Soul food

It is 4 am and I am frying onions. The smell is overpowering. It is filling up not just my tiny kitchen but my soul. Now I admit that most people may like their serene mornings to be perfumed with flowers or incense or at least an aromatic tea or a fragrant sweet .Onions are not particularly known to please noses, especially the purist’s, at any hour. But for me this is the beginning of a new chapter in life, one that if full of flavor. Like the opening to a buffet of never ending delicacies, a recipe book without a last page. I stand at the cooking platform staring into the kadhai looking at myself, my 30 years. Like love at first sight, there is a sizzle when the onions touch hot oil and the crisp noise cuts through the silence of a sleeping city. But my thoughts remain unchained, running amok like escaping smoke, the frying only making them wilder. So here I am, back into my kitchen after 2 months. Awake because of jet lag, awakened by the days spent away from the kitchen, the house, the city, the people.

Sometimes when you go away changing everything around you, you also leave yourself behind. This trip was something like that. Getting out of my skin, to see who I am sans my items of identity. I am no more a journalist, a wife and mom, a girl good at whatever she does but never satisfied with what she did. Now I can be all of these and yet none of these at all if I wish so. This discovery of me is truly what I got back from my trip to the United States of America. So as people ohh and aah at the Macy’s and Herseys tumbling out of my unpacked bags, it is I that I consider my souvenir. So as I dress up every day to please myself with the image in the mirror I am also going to do the one thing that gives me extreme creative satisfaction. Cook. The tang, the spice, that essential sweet and an odd bitter or bland touch on the palate. They make me happy, my sense of being complete. Mixing, heating and beating raw ingredients until I see my imagination turn real. Creating from scratch! No excuses, no alternatives. Busy day or boring, the magic potion in the kitchen must brew. You may wonder why I had to go all the way to America to discover the cook in me. Because the torch in Lady Liberty’s hand is the ‘imprisoned lightening’ according to Emma Lazarus. And you never know where lightening strikes.