#4: On mothers, kitchens and burdened memories of peeling potatoes

Hello and welcome to Fried Lines, a newsletter that helps me talk about my fondness for potatoes. I’ve had a rather extraordinary time writing this issue and drawing potatoes from different desks and libraries between Bangalore and Goa. Biting into the potatoes in Goa is a delightful experience of its own, and definitely one of the many reasons why I try to go there. I had the most wonderful time digging into a plate of aaloo paranthas while I lay like a potato under the sun and stared at the most enormous sea waves crashing against the shore. 

Lately, I have been having a lot of aaloo paranthas, because you can never have too many aaloo paranthas in a single lifetime! I often ask myself - ‘What or who do I remember every time I smell the essence of paranthas being cooked in different kitchens?’

By now, you may have observed that I usually remember my mother when I talk about potatoes. It does sound nostalgic when I talk about my selfless, compassionate mother preparing the most delicious samosas in the world. I think a lot of us collectively like to immerse ourselves in the magical nostalgia of a kitchen curated by the hard work of our mothers every time we talk about our childhood or our favourite memory of food. As much as I like reminiscing about my mother doing wonderful things for me, I sometimes also find myself guilty for idealizing the phenomenon of my mother’s intensive labour in the kitchen for which she never gets fairly compensated.

I’ve often wondered about the unspoken roles assigned to the task of cooking and serving potatoes, or for that matter, any kind of food. Growing up, most of my memories of potatoes swimming in the pressure cooker have been tied to my mother drenching in sweat, standing within the confines of a closed kitchen, waiting for the cooker to whistle.

I observed the same drill when I would visit a relative’s place or go to hang out with a friend at their home. I hardly ever saw fathers, brothers, or uncles entering the kitchen or knowing where we stored our spices. In many situations, I saw some women resisting entering the kitchen very often, but eventually, the burdened responsibility of managing meals and chores in the household was primarily shouldered by a woman.

For most parts of my childhood and teenage years, I was conditioned to see women, especially mothers, assuming the role of ensuring nobody went to bed with an empty stomach. And just like that, I started associating most of my memories of potatoes with mothers.

Lately, I see people questioning the phenomenon of cooking being widely gendered and yet we usually end up associating most of our fondest memories of food and cooking with mothers or any particular woman figure. While appreciating and showing gratitude is understandable, I wonder if we go way too far, to the point of glorifying the burdened labour we receive from the women in our households that we never bother to reward or compensate fairly. I’ve begun to reflect on why it is always my mother that comes to my mind when I think of potatoes, and why the labour she puts into creating the finest aaloo sabzi goes unnoticed and unrewarded. 

The burden of cooking for the entire household in one breath has been on women for many generations. While I see many people in the newer generations challenging this norm, the bias of associating women with cooking has still transformed into being seen as a selfless deed - almost like an act of valour that people assume is okay to not be compensated as long as it’s normalized being associated with cute, nostalgic memories that remind people of the selfless love women and mothers nurture for their family members.

Why is it that women have to be selfless and put others before themselves to prove their love to others? Why aren’t women, especially mothers in this context, allowed to be their whole selves and expect their own needs to be met fairly while loving others?

The exhausting glorification of mothers tossing a slice of butter on the finest aaloo parantha in the morning is romanticized to such an extent by our society, that even a lot of capitalist brands cash in on this phenomenon. Whether it’s talking about mango pickles or unpacking your favourite biscuits - almost all brands exploit women’s unrewarded hard work by throwing glittery phrases like ‘Ma ke haath ka khaana’ (food prepared by a mother) or ‘The magic of mom’s kitchen’, and invoke some strange sense of homesickness among consumers who may as well automatically believe that the said product is as good as the food prepared by a mother - the ultimate benchmark that all kinds of edible products are supposed to attain.

Often, the burden of glorifying the exhausting work that mothers do is very casually handed down to their daughters - when the worth of the daughters is equated with excelling at all kinds of household chores, especially cooking. Growing up as a girl, my contribution to different chores in the house was taken for granted and every strength or area of improvement was measured by my ability to organize things around the house. Even though I realize the strange power dynamics that often exist between the mothers and the daughters who are from my generation (when a daughter isn’t expected to take care of the heavier tasks of the household that a mother usually assumes), the burden of scrubbing off stains from kitchen towels still doesn’t end for a daughter.

