When I try to write , I end up with a big fat nothing. I end up cooking. This way or that I have to do something. I made a bengali ishtyle khichdi /khichuri today. One dish meals make my day.

I remember my mom trying to teach me to cook , she is one of the most impatient teachers. Not for her the gradual learning curve. Her policy is more do or die. Then there are casual sexist remarks , like how can you be a woman and not know to cook. As a woman you mustnt run when the mustards seed splutter on your hands etc. So I try to avoid cooking when she is around. She promptly gives me a thwack on my back if she sees me being a little careless or unhygienic . And I am 25.

Sometimes I am surprised that I turned out to be a feminist.

SRK , The Kapoors , the Bhuttos. What is it with Sindh , what is it that they do there that makes the people there excel in whatever they do and carry a good deal of charisma , je ne sais quoi about them. I imagine the overpowering men from the NWFP , warlords , chieftains really . its been one place I have always wanted to go to. With the current situation , I might as well stop wishing. I compare this to my home , and my surroundings, of abundant water , paddy fields , the sea . Its interesting how a story from NWFP tends to be a story about men , machismo and the one about the coast is invariably about the women.

I remember all the women in the family as being the material of family legend s, there were stories of how some women would run the household effectively in absence of a man , regular income and so on. When my grandfather bought anything , it was in the name of my grandmother, not because of tax benefits , cause honestly as a peon in BPT , I don’t think he made enough to pay tax. The women were all there was. The men stayed away from making tough decisions , leaving the women to do the dirty work. Unfair unfair I say. All the story telling , playing , laughing , fighting happened in the kitchen. Men , women , children all would be in the kitchen sharing stories. Never was the eating time a reason for sharing stories. I all of three , had my first ever fight with my grandmother in the kitchen , standing with my back to the platform , barely tall enough to reach it.

That’s my family alright. Turning kitchens into war zones and dining tables into peace treaties , where eating in silence was the norm , and a sign of calling it a truce. We were not and probably are not a very liberated family. Women worked , but that was no reason why their culinary and housekeeping skills could be over looked. I learnt very early that at the end of the day , I had to know how to cook , clean , keep house and do well in my studies/work. That was patriarchy. You made women in such a mould that you never needed a man to lord over the house. The women did it all.

My mother’s family , that came from a ‘pure’ caste , was patriarchal and openly so. Women eating on the same table as men was seen as ‘too modern’. Women sitting next to men was sacrilege. Till date my mother is very likely to frown on a married couple sitting next to each other at a dinner table. I learnt , when with my maternal relatives , to eat in the kitchen , often when the men were done eating. Luckily no one ate what their husband/son had left behind, or in the same plate. If food was left behind , by prior intimation , it was to be distributed amongst all indiscriminately. The men would sit on the threshold of the kitchen offering to help with serving food , yet never actually doing much work.

Remembered sitting on a park bench in Parsi Colony , being warmed by the sun and eating cold sweet curd from the parsi dairy. Funnily this is what I associate with Dilip Chitre
though it was Kamala das who wrote about grass and sun and a kindergarten picnic gone wrong. Reading Kamala Das's autobiography.

I dont know how it feels so strange once a poet whom I liked dies, I think o I can never meet this one , as if there is any chance I could meet the poets I read.