There are two types of kitchens mainly- family kitchens and
bachelors kitchens. Most of the middle class family kitchens are well arranged
like a properly run private museum. Bachelors’ kitchens look like government
run museums, terribly misplaced in their positions. I am not talking about
exceptions but norms. Exceptions, whether they are bachelors or married, are
cleanliness-maniacs and control freaks. They don’t want anyone else to touch
their kitchen wares. Often you feel that it is better that they remain
bachelors. They remain bachelors because they don’t want their orderliness to
be shattered by another person. They are like strict curators in a museum never
visited by anyone other than the officials. Protocol is what matters to them.
There are many different types of kitchens than the above mentioned two; there
are sad kitchens, happy kitchens, bruised kitchens, screaming ones, yelling
ones and kitchens where tears boil in a pot along with the reflection of a
waning moon.
At a married friend’s family kitchen where his wife cooks so
many times a day for his never ending stream of visitors, I sit asking him
whether I need to help them in doing something as they are cooking for me and
my family visiting them. We sip from the half filled glasses of deliberate
oblivion. The last piece of ice cube from the crammed freezer of the
refrigerator floats like a thin slice of polar memory in my friend’s glass,
which he pushes with the tip of his tongue for testing its patience to stay for
the next round of filling.
I insist on doing something for him. He gives me seven big
onions and asks me to cut them into very thin slices so that he can fry them
for lacing the Biriyani which is already in the cooking pot and is on its way
to the gas stove. Like many in this world, who have hated cooking or being
kitchen helps, I too like cutting vegetables and onions for it saves you from
many other kitchen related works like washing the meat, rice, preparing the
dough and so on. Cutting vegetables need minimum skills provided if you have a
good cutting board and a sharp knife. There are also you find some problem only
if your host is two particular about the sizes of the pieces that you cut out
of a potato besides being strict on the shape of it. There are some friends who
would show off their recent purchase from a mega mart- a machine that could cut
anything into size, except your ego. It has several blades in different shapes.
And it is too handy to be used till it finds its permanent place in the
cupboard as a museum piece for the coming generations to gaze and wonder upon.
He gives me a cutting board and a sharp knife, and throws a
couple of instructions. Then suddenly the kitchen is abuzz with the discussion on
why and how everyone else in there hates cutting onions. Onion makes most of
the people cry. It is one vegetable that takes revenge straight on people the
moment violence is inflicted on them. The other vegetables do it slowly once
they are ingested and digested. Salad seekers are revenged by bad taste in the
name of sophistication. Anyway, the discussion keeps moving around onion and I
set out on my own track of thinking on path flanked by trees that have sleeping
eyes for leaves, melting watches for flowers and alphabets for branches and an
abstract defiance for the main trunk. I walk along the shadow-less path along
the tree and wonder why there are no shadows of the trees all along. From
nowhere I listen my photographer friend’s voice, who has been struggling with
his drinks, phone calls, cooking efforts, children’s screaming and a lot of
unnamed ghosts in his head for quite some time, and it says, ‘where the light
falls parallel and almost close to earth how there could be shadows? It gives
only a hue of light that fills in the places like a film set, like a dream.’
(Potato Eaters by Vincent Vangogh)
The smell of onion comes along with me in my journey. Cutting
onion is different from peeling onion. Peeling onion is a journey to
nothingness. It is like knowing the essence of Hinduism in the right sense.
Each layer tells you ‘neti neti’ (na iti- not this). And you keep peeling until
you reach nothing else to peel than your own fingers approaching each other
like two swans in the pool of time trying to grace each other with their beaks.
In kitchen you get philosophical and you feel like leaving everything and going
into nothingness. But like the true Hindu philosophy, the tear jerking element
of it holds you back to the earth, to the stool on which you are sitting and
cutting the onion, into your own world of woes. I ask, what is the greatest
solace of someone who holds a onion at one hand, a sharp knife on the other and
his or her nose running? The outside of right palm, the right shoulder. Someone
cutting onion alone in a kitchen and immersed in a chemical driven crying that
turns into the memory of something really poignant and capable enough to force
real tears is the most touching scene, a blend of comedy and tragedy, that one
could imagine. You should see it in a more Guru Dutt-esque light.
Bachelors cut onion and vegetables well. Living in
semi-penury also makes people cut vegetables well. That’s why people during
their college days, when they stay in hostels or in rented accommodations cut
vegetables very well. There could be many reasons; shortage of resources is one
reason while occupation of meaning is another. In hostel days, apart from the
dreaming of love making or being in love, what one does fruitfully is cutting
vegetables and cooking frugal meals and sharing them with friends. Studying is
an excuse for crossing the turbulent river called youth. Hostel rooms and
rented apartments are pools of fire where bodies and souls of young people get
baked for future life.
(Frugal Meal by Picasso)
However rich you have become in your later life, however
expensive your life has become, do you think that you have ever tasted
something like a dal-chawal that your friend had served before you when you
came out of a long slumber induced by drugs and cheap liquor. Has the chicken
ever tasted so well, many times better than the star dishes served in silver
plates by turbaned butlers with a hopeless band singing sad songs for happy
hours as an acoustic backdrop, than the one curry that all of you made together
after pooling in money from for almost a week’s parsimonious living? Have you
ever eaten an omelette as tasty as the one that your friend made one evening
when hope was setting along with the sun in the western ghats and the stars of
your madness were trying to peep through the sky above the neem tree?
Kitchens are places where philosophy originates and finds
its flights of fancy. Life is like a wash basin filled with the dirty plates of
previous night’s dinner. You need to clean it up. Wash all complaints aside,
pack them well into black polythene bags and keep outside the door. Time is the
closest stream of river Ganges. Immerse till you choke, rise, pick up an onion
and start cutting.
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