During my adolescent years, I made sure to steer clear of most of the chores, particularly the ones that never seem to cease in the kitchen, to avoid inheriting the thankless role of managing a household from my mother. A lot of times, even my mother avoided having me around the kitchen to completely let go of our larger family counting on me to fry aaloo pakodas for them. There are benefits of being perceived as a lazy potato after all. My potato-filled memories as a child mostly revolve around smelling and eating them, and having them served to me on a plate, but never peeling or chopping them.

For a considerable part of my life, I created a biased distinction in my head. For me, cooking as a woman symbolized suffocation and giving into the ideals of patriarchy, and not cooking for others and for myself provided an illusioned sense of liberation to me. I’ve always consciously run away from cooking for as long as I can remember. Of course, a lot of my aversion towards entering the kitchen came from entitlement and social privilege - at the end of the day, I could always afford and enjoy the convenience of having someone else cook for me.

A few years ago, I found myself in an unusual situation after moving out of my parents’ house for the first time. I think for most of us, the story of transformation and accomplishing the bare minimum task of doing chores for ourselves begins when we don’t have our mothers cleaning up after us anymore. And it’s a completely different ball game for women, especially the ones who have been deliberately attempting to run away from the seemingly gendered idea of managing household tasks. 

Suddenly, looking after the house didn’t seem suffocating, it felt freeing - it wasn’t a burden, but my first gateway to achieving independence, to be able to build something for myself. I stepped into my kitchen and tossed potatoes in a pressure cooker for the first time. The first whistle of the pressure cooker marked the beginning of my independence, and also helped me see clearly through the bias I had forever held against cooking - an unwarranted gift I had kindly received from the ideals of patriarchy. All this while, I had been viewing cooking as a way of giving into the usual societal norms that are often unquestioned until it strangely helped me find myself as a person.

To be able to cook for yourself, to truly know and see a raw potato transform into a fried plate of sabzi was an inexplicable feeling that I had never experienced before. I’ve had some unforgettable memories of covering my palms in oil, and rolling mashed potatoes into little circles of aaloo tikkis for the first time in my life. The joy in my heart and my belly was unparalleled and I soon started boiling potatoes in my kitchen more often than I had planned. And thus started my journey of discovering my relationship with making food, and seeing clearly through the twisted politics of cooking in our kitchens. Of course, so much of it is not just dictated by gender alone, but also by the caste and class dynamics of individuals, particularly in India and several other South Asian countries. The fact that I am writing this newsletter talking about the mere act of defying the expectations tied to cooking is coming from a place of social power, and caste and class privilege. A lot of women, especially from marginalized communities, don’t even have the luxury or the option of questioning the status quo and their roles of serving food in their households and outside their households every single day. Many people also rely on cooking to pay their bills - they don’t just cook for their own households, but further, extend their rigourous labour to several upper caste/upper-class households in India, households that ensure they are stuck within the endless, exploitative loop of working for unfair margins of compensation.

With these reflections, I have been trying to untangle the bias I’ve had against cooking. Of course, cooking my meals helped me unlearn the solid line I had created between my understanding of a woman who is ‘liberated’ and a woman who is, perhaps, ‘oppressed’ - which was, of course, also enabled by the immense privilege that I hold with myself. 

But there is still this constant struggle between finding my agency and giving into the norms of patriarchy that I often try to dissect in my head. The idea of frying potatoes for myself has significantly transformed for me, and I have also found myself enjoying it. But as much as I like moving sliced potatoes along different spices, it also comes to me with the burdened expectation of faring well at it, as if I should be comfortable cooking potatoes perfectly by default. Once again, the subconscious burden of managing a household hits me no matter how hard I try to separate the entirety of my identity from it.

I think when we specifically visualize a picture of people being raised in typical, heteronormative families, we sometimes don’t understand how different managing everyday chores can look for women in such dynamics.

