She says she likes to cook, but cannot do without an oven. Basic LPG stove with two burners is extremely inadequate for her cooking, to the extent that she doesn’t even want to enter as inadequately furnished kitchen as that. She doesn’t have to cook though, nor does she have to enter such an inadequately furnished kitchen if she so wishes. For she has a maid who does all the cooking – using the same two-burner LPG stove. For her, the stove is a luxury. When she goes home to cook for her kids, husband, and her brother’s three children that he left with her as he was dying, she has no alternatives to using a mud structure on the ground out in the yard, where she burns dried leaves, twigs, and if lucky some firewood to cook for her large family. No continental cuisine is cooked at her place, just some corn flour staple food and vegetable soup – with just enough vegetable to give the name ‘soup’ to that salty water.
Archive for the 'fiction' Category
It’s a busy road leading into and out of the city, especially so during rush-hours. And it’s the evening rush-hour. I had decided to walk to the post office at the near end of the city instead of cycling, and was coming back after making a round of the city towards the close of the day, popping into a discount-bookshop and picking up three books for a fiver. I had failed to notice him from afar, but see him from just far enough to walk along looking at him. He sits on a in-memory-of bench by the roadside, one of so many that have popped up recently – may be the city council have finally realised they have purpose after all, and that this city also gets a couple of months of good weather and sunshine. The bench faces the roadside, and the road is full of rush-hour traffic. No wonder the man sits looking sideways instead, avoiding the road, and hence the eye-contact with the motorists who wait for the traffic to flow, with windows down and their hands hanging outside, searching for a cool breeze. He has a cigarette in between his fingers, and he’s puffing the smoke every few minutes – you can tell he wants that cigarette to last long. but you also feel he’ll lit a new one as soon as he finishes the one he’s smoking. He has his bicycle, an old, grim-looking one, with dents and rust in every joints, and chains, and gears, parked by the bench – the bench helping the bike stand upright. A plastic bag with some shopping hangs by the handle – a bunch of greens, a bunch of coriander, a pack of red lentils, some ginger on top of other items, which will probably tell you his origins with even more confidence had they been visible. I wonder how naked it all seems – finding someone’s origins from the shopping items they carry back home. I admit his skin and his clothes are give-aways too, but those food-items just put the confidence in one’s guesswork.
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