Food for thought: Invisible labour and hidden expressions from my mother's kitchen
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In my family, my mother is known as a reigning queen for lunches and dinners. All her family members talk about how Amma, the youngest girl in her family of ten, learned to cook so proficiently at a very young age. They say that food is only good if it is made with love – the secret recipe. And people told us that my mother had that, always.
My father likes to host his siblings and relatives in our home, which throws my mother into a frenzy as she spends time planning menus, buying groceries, chopping ingredients for mutton pulao and chicken karahi that would be devoured as soon as they were prepared. Events such as Eid and Shab-e-barat, compel her to stay awake through nights and get ahead with meal preparation. I have heard her fussing and fretting as her calloused hands knead dough to make the most delicate delicacies. She bangs utensils against the counters and pans so loud, as if running a private orchestra. But her plump face beams widely whenever she looks over at her loved ones and finds them tasting freshly made rotis and drinking her perfect chai.
That is, until her glance meets my eye and a shadow crosses her face.
Ever since I was a child, I was not allowed in the kitchen when she was cooking with other people and shooed away if I so much as set a toe inside. One of my earliest memories is of my mother snapping at me as I tried to speak to her, telling me to wait because there were guests to feed. During these dinners, when my mother roamed the rooms, catering to the mouths of hungry guests; I was swept into a room, fed and put to bed to the clammer of the party going on outside. Through those nights, I used to wonder whether my mother really loves to cook. Does it change when you no longer have to cook as a passion but as a requirement? Do expectations derail a hobby? She would moan about her fate, spending hours in the kitchen, “bus meri zindagi sirf choola aur chakki mai guzray,” she would say as she soothed a burning finger in her kitchen. “My life will pass among this stove, these pots and pans.”
For the many times I’ve seen her cook with love, I’ve also seen her cook with hate. I have watched as my mother raged and ranted to me as she pounded meat, slapped dough and stomped spices. It is during these times that I wondered whether the reason she’s so careless with the kitchen and its tools is because these are the only outlets for her anger, besides me...
My mother liked to tell everyone that I was a very difficult child, I did not like to eat. This was true and it still is. I remember many moments of my childhood where my mother begged, scolded, bribed and tried to get me to eat anything other than the three staple items I usually had. “Does not like to eat?” Relatives looked mystified as I stood in front of them with my arms crossed. My mother would nod, exasperated, driving me away from the kitchen as usual as she prepared to deliver another one of her delicious meals. “You will look like a giant!” she used to say to me as if talking directly to my waning appetite. “So huge and tall with no weight, it is terrible!” she would sigh as she took away another meal I refused. The occasions she got me something new to eat were terrible. I would gag and retch, tears streaming from my eyes while my stomach violently rejected anything I could coax down my throat.
Many times I would return from school with my lunch still uneaten due to my pickiness. The toast got soggy, the roti and lentils sat limp with neglect. Eventually, my mother started giving me money, hoping the temptation of junk food snacks would enable me to eat something at least. I was probably the strangest child when I would refuse to eat Mcdonalds Happy Meals, and other frivolities my parents took me to try. Finally, when I was about eleven years old, my parents took me to the doctor. “We want her to get chubby,” my mother said anxiously. “Children who are chubby look adorable, she is not chubby, she is the tallest in her class. She doesn’t look healthy,” she said.
I felt a twinge of something in me then, like I had a defect I could not fix. It was the first time of many that I did not fit into my mother’s standards of how her child should look. I stared at my feet as I thought of how I was not adorable, not healthy. I was a giant. I was huge.
The doctor sighed. “In a few years, you’ll be coming to get her thin again. Let’s let it be,” he said. But due to my mother’s insistence, he put me on some pills, which everyone hoped would stir my appetite. But that didn’t work, either. Even when I did eat, the food felt like a beast in my stomach, which would end up in vomit, leaving me retching out everything I ate. Eventually, the pills were taken away.
