Whispered Secrets of the Matriarchy by Srishti Chatterjee

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.

I’ve never tried to be a good cook. I’ve focused on the sustenance aspect of it, the idea that food should be enough for survival. Juggling multiple jobs and a full time degree gave me very little time to give to cooking. In six months of quarantine, however, I’ve really delved into it. I’ve spent hours nagging my mother for recipes, experimenting with powders and sauces and herbs, getting the marinade right. Knowing when to flip the fish without getting it flaky. And yes, exactly where to grab the roti to flip it without burning my hand.

I live alone, I’m my own family. I don’t have the expectant stomachs of husbands and children, just have my famished body after a full day of work. I have recently realised that walking through grocery store aisles looking for the perfect chilli powder for just myself is an act of revolution. I’m beginning to archive in my taste buds and cognitive skill, the stories that my grandmother wrote and whispered to Ma, – the ones I tried to throw away in a frantic rejection of femininity and now desperately cling to as an idea of home.

I’ve often made fun of how Ma thinks honey and lemon water can heal any pain, or how our grandmothers think turmeric can solve all problems. What I don’t think about is how they didn’t have a chance to sit and write about whether or not their kitchen is a battleground, because the survival of their families depended on their warfare. Dimta didn’t have an intricate knowledge of the world, didn’t know that women succeed less because men own our skills or that the voice in her head that made her wonder why the people she loved hurt her the most was actually depression. Ma doesn’t romanticise warmth and freeze it in op-eds. They just knew honey and lemon felt warm together, and they were right.

I have a separate chat with my mother to share my recipes, which I routinely forget to do. The internet archives it all, anyway. Recently, I’ve started journaling what I cook. Pictures, vague instructions – ‘little powder’, ‘sprinkle salt’ without any actual instructions, just like Ma and Dimta. The ‘how much’ of it all is a secret, earned when you cook, day after day, saving little bits of yourself and the matriarchy before you.

My recipes are archived in bits and pieces. The world is no longer a pile of naphthalene-smelling magazine cutouts and frantically scribbled notes with curry stains on them. I archive the food I make on Instagram stories, in conversations with my best friends on what’s for dinner. One of my friends I haven’t seen in months replied to my story on buying a whole lot of coriander, and that’s the story of how I learnt how to make coriander stay fresh for longer. I am surrounded by passionate feminists who share with me pictures of gourmet sushi and leftover stir fry, all with equal love. My friends are all witnesses to my taste revolution, from survival rice and curry to the craft of spices that the perfect shorshe chingri is.

I cling to memories of Dimta like an idea of home. I cook her favourite food (with much less oil). I dress in her sarees, desperately clinging to the matriarchy with my non-binary identity because when the world is so boxed into binaries, not belonging anywhere can feel a bit confusing. It feels like I’m a lonely child, drenched in the rain, with nowhere to go, no shelter, no one to tell me how to get this right.

Then I think of my grandmother, a lonely woman, raising her only child with pride and fear. I think of the matriarchs of my life. It rains a lot in Narrm, and every time Ma calls when it’s raining, she reminds me of how Dimta was afraid of storms.

I remember how much I survived, and I look at my mother and think of how much she has survived, and loved through it at all. Dimta was terrified of storms, but she has given us, in whispered secrets of the matriarchy, the strength to walk through them all.