My mother has special nooks and corners, compartmentalised in her kitchen. Her top drawer has the ladle, the spatula, the big stirrer, and also tiny wooden spoons that come free with ice cream tubs. She says it’s perfect for the salt measurement in her macher jhol, the quintessential Bengali fish curry.
Everything is organised in a manner that is found in the army barracks. One on top of the other neatly folded. She finds a sense of continuity in her life with this arrangement.
What is very unique about her is that she folds all plastic bags neatly in a pile and keeps them on one specific shelf in the kitchen. Every time someone is visiting and she wants to pack some goodies for them to take back, she pulls one from the neat fold of plastic bags she calls “packaet”. Puts the dabba in the plastic cover and ties a strong knot of the handles, before handing it to the guest. The packet space is a chalked-out place of pride in Maa’s kitchen.
Once by mistake, I had kept the dustbin black cover with the precious packet pile and to my horror, she pulled them all out, explaining that dustbin covers are not meant to be mixed with the white covers.
I told her plastic is not environmentally friendly. She must move ahead with the times. She isn’t the one to not retort. Pat came her reply, “nor is your lipstick. I saw a show in which animals are treated with cruelty for makeup, so before you buy your fuchsia shade, think about the poor animals.”
Ok! I had lost the argument. Just yesterday I flaunted my new Kiko brand of lipstick to her. Sometimes I think, I must not show her every new thing I buy.
Maa takes pride in me and in her kitchen utensils in equal measure. She boasts of objects that have lasted over 30 years, much beyond the warranty dates.
For example, in my mother’s house, you can find an old yellow plastic Dalda bottle with a green lid. The packaging design has a green coconut tree on the front of the bottle. By now a few branches have faded out, it looks like a coconut tree that is swaying in the nor›westers of West Bengal. Every weekend she cleans the container, turns it upside down to dry it in the sun and again refills it with spices. That container is about 50 years old.
Her pressure cooker that she received as a gift at her wedding is 53 years old. On many sad evenings, she has confided the oft-repeated story to me, about how her sister in law wanted to whack the pressure cooker. But she was way smarter than them. She had said that she had lost the rubber ring of the cooker.
I don’t admit it to her. But it is the best mutton curry that even today on some Sunday noons gets cooked in her 53-year-old Prestige pressure cooker. I get the tart mustard oil mutton curry from her geriatric vessel. It’s as tasty as I can remember since childhood, with succulent pieces of mutton in it. She also has a blender that she uses to mix her Dal that is 70 years old, passed on to her by her mother. I have declined her offer to gift me the blender.
As the years have passed, I have become conscious of not folding plastic packets and instead of using cloth bags to buy veggies and fish. But in my cupboard, you can find an old paper Harrod’s packet, a Louis Vuitton brown paper bag that had my leather bag. The LV paper bag is folded and kept just for the sheer joy of its design and also for my subconscious awareness of the shift in my monetary status and buying capability.
I like to believe that I am more sane and reasonable than my mother. But one can’t ignore the genetics of storing packets that I inherited from her.
Mothers are our first teachers, so if you ever find me packing your leftover food container in a plastic bag, please know that it’s not me. It is my Maa who is working on my subconscious mind to be a little like her.
It is her homesickness that makes her cook the mutton on Sundays with huge potatoes sinking in the gravy. I know she takes pride in her culture. She wishes I understood her need to continue the life she had grown up with.
As I grow older, I have a profound sense of regret, for ignoring her feelings that I didn’t understand was her pride and her habit to hold on to her past.
My mother is a woman who has seen the partition of Bengal. Her family moved and she grew up in Delhi. But her loyalty remains steadfast in her cultural conditioning. I have successfully moved away from the shackles, she tried hard to impose on me. But food still remains a place of soul comfort, in spite of the travel I have taken physically and metaphysically in the past years.
We stay close to each other but in different homes in Bengaluru. Whenever a steel tiffin box with her mutton curry arrives tied in a knot in the plastic packet, I know it’s going to be a hearty meal of my mother’s cooking. Always with lots of aroma, the big potato in it and the best pieces of meat that she keeps aside only for me.
Mohua Chinappa is an ex-housewife turned author.