When I became a teen, food became an even bigger controversy among us. Guilt still stirred up as I ate meals, laboriously chewing and swallowing, the sensation still as uncomfortable and unwelcome. While adults put up with the strange habits of children, there are few chances of it happening once you’ve grown-up. Especially if you are a girl. As I got older, I was suddenly accosted by well-meaning relatives telling me to eat. “Stop dieting and enjoy a meal,” they would say even when they met me for brief minutes. Closer relatives commented that I should live out my nakhray, or tantrums as I would soon be of marriagable age. Others suggested my parents stop pampering me so much as girls were supposed to be accommodating. Often, the pressure to eat was such that I would force myself to eat whatever was presented, then cry as the familiar vomiting began. Meanwhile, older women in particular, became interested in how my body was developing. I was often pinched and prodded while everyone offered advice for helping “things grow.”
When I joined university, our psychology class conducted an experiment around body image. I had never given thought to my body or how it looked except for a few glances in the mirror, which left me feeling alienated from my own skin. I would look at my neck, my waist, my legs and feel confused. How I looked in my reflection was never how I felt I looked. “Girls who stare at the mirror a lot become ugly,” my mother would say when she caught me. “Huge and ugly, is that what you want to be?” Our class experiments revealed surprising results to us: the girls who thought they were of normal weight were underweight; while the girls who thought they were overweight were of normal weight. Our teacher remarked on how this served as a larger metaphor for what society tells us about our bodies. I remember I was one of the girls who was underweight which perplexed me to no end. If I was not heavy enough, why did I feel so huge?
One day, when my friends and I were shopping online, I noticed one of them looked at me in surprise when she saw the size I was checking out. “But you’re so thin! It would look like a curtain on you, that’s a size for women with a heavier body shape,” she said to me, confidently. This came as a huge revelation with puzzling questions. I thought back to all the moments I felt ill at ease with my reflection, because it was never how I felt it should look. Why was the way I looked the opposite of how I felt I looked? Was I a giant or was I thin? Did my perception of my body come from the way I approached food? Did my complicated connection with my body have its roots in my relationship with food?
Living in a collectivist culture, which thrives on food as hospitality is difficult for those who don’t identify as “foodies” and don’t see food as a space for pleasure. Our traditions that emphasize cuisine continue because of the women who labour to carry and uphold them. Understanding this compulsion to carry that baggage forward becomes more difficult when you are an individual who struggles with eating and appreciating food. From weddings to funerals to Eid festivals to Ramdan to Niyaz, every event in a desi household centres around food as celebration. In a culture like ours, it’s easy for those like me who struggle to eat, or others challenged by binge-eating to slip through the cracks, our problems remain unseen. A different kind of hunger ensues — not for nutrients, or delicious foods, but understanding.
As for my mother and I, food became the battleground that hinted at our strained relationship. For her, the kitchen and I were the two channels to express emotions that she wanted no one else to see. I couldn’t separate her anger in the kitchen as she cooked, to the over-the-top love everyone claimed she cooked with. We were two ends of the spectrum — her love of cooking, and my hatred of it. Her expression of everything through her dishes, and my rejection of them. Maybe my immense dislike of cooking and food has everything to do with the gendered aspect of it, the way I have seen my mother spend days and nights in the kitchen. Maybe I did not want to confine myself to it like her, which affected my ways with the food everyone else loves.
After our fights, when we would reconcile, a plate would land near me and she would bark at me to eat. Often, I left it there as it is. Sometimes, when it was her fault, she would silently put a plate of peeled fruits near me and look at me sadly. Mostly from guilt, I would eat what she had served, feeling the unease as I forced food into my food. “How will I ever cook and feed people like you?” I asked her one time, massaging her shoulder, tense from being hunched over the pot making channay ki dal ka halwa overnight. She allowed me to sit near her, but hid her face before saying — “I hope you never do.”