A kitchen sans a mother, and one full of odours

Away from home and forced to set aside hours to cook and fend for oneself is an experience in itself

July 15, 2018 12:00 am | Updated 12:00 am IST

Indian vegetarian biryani with vegetables and spices in cooking process on black background

Indian vegetarian biryani with vegetables and spices in cooking process on black background

Every year, many deluded Indian students arrive on campuses in Europe, the U.S., Australia or Canada with dreams of an easy time, freedom and a better quality of life. All of this is subtly marketed by the brochures of education consultants and by the Facebook feeds of the senior students.

But it is only when you sit in a spotlessly clean, white and highly equipped kitchen in a country far away from India and face the prospect of spending time preparing a meal that can qualify as edible, that you realise the amount of time your mother (or grandmother, or maid, or whoever ruled your kitchen in India) managed to save for you. All the weekends you planned to spend on socialising are now spent in the kitchen trying to figure out how raw ingredients can acquire the taste of the food that was available so easily in India. You are forced to set aside hours to attempt to cook Indian food — in a day that is already hectic with classes, lectures, seminars, library hours and studying.

Among the international student population of any university outside India, this obsession with cooking is generally found more amongst Indian students. Indians seem to have an irrepressible need to devote more than a few hours a week in the kitchen. The blandness of western cuisine Indians cannot tolerate for long. This often becomes a matter of life and death for vegetarians as they try to survive life in the West.

Admittedly, most Asians are known for making cooking an indispensable part of their student life. But Indians are known for it because of the unusually pungent smell they generate for their entire building — especially if it is a shared housing arrangement, a hostel or dormitory.

As you struggle with chopping onions while your eyes water incessantly and sauté vegetables in masalas amid a cloud of suffocating vapours, your mind fervently prays for the day when all of this can end and you can go back to being fed like a spoilt child at the dining table by your doting family members.

And as you fill the entire building with the long-lasting odour of garlic, onions, chilies and other Indian spices, your Western neighbours will in all likelihood despise this obsessive hobby of yours and wish you had lived somewhere else. The vapours drifting into every nook and corner of the building from your culinary efforts is a pleasant aroma for the Indian, and a stench for others.

But it’s not all bad. Experience is the best teacher, after all. In this day and age, when your career takes you all over the world and far away from your family and domestic help, learning the essentials of living independently is crucial. It is only a matter of time until one encounters this situation in life. So the earlier, the better!

The same Western acquaintances who gave you disgusted looks while you were cooking can easily become your friends once you discover fully the art of Indian cuisine. Ultimately, there will come a day when you invite students from other countries to your room to serve them your amateur attempts at Indian cuisine.

And there will come a time when their eyes widen appreciatively and they declaim words of praise and wonder. Of course, it does help if these people have never really tasted Indian cuisine, or if they have a strange fetish for spicy food.

But ultimately, you will find that everyone has the ability and the need to create some remnants of home from one’s own hands while in a different continent.

ankitha.cheerakathil@ifd21

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