I was chatting with a friend a little while ago. He's going to be off in a few months - going away to be on his own for a year or so. We were talking about what it's like living on your own, you know, your space, your time, your place, your kitchen.


My kitchen. It's strange how as teenagers one's always associated the kitchen with a very domestic mother-figure existence; I mean the last thing most of us would do is admit we are even the slightest bit inclined towards anything kitcheny, let alone admit we enjoy it! Especially if you're a girl. Somehow, you always worried you'd get labelled as the 'ghareloo housewife mild boring' type. In retrospect, 18 year olds can be so judgemental na. If you would rather cook than study in high school, you can be rest assured you'll have a few people tell you you aren't ambitious enough. If you're happier pottering around in the kitchen when in college, you can mark my words your parents will start groom-searching the day you graduate! It's us late-bloomers who get away easy. You're away from home, you need to stay alive, and you learned to cook- atta girl! Then you become a hero of sorts in the eyes of everyone back home. And everyone who teased you about wanting to bake n fry n grill is either baking frying and grilling too, or is turning to you for advice on how to bake n fry n grill!


Somehow, the kitchen isn't all that formidable a place anymore. No longer mum's territory. No more 'trespassers will be persecuted' glares. No more sniggering! Perhaps I'm just in a very nostalgic sentimental phase of life, but the kitchen brings back such fond memories. Mornings and afternoons and evenings and nights spent gossipping over boiling pasta, analysing love lives over mugs of hot chocolate, talking about friends and fun from back home over community dinners - D takes care of aloo, P takes care of rice, R handles the veggies, J does the parathas, P does the dal - singing along with James Blunt over a mop and vaccuum cleaner, stuffing an overstuffed fridge with labelled green peppers, screaming noisy crass meaningless hindi filmi numbers in chorus on a tipsy freezing cold night. Making brownies from scratch, making pizza from scratch, making oatmeal cookies from scratch, making 5 kinds of stuffed parathas from scratch, making Aunty Daisy's lemon pudding from scratch, pancakes and honey, rolling puris with a coke can, tossing spagetti on a wall to check if it's done, poking around in the cake and then wondering why it isn't rising, visiting mums and feasts, birthday parties, late night movies on laptops that weren't loud enough, photography sessions that went on for hours, last minute essay submissions, makeover sessions, kitchen wall collages, christmas lights, diwali diyas. I do the cooking, you do the dishes; I do the clearing, you do the wiping; I do the mopping, you take out the garbage; and then we sit together and look at holiday pictures and tell stories and exchange gifts. Or we gush about clearance sales and parade our exploits. Then there's the cute guy at the bank, and the tutor with a smile to die for, or the very hot lab partner, or the fellow who gave you the look in the computer cluster, or a cheating boyfriend, or a long distance relationship gone sour, or a story of unrequited love, or an all-the-way-from-middle-school-to- now crush that went her own way. And you dream. Of a Harvard PhD, a world-tour, a cafe-cum-library, living happily-ever-after.