After the sun sets, it takes some time for the darkness to ascend. What the sun leaves behind is rather beautiful, of what paintings are made. Hues of pink, orange, blue and at this time of the year, strokes of grey too adorn the sky. These colours lure you to the terrace, but the heat is not as soft as the pink in the sky. These colours wander about the sky after losing their source before fading away, waiting for you to reach your terrace. So well, this is what happened at home too. When mother fell to the bed rest with her thinning uterus, menstruating and wetting her rather flat pillow, weeping away silently; I took over the kitchen. It wasn’t total darkness, as I flailed around the house waiting for help, and doing all that was supposed to be done to keep us afloat for two weeks.
It wasn’t my first time cooking. I learned to make everything I loved because the dishes were alien to my mother, and my grandmother. They were happy cooking elaborate fish and mutton curries that I never consumed. And I was trying my hand at Rajma and Kadhai Paneer on school nights. My secret ingredient was adding little milk to whatever I made to give it a creamy texture without making the food heavy. But this was my first time cooking in the peak of the great Indian summer.
You see, when I walked into the kitchen on the first day I had no idea about how brutal the Indian summer is. And it was not like I didn’t know how it was – I had spent three years here in the capital and had walked through the streets with the loo hitting my face during peak summers – but the kitchen was something else altogether.
So, that morning, I went in to make dal, something I hadn’t cooked before. I knew how to make the most elaborate vegetarian curries, which had the smoothest of gravies made with tomatoes, cashews and curd but had never tried my hands on the simple dal chawal. The recipe is easy – you just have to boil the rice and lentils – but the fact that this simple dish is something which has to be cooked every single day, come hell or high water, makes it look quite burdensome.
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I have never really felt a part of my family, close enough to care for them, love them and most importantly, voluntarily wanting to feed them. Until that day, cooking was only a great act of self love for me. But here I was, mixing the moong dal and masoor dal, scrubbing and washing them like they’d just been dug out from under the ground. The water running out of the tap, was hot and had me wondering how long it would take to make the dal come to a boil if I just left it in this water. I aspire to record such things – the time it takes for the whole spices, the jeera and dhania to turn black (but I am always cutting my vegetables as my whole spices sizzle in the oil), the time it takes for the chai to turn cold in summer, winter, spring and autumn and the time it takes to absentmindedly grind spices and make purées by hand on the traditional Bengali paata-puta.
The dal I made that day was delicious, or so was my grandmother’s biased verdict. The chopped tomatoes, asafoetida and slapped coriander springs were the heroes of the simple dal. However, I was disinterested in the food altogether, desperately wanting to take a shower as soon as possible, but the AC in the bedroom had already soaked up the sweat. I also roasted some papad to accompany the dal. A dear friend once told me how the papad symbolises a full meal (so he refuses to have it in the house where he lives with his dysfunctional family). His mother never cooks, he cooks his own food. I wonder why his mother stopped cooking.
I often think about his mother, and other mothers, who choose not to cook. Who choose not to melt away their lives in the heat of the kitchen. I wonder if I’d become like them, and have my children cry my condemnation on a random Wednesday night phone call. I wonder if I want children at all. A part of me does, another doesn’t. I am scared of losing my acts of self love. I am afraid of being called selfish after several acts of self forgetting service. I am afraid of having a child like myself. I am afraid of having my mother’s verdict come true. “You will suffer for the same reasons for which you made me suffer,” she would say, on many occasions, in Bangla, Hindi and English. I did all this thinking while washing the dishes. The thinking put my mind off the hot water running through my hands on most days.
Even though the great Indian summer remains absolutely undefeated through the monsoon, and autumn, the kitchen with an open door seems merciful on a rainy day. On those days, I spend some more time in the kitchen, but get little cooking done. When the going gets easy, I feel like putting my feet up too. Indians like having fritters (pakodas) when it rains, with a steaming cup of milk tea. Bollywood has successfully taught us how to romanticise rain. But the kitchen is still hot. Grinding lentils, cutting onions, and frying them in hot sunflower oil is still draining. Bollywood skipped that part and only showed the characters in love enjoying and rain and the pakodas. I often wonder, who made those pakodas?
Cooking through the Indian summer is a nightmare. And it’s only going to get hotter, for which we have to thank our corporate bodies, governments and individuals of the world. In the end, I can’t tell where my body ends and sweat begins. I am in fact, nothing but my sweat, cooking dal chawal, and waiting for December.
Shristi Bhattacharjee is a Sociology graduate who likes films and visual culture to the point that it has become hard for her to like much else. You can find her on Instagram @cheeseburstlife.
Featured image credit: Unsplash