Cooking Alone

The Depressing Joy of Cooking for One

Dear all,

In this edition of Evolving & Enough, I am sharing an essay I wrote in November 2018, two years before I started this newsletter. To cringe at one’s older writing is natural…and also a sign of one’s growth? To share one’s older writing is scary too. Yet, I feel like sharing these raw notes on cooking alone, as many of us might have been solo dancers in the kitchen during the pandemic. I am also pairing the essay with a poem I wrote in April 2021, at the height of the second wave. Do scroll down, and respond if you feel like it.

Double the love,

Raju.

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Cooking Alone

After returning from the Koliwada, you clean the fish under tap water. You remove the scales using a dull knife and with your fingers, you scoop out the innards. You make acquaintance with the smell and meet eyes with the fish, touching the presence of its rib cage. You make a marinade out of the sourest thing in the fridge and like a bride at her haldi ceremony, the fish starts glowing. The smell is altered and as the oil bubbles up, you prepare your ears for sounds of sizzle and splutter. The fish takes a few minutes on each side and you start boiling rice on the neighbouring burner. All this while, you forget that you are alone. The sensory experience of frying fish takes over your heightened sense of loneliness. 

Anonymous Woman - A Series by Patty Carroll via Colossal

Loneliness in highly populated cities is at once nasty and glamorous. It is far from preferable, but when the condition does inhabit you, it makes you crafty.  Weren’t you raised to put a positive spin on your pain? You conjure in your mind the upsides of loneliness. Of course, there are those much-celebrated abilities such as abandoning one’s pants and sleeping diagonally.

But, how about the complete liberty to fail in the kitchen? When you have nobody at home, you find the freedom to experiment, with nobody to feed or impress. You learn faster, better, a new recipe each time your old pain catches up, each time you are humiliated at the workplace, each time the moon is full and you are not. You WhatsApp the pictures to friends in other cities, but it’s the lighting, the colours and the filter they respond to. The taste, touch, and smell are still, solely and sorely, yours. 

The Surrealist - Victor Brauner - 1947

For years of get-togethers and potlucks, a younger version of you was asked to bring your signature Baigan ka Bharta, and nothing else. It was a sure shot hit. You cooked it so many times, you could’ve made it when you sleepwalked. You wanted new signature dishes? See, you got your wish. 

Those abandoned have no dearth of time and space, and you with all your privileges could choose cooking as comfort, not as survival. Your mother, aunts, grandmothers – they never got this opportunity. To transform turmoil into delicacies. To bask their emotions in the steam of rice or lentil. To afford accidents when a man waits with his oddly shaped appetite. Their loneliness was to be swallowed raw. You are luckier than them. You can even challenge yourself with a meat recipe or two and appear for a second, less of a Brahmin lady. And though that is impossible, you make something else plausible – the long list of recipes you master night after lonely night. 

Far away from family and friends, you cook Sambhar, Mint Chicken, Mushroom Chettinad, Pan Pizza, and Pasta Carbonara using recipes borrowed over the phone. You prefer them over learning from strangers online. One time, you use the recipe given on the packet of a Marathi local brand of Biryani Masala. You laugh out loud when the biryani is ready. Because the packet never told you when the masala is to be used! You cry when the meat is falling apart in its tenderness, and the masala sings in your throat. Because nobody is there to taste it and exclaim in delight. So you eat while watching on TV, the narratives of other lonely people. 

What to sip while eating, what to eat while watching, what to watch while numbing - getting this trifecta right takes away all the time you could have used to wonder - why this person ghosted you and how that person stopped sharing. To give yourself the rhythm of night and day, you learn to set curd. You make your first mango pickle to get back at the summer for burning you. The small town in you wants to pack up a bowl of homemade strawberry chutney and rush to your neighbours. But in Bombay, the doors are shut tight. So you share a picture of it online. And strangers assume your life is as heavenly as the cheese oozing from the omelette. 

All this is before you seek therapy, way before you identify your inner monster as anxiety. You are still months away from resignation, from packing your bags and returning home - only to begin a journey you have been stalling for long.

For these years, the pressure cooker is your only buddy, it’s whistle friendlier than the noise in your head. The chopping board volunteers itself to carry your scars. The eggs inspire you with their readiness to be fixed. You have nothing to complain.

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Greens - Nagpur - 2019

Poem

When the burly man is busy

picking chillies and garlic for his kitchen

the daily store has no vision,

just provision

rice flakes puffed rice rice batter toor daal wheat flour rice murruku

Many needs to knead

The dosa still liquid

Bellies lead, people follow

The pandemic morning

is alive with bulbuls

their jingles, their red bums

Kitchens are waiting for their dancers

to arrive with green ghungroos

mango shades tomato lips

The morning is complete

without you.

What if I need you

With my milk and eggs

Your arms a necessity

Your little lips

Essential items

Listed so by the government

of long-distance love