Whispered Secrets of the Matriarchy By Srishti Chatterjee
(they/them)| Graphics by Rosann Anthony
I think my biggest achievement since I moved out of my parents’ house is that I can flip a roti on my pan, using my bare hands. I have touched hellfire. I have inherited the invincibility of my mother, and her mother, and her mother, the wanton abandon that comes with the instinct of sprinkling powders and grabbing rotis and stirring until the right colour. However, I have what the matriarchs of my life didn’t, an Instagram story highlight for the food I make – and an appreciation for the food that is not a segue into my preparedness for marriage. In my family, when we discuss recipes, we don’t talk about measurements. How much turmeric powder? ‘A little bit.’ How much chilli powder? ‘One pinch.’ Colourful powders are measured in how much you want your forehead to glisten with sweat. Food is a feeling, and recipes are whispered hand-me-downs of the healing powers of cumin and the fine line between spiciness and hellfire. I have heard these whispers, when dimta would stir something in obnoxious amounts of oil and my mother would stare at her with disdain. Unhealthy, but no one cooks shutki machh (dried fish) as well as dimta did. Women, for ages, have been ‘confined’ to the kitchen. Dabhai was in the military and would be away for months. Dimta would spend all her time in the kitchen, frying and stirring and marinating love to be tucked into Ma’s lunchbox, with some to be posted for dabhai to receive after months. A lonely woman raising an only daughter in a small village in India, dimta, I believe, put her spirit into cooking. Admittedly, I don’t remember much of her. Ma and I have rebuilt our memories in our stories, of how she made the best shorshe chingri, and how she could knit with her eyes closed. Some of her memories are wrapped into the sarees I raided from her cupboard and brought with me to Narrm, smelling of naphthalene balls, and love. I saw a joke on Tumblr a while ago, about how living alone as an adult is just cleaning your kitchen ALL the time. I look at the severed onion heads that have made me cry, empty spice packets, the insides of a tomato – all signs of my battle with time that has produced tonight’s dinner. I think of my grandmother, and my mother, cleaning the kitchen day after day, without Tumblr memes to unite them with the international community of lonely adults. In stirring pots and pans, in the right amount of red in a curry, I notice the battleground of the women that have raised each other. I think of my grandmother cooking while my mother, the first in her family to study in English, reads Shakespeare. I think of how every woman before me has been a ‘first’, and yet, has carried centuries of strength, grief and resilience, tucked into sarees, photo journals, and recipe books. After dimta passed away, Ma and I spent a lot of holidays rummaging through her stuff, archiving her life, picking what to keep and what to donate. We came across the recipe books, magazine cutouts, handwritten notes, an eclectic melting pot of copybook chef’s recipes and her own expertise. Ma has a similar way of documenting, with her recipes handwritten in a notebook sourced from an indie boutique in Dhaka, my grandmother’s ancestral hometown before the Partition of India. With Ma, the recipes turn bilingual and multicultural. They’re reflections and memories from the afternoons we’ve spent watching Masterchef Australia reruns, hoping to someday access such big pantries. In my early stages of misinformed feminism, I avoided cooking in a paranoid assertion that I wasn’t ‘like other girls’. Patriarchy treats being a self-sustaining human as an option, as long as you have a job and earn enough money to excuse yourself. It’s disappointing, yet unsurprising, that most acts of feminist revolution are about having ‘women on top’, rather than questioning the structures that decide top and bottom and in between and beyond. Almost as if my rebellion was their organised pet project, my parents taught me only basic cooking – rice, dahl, fish curry. Chicken stew. Sustenance, and nothing more. Not the emotion, not the gender role.
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