Every time, I feel I’ve accomplished and finished a hefty task of cooking a meal, it is somehow reduced to an assumption - a preconceived notion that this is how it should be and that it should come to me naturally anyway. I would expect an army of people applauding my efforts every time I finish doing the dishes. But I think the applause has usually been reserved for a lot of men who also arrange dishes in their kitchens the way I do. 

It’s interesting how peeling raw potatoes is considered a bare minimum task that all women (the ones who cook and the ones who don’t) are supposed to do. And yet, the same bare minimum task is lauded and praised when a man picks it up as well. Somehow, it seems that men who are living away from their mothers are accomplishing an ambitious task by cleaning up after themselves, something that needs to be smothered with a dozen compliments. But women who are living away from their mothers are merely fulfilling a minimal job by managing their everyday chores - something that needs to be put under scrutiny and shared regular ‘constructive’ feedback with.

I’ve also come across several fathers who love to cook and try to ‘help’ mothers in the household. This obviously begs the question of understanding who the ultimate responsibility of managing the household really falls on. At the end of the day, all that fathers are doing is ‘helping’ the overworked women in their houses.

I met different kinds of fathers as a child - fathers who took the responsibility of cooking at least one of the meals in the house, fathers who saw cooking as a ‘delightful hobby’ - an art that they tried showcasing for their people on special occasions by frying aaloo pakoda or making chai in the kitchen, fathers who assumed the responsibility of the house in the absence of mothers, fathers who managed a household that had no mothers, fathers who tried chopping cucumbers as mothers prepared the primary dish. And in every scenario, fathers working in the kitchen were praised and lauded by many. I even heard people say, ‘They manage to cook for their children despite being a man.’

You might argue that we tend to give compliments to our mothers as well (of course, I have been talking about it for a while now) - the very foundation on which the idea of receiving unrewarded labour from mothers in our society is based. However, there is, of course, a huge difference between the intentions behind giving compliments to a father in the kitchen and a mother in the kitchen. We feel grateful for our fathers frying potatoes in the kitchen when we applaud their efforts, because perhaps, we feel that’s not what they are supposed to do for us in the first place. On the other hand, we take our mothers’ efforts to boil potatoes for granted no matter how often we tell them they make delicious food, because we somehow feel this is what mothers are supposed to do for us anyway.

We romanticize the act of cooking, especially when we’re not frequently used to cooking for ourselves. Of course, cooking is about plugging in your headphones and slicing a bunch of potatoes to your favourite audiobooks, but it’s also so much more than that. 

When men tend to handle cooking tasks in the kitchen, the heavier burden of dealing with the aftermath of cooking and eating - the real grunt work that makes cooking possible - is invisibilised and underestimated. 

Who cleans the kitchen after a giant feast of aaloo gobi and paranthas is cooked on the stove? Who washes the utensils smelling cauliflower and spices? Who cleans and throws the skin of the vegetables that were peeled and chopped in the kitchen? Who takes care of the leftovers and stores them meticulously in the refrigerator once everyone is done eating? Who takes care of scraping the leftovers off the plates and throwing them away? Who takes care of washing the dishes once the meal is served and consumed, and later, of disposing of the garbage? These are some questions you will very rarely find upper caste people, especially upper caste men, answer every time they talk about their love for cooking.

Men are infamous for the widely recognized stereotypes of being messy, dirty and laidback. I often wonder if it must be convenient to hide behind the comfort of these ‘prejudices’ - to not be expected to do the absolute bare minimum and then somehow be lauded for their attempt to do the same. Messy house, half-burnt rotis, tasteless curry? Who cares? They are men after all. Be thankful at least they know the way to their kitchens because ‘men will be men’. And of course, these stereotypes also create a neat pathway to achieving the ‘good guy reputation’ for the ones who actually know how to make good potato curry - the ‘good ones’ who are better than the ‘bad ones’. Some even use it as a token to sell their personalities while pursuing romantic relationships or building new friendships. ‘I cook in my free time’ - their bios on several dating apps would say, as they turn something that women have been burdened with over many generations into a tiny leisure activity. Not all men are bad, some know how to make aaloo paranthas and fulfill the bare minimum household tasks!

