The heart of the home

Last night was a very regular night at my household. After coming home from a long day at work, I took to my beloved kitchen and spent a blissful half an hour—sipping on a glorious cup of white tea and reflecting upon a smorgasbord of thoughts, much like a swirling array of distant traffic lights on the highway. As I spent this quiet moment, it suddenly struck me that with my entire home at disposal, I chose to stand in the kitchen.

The thought brought a smile to my face. You see, equals as we are in many aspects, the kitchen at my household is entirely mine. My husband, despite possessing the ability to cook quite a mean gravy, isn’t a natural in the kitchen. It is my haven—a place where I sculpt my fries, paint my curries and sketch everything else in between.

This isn’t even a new habit— I grew up in a household with both of my parents going to work. Since the age of 12, I naturally took to the kitchen as I always liked a good, square meal done to my exact preferences—my mother, who’d leave for work as early as 7 o’clock in the morning, encouraged this habit too. I’ve grown to treat my kitchens as my canvases, a den that’s solely mine.

While this was a habit of choice for me, the past decade as a working journalist has made me realise that such a choice is an abject privilege for many in our country. Even in our generation of millennials and our respective social circles, the idea that a woman belongs in the kitchen (and vice versa) hasn’t exactly disappeared. Case in point—many of my friends, who are in fact the primary breadwinners for their respective families, still make it a point to wrap up work and cook.

This, though, wasn’t quite a matter of choice for women, historically. Decades of patriarchal social construct have often led to women using the kitchen as not just their refuge, but a space where they’ve vented, laughed, cried, celebrated, grieved, or simply coexisted with a fellow woman in understanding silence.

While the kitchen was forced upon women in the past, we made the space our own. It is where many of our grandmothers have hidden away cash in an obscure container that only they knew about—only to be taken out on a day when there would be dire need for it. For many mothers, the kitchen became a space where they could hide away a spiced-up drink—away from prying eyes of their own family, and the demands of their children. Oh, if the walls of our kitchens could speak!

Interestingly enough, just before I sat down to write this column, it struck me that it’s unfair to judge the role of kitchens in women’s lives in black or white. This is a space that, today, has grown to give many women an agency and purpose around us. Across India, the home chef revolution that began shortly before the pandemic in 2020 has seen innumerable women become entrepreneurs. An admirable instance of this is Mumbai-based Jasleen Marwah, founder of the critically acclaimed restaurant ‘Folk’, in South Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda.

Interestingly, Marwah came from a household where her affinity to the kitchen was a choice she made. Naturally, the connotations of the kitchen were not negative for her—today, its importance is tantamount to her sense of self.

Even for women from a generation before us, there have been many instances of families coming out of difficult financial situations thanks to the woman of the house starting a home-cooked food delivery venture out of pure need. For others, the kitchen has offered them space to experiment with mundane, everyday food—in turn creating recipes magical and eternal, and eventually turning into cook-books that we all revere today.

As I finished sipping my tea last night, I realised that the humble kitchen—to me the mightiest room of any household—is a powerful epicenter with centuries of stories, secrets, heritage and heirloom that beams upon whoever takes to it. Make no mistake—over time, many men have found themselves in the kitchen too, and fallen in love with this space as well.

Whichever gender it be, what’s true is that the kitchen is a space that protects you from the world. And in those minutes that you spend here, there’s nothing that can hurt you, or hold you back.