A mother, a kitchen, and I

  • 12 Sep, 2020
A preface to a decade long conversation between a mother and a daughter about who owns the kitchen and who owns the world.

My mother never lets me enter the kitchen and, building on that, I developed the habit to never participate in any household chores. I never volunteer to help my mother around the house, as she collects our clothes from various corners, cleans the dishes after every meal, sweeps the floor every single day at noon, or keeps our dinner on the table at 8 pm sharp.

She has been doing all the above tasks for as long as I have seen her, and I have been around for only 25 years. She was doing all of this even before that. And if I try to calculate the time before I was born, my mother has been repeating all her tasks through 7 days a week for nearly 37 years.

Do you know what will happen if you work in a company for 37 years? Well, you either retire with a respectable amount and reputation in your pocket or you end up owning the entire company and relax in your beach house.

…Honestly, I stopped for a while after writing that part. My mother has never had a holiday or a sick leave. She will perhaps never retire from her work and she will never be paid for the time and effort that she puts in.

When I ask her if she will ever stop working around the house, she politely explains, “A day will come when my bones won’t be straight anymore. Probably that day I will have to stop.”

When I think about helping her, and sometimes when I try to offer her some help, she refuses it. Either she senses that it is not an honest offer or she does not want anyone else to barge into the space she has owned for 37 years. I feel it’s a bit of both.

As one of the few women in the family who is earning her own living, I understand that having one’s own space in a chaotic workplace is of utmost importance. While most companies emphasize on teamwork, I always find myself to be the oddball who likes to get work done in one corner.

It’s not that I don’t like people, I am probably someone who is more confident when she is doing something alone. And as my mother says,

“I know where all the ingredients are, it is easier for me to reach them when I have to cook in a hurry. And if I go wrong I am the only one who is to be blamed.”

While my cousins and nieces have taught themselves to cook and work at the same time, I constantly fear that the day I enter the kitchen everyone will automatically assume that I will enter kitchen every single day for the rest of my life. And I will never let that happen.

My mother chases me away when she sees me in the kitchen. She appears disappointed whenever she sees me anywhere near it, and whenever I leave the kitchen I can always feel her wiping the slabs, the stove, and the utensils.

Out of sheer curiosity, I asked my mother why she does that each time. She didn’t reply to it but she said something else.

“Get yourself a job and get out of this town. Don’t end up like me. People will take you for granted, you will only cook and make beds. It’s a very boring life.” I was barely 15 then and the words have stayed with me even today.

It is one of the reasons why I have consciously kept away from all the sweeping and cleaning. I have probably pushed it to the extent of a phobia, and now even when I live in my own flat in the bustling city of Mumbai I refuse to do anything around the house.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to leave everything behind and return home, I came back knowing that I am here for a long haul. I have been at home for 7 months now.

Things haven’t changed much around the house. The men still do foolish things which only provide temporary solutions to our problems. The women still try everyday to rectify those mistakes. Only this time, my mother is shorter, frailer, and paler than I remembered.

Spending most of the time at home and being with her on such close quarters, I began seeing my mother as someone I had never noticed before.

And as I followed her around her house with my camera, I began walking in a path that was hidden in the yellow leaves of my prejudice that she is first my mother .
She isn’t first my mother , she is a woman. A woman who loves to sing, play the harmonium, and a wholesome palate of Bengali fish, sweets, and egg curry.
She prefers it when things are organised, she says that cleanliness symbolises an honest mind. “If you are clean, then you are not hiding anything from anyone. Everything is here to see but kept in a proper order.”
She doesn’t need a religion to believe in god. She believes, “There is one supreme power. And as a child that supreme was described to me as a blue-skinned boy who could lift an entire mountain on a finger-tip. I don’t know if there is any other form of the supreme power. But for now this will do.”
She has taught me that an individual is as much responsible for a society as the society is responsible for the individual. It is a matter of maintaining a balance between the two. One shouldn’t try to rule over the other.
And sometimes this woman likes to visit the world she has built for herself. No one is allowed there, maybe some of us are lucky enough to stand and watch, but this world belongs to her. And it always will.

I will never pick up any household chores, that is declared. Neither my mother nor I will like it if another woman is forced to undergo the whole idealistic concept of “women can manage it all”. We cannot.

After spending close to 10 hours at work and then adding two more hours to the up and down commute on a local train, a subway, or a bus, it is cruel to expect that the woman will come home and cook food for the family and help her children with their homework, and still maintain a sane mind.

It is equally vicious to expect that a woman will spend 37 years of her life doing a single job without a holiday or a retirement plan. I don’t blame any one man or woman for this. I blame us all and the ages before us which did little or nothing to fix this. I hate myself because I know my mother won’t stop working and won’t accept help from me.

On a personal note, however, I can only end this vicious cycle by breaking it. I have pledged to not sweep, cook, or wash the dishes. And I don’t think I want to change that at any time, at all.

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