Women, on the other hand, always seem to be drowning in the pressure of being perfect, organized and tidy no matter what the circumstances are. Your house should be spick and span, you should know your way in your kitchen and you will be definitely shamed if your room remains messy for two days in a row!

The burden of living with these notions has always been exhausting for me. No matter how much I try to disassociate myself from these biases, they still dictate every move I make in my house. I even ask myself if it’s me as a person who likes to keep things clean and organized in the house, or if it's just that I’ve been conditioned to be organized as a woman for as long as I can remember. Of course, while navigating this baggage, it’s always challenging to reflect on the activity of cooking, and I feel that maybe, to some extent, this is why most privileged women decide to let go of cooking or managing any kind of chores in their houses.

The sentiment of completely disassociating from all kinds of exhausting chores is understandable. When societal expectations from women are so toxic, it’s always easier to completely let go of fulfilling any of them.

It has been an odd journey of realizing the biases attached to cooking as well as trying to use cooking as a symbol of my liberation and make something out of it. I am still learning where it truly comes from and where it truly ends. Or does it ever end for us? Because no matter how much I try to let go of things and try being my version of a laidback woman, a useless potato, the burden of being a hyperproductive and organized woman never seems to leave me. While scrolling through my Instagram one day, I came across someone posting that they had never seen a relaxed woman in their life. It made me think about how women are usually encouraged and conditioned to be working all the time. We are either taught to be ambitious, and goal-driven, shine through our careers and make a mark on the world, or encouraged to make the perfect round rotis and clean our houses during Diwali - there is simply no winning here! And we are rarely asked to sleep, nap, and be messy and unorganized. At first, it made me sad to realize that women’s worth is measured by their ability to be productive, but it soon turned into a gigantic feeling of anger. It truly makes me angry to have not known enough women in my life who only dreamt about leisure. It makes me angry that I have spent most of my life believing that I need to be constantly on my toes to have a happy life. And it surely makes me the angriest when I see so many women, especially mothers, still constantly working for their families, managing to be in the kitchen at all times, and internalizing the idea of being hyperproductive to mean something for others. I don’t remember the last time I saw my mother pause and rest, and I know that this is the story of most women around us.

I’ve learnt that the idea of relaxing and enjoying leisure as a woman can be such a powerful symbol of resistance against capitalism and the patriarchy. To sit by your balcony and open a bag of potato chips instead of going by your usual grocery list can be so exhilarating. Perhaps, my only fantasy is to see all mothers around us doing the same without caring about anything else in the world. 

The struggle to look after myself is unnecessarily complicated when it doesn’t have to be this way. Taking care of myself is a fairly odd combination of engaging in absolutely mindless activities (that would make the patriarchy frown but my heart unconditionally happy), and duly following the procedure of cooking and cleaning up after myself. But where do I establish boundaries against completely giving into the hyperproductive norms of managing my everyday life? I think this is when I remind myself that as much as the act of peeling potatoes in my kitchen helps me own my narrative and look after me as a person, it surely doesn’t paint my entire identity. Perhaps, it is a fragment of who I am and what my life is - a little spot in the skin of a potato that helps me go through my life but never dictates it.

Somehow, I try to embrace the act of adding potatoes to my pulao as the rice balloons up in the boiling water. I try to own the task of feeding myself by defying the usual expectations of what meals should look like, deliberately making mistakes and creating accidental discoveries, and taking breaks whenever I want to. I try to cook on my own time, and let the dishes rest in the sink overnight if I don’t want to immediately say hi to them. But most importantly, I do it for myself. And I decide to go beyond and do it for someone else only when there are no expectations of being a selfless person, and instead, there are promises of reciprocation of the compassion and potato nuggets I choose to share with them. The emotions encompassing love, especially through cooking, are truly beautiful. But I hope they never trap women within the ceaseless confines of unrewarded labour, and I hope women never have to feel obligated to extend these emotions to others at the cost of sacrificing their own desires and expectations in the first place.