The garage door opened, then the door into the kitchen. My wife walked in, placed some plastic bags filled with groceries on the island, and dropped the keys onto the countertop. I stood up from the sofa and gave her a helpless look.
“Ah, you are here already!” she said.
“Yeah, I had told you. We are shutdown. We had four hours to close shop. No idea when we are going to reopen,” I explained.
“Good. Now put these groceries away. There’s more in the van. And please unload and fold the laundry in the dryer,” she said as she opened the microwave to warm up some rice.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013. The first day of the Government shutdown. I was at home, without work. My wife, on the other hand was now at work, full-time. The tables had turned and I was at the receiving end, a quite unfamiliar territory. And she wasn’t about to let the reversal of roles pass without notice.
“What else you want done?,” I offered.
“I will make a list,” she said. “Start with the front door, which you broke but haven’t fixed for a year. The dishwasher isn’t cleaning properly. And what about the bathrooms? The shower stalls could use a good scrubbing. Sanjay has been complaining about virus on his PC … .”
“Wait a minute,” I cut in. “I have my own list.”
“Help yourself,” she continued, “but these have priority.” Surely.
Her list, I noticed, didn’t include one chore—cooking. Over the years, I have been asked to help around with many things, except cooking. And that’s because she had heard the story about a PIGS in the kitchen. (See here for more on PIGS and what it means).
Years back, I had landed in Atlanta on a crisp December morning with $7 … okay $750, the maximum dollar quota allowed by the RBI, and a VIP suitcase full of newly stitched pants, shirts, and handkerchiefs. My parents had set me up to start my graduate studies on a good footing, or so they thought. On the money front, they were right. I found I could survive on my graduate assistantship and conserve the RBI allotted quota, which had to be remitted back quickly anyway, since it was acquired by pawning family gold for an “agricultural” loan from the Corporation Bank.
But American food, that was another matter. Remember, this was in the South, in an era when announcing you are a vegetarian got you directions to the veterinary college. Walking for the first time into a Winn Dixie supermarket was an awesome experience, but the familiar foods acquired there required an additional step called cooking, for which I was ill-prepared.
It wasn’t that I had grown up lazy. Far from it. We did many chores around the house, except these were the kind of chores our grandmother deemed befitting for male members of the household. Tinkering around in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, or mixing spices on the ammi (a stone grinder) weren’t on the approved list and were expressly discouraged. On the approved list were tasks such as irrigating banana plants, dehusking coconut with a vettukathi (machete), plucking mangoes on demand, climbing the jack fruit tree, harvesting papaya with a thotti (a bamboo pole with a knife tied at one end pointing downward at an angle, putting the wielder at considerable risk of injury), or chopping firewood for the aduppu (wood burning oven made of three bricks and a pit in the middle). The closest the boys were allowed near the kitchen was to scrape coconut using a chirava, a low wooden stool with a serrated metal tongue nailed to a protruding neck. Clearly, none of these prepared you for the complicated process of turning raw grains and vegetables into edible form.
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| A chirava in the twilight of its life, pushed aside by frozen grated coconut |
So, soon after landing and finding my way to the Winn Dixie, I instantly fell in love with sliced bread, jam, butter, apples, whole milk, Swiss Miss, coke, and Mars bars.These, as you see, could be consumed with minimal preparation. After a couple of months on this diet though, my custom stitched pants and shirts began to run out of space to hold me—all dozen pairs of them. My dorm-mate, a benevolent Bangladeshi named Ahamed doing a Ph.D. in entomology, noticed my growing corpulence. He invited to me the dorm kitchen and offered preliminary cooking lessons. Better yet, he began sharing with me the dinner meals he painstakingly prepared. The fare, always the same, consisted of rice, fried chicken legs topped with steamed broccoli, and yogurt and pickle. Though simple, this was heaven-sent. But clearly, this osal (mooching) couldn’t go on for long either.
That’s when I decided to take matters into my own hands. On a sunny Sunday in spring, I stepped into the kitchen wielding a saucepan like a seasoned chef, with the intention of cooking some rice. I had watched the Bengali cook rice and the steps seemed simple enough. I measured a two cups of rice into the saucepan, added some water, and placed the pan on the cooktop on high heat. I then went back to my room.
Big mistake. Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig mistake. I am not entirely sure how long I was in the room, but does it matter? Total bedlam broke out. It started with shouts coming from the kitchen side of the dorm: Chinese students were yelling what sounded like unprintable language, while the Burkino Fasosians with their booming voices were cursing in French. The Americans were asking “WTF happened?” I ran down the hallway toward the kitchen and peeked in through the crowd. The far side of the kitchen was filled with black smoke billowing out from the cooktop. The range was on fire, which had engulfed the remnants of the saucepan. The flames were shooting up at the hood, which, because of the accumulated grease, was in imminent danger of catching fire.
“Who did this?” I was tempted to yell to deflect blame, but thought the better of it. At that moment, Ahmed rushed in through the crowd carrying a fire extinguisher. In seconds, he pulled the pin and unleashed a torrent of fire retardant onto the stovetop. The flames died down quickly, leaving behind a smouldering coil and the partially melted saucepan with a blacked lump of rice resembling bituminous coal inside. Meanwhile, from the back of the crowd, I quietly turned around and tiptoed back to my room.
I didn’t venture into the kitchen or the surrounding area for days. The word had gotten out about the perpetrator. In the hallways and in the dorm’s courtyard, I saw little congregations of Africans and Chinese whispering in hushed tones wherever I passed by. I was certain I will be caught and made to cough up moolah for the replacement cooktop. Worse, I was afraid Chelton, the half-Cherokee half-white dorm manager given to short temper and alcohol, would do physical harm. Yet, nobody challenged me directly. And a week later, the kitchen sported a working cooktop, paid for by the dorm management. The Chinese students were back cooking their 8-egg omelets floating in a bed of oil and the Africans were baking whole stuffed chicken in the oven with abandon.
A miracle? Not really. A benevolent display of subcontinental brotherhood, that’s what helped quieten things down and save my skin. You see, when in our neighborhood, we—Nepalese, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Indians—quarrel over trivial things. Overseas though, we strike an instant bond. Suddenly, the trivial differences are easily overlooked and what’s common looms large. The talk turns to the superiority of our culture and customs and the various shortcomings of the American way.
When Ahmed entered the kitchen and saw the fire, he instinctively knew what happened and his subcontinental sympathies kicked in. He had a few years of life in the dorm under his belt and he was perceived as something of a leader of the foreign students. After dousing the fire, he immediately set to work on quelling the uprising. He convinced Chelton that is was a pure accident, which might have been triggered by the aging stove. He put gentle pressure on Ben Chu, the senior among the Chinese students, to quieten down, lest he expose many of Chu’s misdeeds. It also, helped that I was on friendly terms with one the Africans: I used his in-room phone to call India, paying $2.39 a minute. The fire that nearly brought down the house was soon forgotten. And I was back in the kitchen, trying to fix something edible, with a good helping of humility. Thank you Ahmed.
About two years later, my wife, before she became such, visited me in the dorm. I served her rice and cabbage thoran (sauteed). As we ate in the dorm dining room, I told her about the kitchen fire. The move turned out to be a masterstroke. She loved the food, or perhaps that I had prepared it and served her at all. And the fire story frightened her to the core. In another two years we were married and I haven’t cooked since!
If you try this strategy, you are at your own risk buddy. Don’t quote Badayi on it.
