#vimala

I remember the kitchen's flavor upon flavor, a mouthwatering treasury, pungence of seasonings, and the aroma of incense from the prayer room next door. Each morning the kitchen awoke to the swish of churning butter, the scraping of scoured pots. And in the center, the stove, fresh washed with mud, painted and bedecked, all set to burn. We saved secret money in the seasoning box; hid sweets too, and played at cooking with lentils and jaggery. We played Mother and Father, in the magic world of kitchen that wrapped childhood in its spell. No longer playground for the grownup girl now trained into kitchenhood. Like all the mothers and mothers’ mothers before her, in the kitchen she becomes a woman right here. Our kitchen is a mortuary. Pans, tins, gunny bags crowd it like cadavers that hang amid clouds of damp wood smoke. Mother floats, a ghost here, a floating kitchen herself, her eyes melted in tears, her hands worn to spoons, her arms spatulas that turn into long frying pans, and other kitchen tools. Sometimes mother glows like a blazing furnace, and burns through the kitchen, pacing, restless, a caged tiger, banging pots and pans. How easy, they say, the flick of a ladle and the cooking's done. No one visits now. No one comes to the kitchen except to eat. My mother was queen of the kitchen, but the name engraved on the pots and pans is Father's. Luck, they say, landed me in my great kitchen, gas stove, grinder, sink, and tiles. I make cakes and puddings, not old-fashioned snacks as my mother did. But the name engraved on the pots and pans is my husband's. My kitchen wakes to the whistle of the pressure cooker, the whirr of the electric grinder. I am a well-appointed kitchen myself, turning round like a mechanical doll. My kitchen is a workshop, a clattering, busy, butcher stall, where I cook and serve, and clean, and cook again. In dreams, my kitchen haunts me, my artistic kitchen dreams, the smell of seasonings even in the jasmine. Damn all kitchens. May they burn to cinders, the kitchens that steal our dreams, drain our lives, eat our days--like some enormous vulture. Let us destroy those kitchens that turned us into serving spoons. Let us remove the names engraved on the pots and pans. Come, let us tear out these private stoves, before our daughters must step solitary into these kitchens. For our children's sake, Let us destroy these lonely kitchens.