A tablespoon of butter sizzles on the pan. Two broken elaichi, the cardamom tossed in for aroma. I don’t know the correct way of chopping onions, so as with all things in life, I decide to wing it. Doesn’t turn out half bad. I am convinced onions have seeds and everybody who has told me otherwise has lied to me. Regardless of the guilt I feel about wasting, I leave a suspicious little central piece of onion out. I don’t want my friends, coming over for dinner, to accidentally eat seeds. I don’t know how to peel garlic either, so my cooking is usually devoid of garlic. But my friends promise me it is not devoid of flavour. I choose to believe them.
I have never intently watched anybody cook, except in YouTube videos. I was never very interested until I shifted to Noida and started living alone in a tiny flat in a highrise building. Suddenly I had an entire, albeit decrepit, kitchen at my disposal, and enough supplies to experiment with. The first dish I made was khichdi, for a friend who had an upset stomach. My mom narrated the recipe on speakerphone, and clumsily, amateurishly, I threw in rice, daal and ghee and whipped up a satisfying bowlful of khichdi.
As I watched my friend gobble down something I had created, I felt oddly empowered. When he told me the next morning that his stomach felt a whole lot better, I felt unreal. In cooking, I found magic. I could now soothe an upset stomach, cure a bad cold and mend an aching heart – sometimes of others, and quite often, my own.
From khichdi, I went on to make black pepper chicken, meatballs in coconut curry, noodles, soup, puddings and cake. I preferred not to stick to any recipe, throwing in spices of my choosing, inhaling the aroma, tasting a teaspoonful, adding water, adding yoghurt, adding sugar, adding ghee and seeing what I could come up with. Every time it was something new, every time it was something different. I’d found in me a superpower, it seemed. My old-fashioned kitchen became my theatre, and my performance an escape from the struggles of a mundane existence.
It took me a while, however, before I realised that cooking meant more to me than just making something for my friends to enjoy and compliment me on. For many months, I had only believed that my cooking was transactional: I fed my friends and in return, they watered my narcissistic soul. Until, one evening, I had an argument with a friend and I switched off my phone, tossed it onto my bed and rushed into the kitchen. In that moment, as I stood facing the stove, a pot of water boiling and bubbling before me, I realised how easily cooking helped me switch off from all else. I think I made a thin, tangy tomato soup and a vegetable sandwich that night.
Since before I can remember, I have struggled with anxiety. As a teenager, I would tug at dead ends of my chapped fingers and once my skin was rough enough, I would rub it against any soft fabric. As I watched the fabric cling to the chapped bits sticking out of my fingertips, I felt empowered. In cooking, I found a similar, stronger and healthier sense of empowerment. People who ate my food translated into the soft fabric, their eating became the clinging action and my cooking equated with the tugging
At the age of 24, as a young adult with endless insecurities, often pertaining to the self, I had always found respite in small experiences of success. I’d scrounged for it in all aspects of my life, and often had my heart broken. The trouble is not that mediocrity in itself is bad. There’s a huge difference between being mediocre and being bad. The trouble is that the awareness of one’s own mediocrity in a world full of gleaming experts and seeming winners can be an isolating experience for a beginner on the grownup scene. It can make one question their self-worth, and question whether they are capable of doing anything at all. This is probably because everyone else looks so successful on Instagram and talks so well on Twitter.
But every time I am able to whip up a dish I feel successful. And I’m not a great cook. I have burnt food, I have spilt soup and let my groceries rot. I am in no way an expert, and some of my experiments with food, as with life, are downright ridiculous. Sometimes, however, amid all the burning and the spilling and the rotting, I find small wins, and those wins heal my soul in more ways than one. So come over for a meal? Tonight I’m making chicken balls in a thick gravy of butter and curd, with red chilli and chaat masala for flavour, garam masala for intensity, broken elaichi for aroma and hope for the soul. No garlic, however, and no faux expertise.
Excerpted with permission from “Finding My Way through Anxiety with Cooking” by Mekhala Saran in Feasting, Healing: Reclaiming Your Life Through Cooking, edited by Jhilmil Breckenridge, Speaking Tiger Books.
