I just finished watching the movie Darlings. The protagonist, the ‘darlings,’ is in the kitchen, apparently preparing breakfast for her husband, who ends up beating her black and blue the previous night, like numerous others. Life is not a piece of cake, and Alia’s character makes noise, banging up the utensils that pretend to whimper and sniffle at the wife-beating regimen they sit through each passing day.
The remorseless husband, definitely not a cool cucumber, observes monstrously, trying to win over his ragged doll while she snaps and cooks, face glued to the fire from the cooktop. In numerous kitchens, food has borne the brunt, symbolized the condition of human desires, sorrows, and predicaments, and gone on to become a mesmerizing storyteller.
While watching the film, I was reminded of Geeta Hariharan’s short story Gazar Halwa, where the migrant domestic labourer Perumayee, slogs in a Delhi kitchen endlessly grating and peeling red carrots in preparation of Gazar Halwa’, a traditional Indian sweet prepared with much ado to symbolize love and familial bondings. Sadly, for Perumayee, a young female migrant worker, and several other women tied up in loveless domesticity, the heaps of grated carrots and mounds of peels become metaphors for unending misery and sorrow. The process of carrot halwa preparation is transformed into a narrative on poverty, dejection, powerlessness, greed, resistance, and much more. The luscious and steaming red halwa simmering with excitement to be savored and gutted is a vivid reminder of the hullaballoo in Perumayee’s home for a taste of food, a sip of water, and the everyday struggle to secure a home to sleep in.
For me, the year is bound to become ‘food for thought.’ Trying hard to do something besides being a couch potato, I burn the midnight oil on a research paper. I happened to study Mahesh Dattani’s Thirty Days in September, a play on child incest and its scarred victims. A mother-daughter duo, Shanta and Mala, have been sexually abused since childhood by none other than Shanta’s brother! Food symbolism touches the play, and we find Mala accusing her mom of smothering her with food whenever she tried to confide in as a helpless seven-year-old sexual abuse victim. The mother saw everything yet used Mala’s favourite food as a bribe, a device to make a child block her pain and memories. Childhood, innocence, and dignity were drowned in flavourful pits.
In literature worldwide, food has borne the marks of the cultures and civilizations that possessed it. In the masculine world of ‘smart cookies,’ many deals have been struck over elaborate five-course meals. Meals that were later abandoned to churn out stale stories under soiled napkins once the cheques were released from briefcases and ambitions shook hands. On the tables of the rich, food basked in power. In castles of greed and lust, it was bequeathed to poison. In the dwellings of the poor, it became, Nah! Its ‘lack’ became the harbinger of misfortune, disease, and death. Food symbolizes a world, the entirety of beliefs, cultures, and traditions. Of religions, festivals, and spirituality.
In the gendered world, food and women were synonymously flung into fires of domesticity and drudgery till they simmered, boiled, and became unidentifiable masses of suffering. In the modern world, food is a traveler, a vagabond searching for doorbells and doorknobs of homes where kitchens are armed with the latest gadgets that can put any five-star kitchen to shame. Still, the most iconic corner is the dustbin with half-jammed food boxes and delivery company tapes.
So may I eat the humble pie and admit that the table fare is not merely our bread and butter? Or did I just bite off more than I can chew?
