bhoj in memory of someone who had just passed away in my building; there they were, gas fires blazing under pots and kadhais , mountains of chopped onions growing on newspapers spread next to low stools, kegs of spices being opened before being dropped into vats of oil. For the Bombay bai , there is no luxury of working with her favourite pot or pan, the temperature of which she knows in her DNA; for the Maharaj and his battalion the outsize pots and pans may need to be exact and familiar, but there is no choice of a nice view, no chance of quibbling about the ergonomics of the height of a counter—what they have to do is constantly produce eatables of a certain standard while making sure not to get sizzling ghee on the rubber parts of the Mercs and Audis parked within splat range.
A (false) binary
Moving from cooking to writing, (which is what I actually do), brought up another (possibly false) binary. I have some writer friends who can write anywhere, simply anywhere, and others who need to have everything just so before a single drop of deathless prose or poetry squeezes out of their being. One prolific pal spends most of his year on airliners, singly contributing almost as much as a small developed country to global warming. This man produces his columns and journalism on his little laptop and smartphone, filing from airports, while squeezed into economy seats as the plane is taxi-ing for take-off or landing, from taxis with his dongle, from elevators of wi-fi connected hotels as he is being taken up to his room.
In contrast, I know a novelist in London who cannot write without sticking to the following process: every few months he goes personally to Paris to pick up a stack of notebooks from a particular stationery shop that binds them specially to his precise instructions, (and no they can’t be posted, he has to bring them home himself); then he begins to write, longhand, sitting at his desk and nowhere else; after he has fissionable bulk, he copies the text via an Olivetti typewriter, correcting as he goes; when the first draft is done, i.e the combination of fountain-pen, notebook and typewriter yielding a semi-complete story, he transfers the whole lot to a computer for a final re-write before sending it all off to his agent. The novelist is relatively young and not wealthy at all, but this is what he does, this is what floats his creative boat, and he does not waver from his process.
I’ve often thought that certain kinds of creative work is inextricably tied to tools the particular craft requires and the place those tools call home. In the case of painters and sculptors, for example, this can be crucial: the studio, its quality of light, the quotidian rhythm of it; or say the differing lengths of time a watercolour paper stays wet in summer and in monsoon, in a dry location or a humid tropical one, allowing or precluding certain kinds of wash work; or the locally available clay, wood or rock; or the indispensable, quirky little implements you have in your studio, the ones you can’t carry with you when you travel, and so on and so forth.
Miniaturist in Mewar
On one hand, some painters are happily nomadic, or not bound to their studios—think of the Impressionists or Van Gogh charging into the countryside every morning, think of Turner with his sketchbooks and water-colour pads trekking across Italy and the Alps, producing two almost parallel bodies of work in the small-scale beauties and the huge oils he makes back home in England. Compare these painters to one of our miniaturist geniuses sitting cross-legged and unmoving for decades, in cool Kangra or roasting Mewar, overseeing his apprentices, pushing the envelope of his art and skill even as he passes these on to younger generations.
In the case of sculptors, think of the totally different dynamic between studio and work site, the work you can complete in your studio and transport out, as opposed to the under construction temple or the cliff-face that becomes your karma-sthan for decades.
In today’s world, with so many practitioners producing conceptual or digital art, you’d imagine that the concept of the atelier or studio has been rendered archaic.
All someone might need, you’d imagine, would be their laptop, ipad and/or smartphone, with maybe a Moleskine notebook and fancy ball-point thrown in for retro comfort. But no, even as they zip from residency to residency, from site to international site, I know artists who retain a peculiar magnetic link to their home bunker. This is the place from where they work best, from where they most efficiently generate work. This is the place to which they need to return, just as a classical musician needs to return to her or his ‘ sa ’. Perhaps it’s the combination of light and smell, or a peculiar conspiracy of sounds, or the taste of the Chinese takeaway, or the taco or pizza delivery, or the thhali from the local Lunch Home.
On the other hand, I’ve read about the (no longer that new) phenomenon of travelling chefs who can’t sit still, who need to travel the world, eating and experimenting, often organising pop-up kitchens in warehouses or the street-side from which they address new customers. Apparently the only thing these ace culinarios carry with them is their knife-roll, with their favourite blades encased in protective padding, as to the rest, they are somewhere connected to the eight-kitchen woman in Bombay and X Maharaj in Calcutta, finding their raw materials, techniques, recipes and vessels on the go, matching their training and skills to new discoveries, producing astonishing food in all sorts of unfamiliar environments.
Having taken my mind off the immediate task at hand, I suddenly see that I’ve almost completed it. Without letting a perfectly good but strange kitchen become an impediment, I’ve almost finished cooking. The alu-parwal sabzi is slightly charred at some edges, the daal is workmanlike but edible, we’ll make the rice once my friends get home and the rotis we’ll order in from the local eatery. It’s not the most fantastic meal I’ve ever cooked but it will do just fine, or so I hope.
The columnist and filmmaker is the author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Poriborton: An Election Diary . He edited Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and was featured in Granta .
