Not All of Me Cooks

I once heard a real-life incident about Bhanu Banerjee, the veteran Bengali actor from Kolkata's golden era. His daughter Basabi Ghatak shared it. When she was a young girl, her father was already famous for his impeccable comic timing and his sense of humor. One day at school, a friend asked her, "Does your dad also tell jokes at home?

Basabi came home and told her father. Bhanu asked her - What does your friend's father do?

"He is a doctor. A surgeon."

"Tomorrow, go and ask her - does your father perform surgeries at home on the dining table?"

What he meant was obvious. Acting was his profession; comedy was a part of it. Being famous for comic timing does not mean performing comedy at home. We wear different hats, and we change them as the situation demands.

I bring this up because I want to talk about a hat I have worn for the last fifteen years - The hat of a home cook.

Am I a foodie? No. Do I enjoy cooking? Not really. I cook because I am responsible for feeding my family, except my 26-year-old son - he now takes care of his own cooking. We eat to live - and for me it strictly remains so, not the other way around. I don't want to make eating and cooking a big deal in my life. I would like it to be a regular, unremarkable activity, the way brushing your teeth is.

But my kitchen runs on traditional Bangladeshi cooking, and there is nothing quick about that. We don't grind our spices, but we do paste some, from scratch, and that alone eats up time. Rice needs more than one dish alongside it. Prep time is long by design, not by accident. And then there's cleaning - if you want to clean chicken or fish properly, really properly, that takes real time on its own, before the cooking even begins. No matter how much I try to take it easy, cooking and cleaning drain a person - especially someone like me, who isn't a foodie and doesn't find joy in the process itself. I have made my peace with this. The time, the labor, the package - I accept it.

The part I have not made peace with is what comes after. Does the responsibility ever actually stop?

A person working outside can switch off from office talk once they're home. A student, after a full day at school, easily avoids discussing school at the dinner table. But a home cook rarely gets that same courtesy. Food talk and review of the food are treated as a natural continuation of the meal itself - sometimes appreciative, sometimes not, but always there, and always assumed to be welcome.

It isn't always welcome, and it isn't all food talk either. I enjoy talking about health, science-backed food discussions, and findings of relevant research. That kind of conversation interests me a great deal, and I'll happily sit through it. What I can't sit through is the other kind: recipes recited in detail, ingredients dissected one by one, someone reminiscing at length about a dish they once ate somewhere. This isn't because I dislike food content in general - I actually enjoy watching food videos and vlogs, quite often. But I want that interest on my own terms, at a time I choose, and not as a mandatory recap of what just happened on my own stove.

This is the same reason I struggle with people who narrate a movie scene by scene, describing each character and each turn of the plot in exhaustive detail. Back in 1985, when very few households in Bangladesh owned a color television or a VCR, a distant relative of ours had both. There were video shops - which were few and far between, meant only for the well-off - from where you could borrow videos by being a member. She used to visit our home often, and a good part of every visit was spent briefing us on the movies she'd watched. One day she began describing a film scene by scene, in the most minute detail imaginable. My sister and I grew visibly impatient, irritated. We tried, more than once, to steer the conversation elsewhere - no luck. Every time we managed to change the subject, she picked up exactly where she'd left off. She finally finished, a good two hours later. I was so exasperated that, to this day, I've never brought myself to watch that movie, even though it was a well-known Bengali film of its time.

It is tedious to listen to that kind of detail, not because the movie doesn't matter, but because a sensory experience simply doesn't transport through words that way. Most of us are not Claude Monet, who could capture the shifting light on water with a single stroke. Most of us are not Aesop or Mark Twain, gifted enough to make a story captivating in the telling. We are limited in our expressions, most of us, and that's fine. That is the same reason I remain limited and selective in expressing my own feelings. The moment was breathtaking. I really enjoyed the movie. That's usually enough for me. Anything beyond that turns into a futile exercise - for the teller as much as for the listener, whether or not the teller notices. Once I'm done cooking, I want to change hats immediately. I want to think, reflect, write, watch television with my daughter, spend time on my own thoughts.

I have a certain idea of what a dining table should be for. It should be a place to chat, to laugh, to talk about the contemporary issues of the day - the World Cup, the politics rumored to sit behind it, Bangladesh politics, world politics, whatever interesting thing happened that day. A conversation that flows on its own, organically, light but genuinely enriching. Not a conversation about the food itself. Not whether the cumin was a touch too much, the salt a touch too little, the vegetables in the curry not quite in the right proportion. That kind of talk is mundane, and worse, it keeps the cook seated at her own trial long after the meal is served.

The trouble with cooking as a form of care work is structural: the responsibility rests on one person, but the meal is consumed by everyone at the table - so everyone feels entitled to an opinion. The labor is singular, but the commentary is collective.

Sociologists have a term for this - the "second shift." Arlie Hochschild coined it to describe the unpaid work that continues at home after the paid workday ends -work that is real, time-consuming, and seldom counted as work at all. Simone de Beauvoir talked about it much before Hochschild - in The Second Sex, where she wrote about housework as labor that produces nothing that lasts. You cook a meal, it's eaten, and by evening the kitchen asks for the same labor all over again. De Beauvoir was so right. Unlike labor that produces a visibly tangible and lasting outcome - like a piece of writing or a building, which stays finished once it's done - cooking has a minimal aftereffect. De Beauvoir's point was that this endless, self-erasing quality is exactly what makes domestic labor invisible. There is no finished product to point to, so there is nothing to credit.

I want to be careful here, though, about what I'm borrowing from her and what I'm not. I couldn't agree more when she talks about invisible domestic labor and why it does not register any credit. However, De Beauvoir was largely describing housework as a site of confinement - women with no world beyond the home, and no outlet for what that confinement produced. That isn't my situation, and I don't want to dramatize it into one. My favorite three terms that I use here are time, space, and context. They have all changed dramatically since De Beauvoir's 1949 time period. I have a life outside this kitchen - research, writing, my own mind to occupy. What I'm asking for isn't an escape from confinement. It's simpler than that. It's my time back, promptly, the moment the cooking is done - the same way anyone else's time is returned to them the moment their shift ends.

If anything, I'm homesick more often than not. My work has taken me to different countries for meetings and training, and I've had long commutes both as a student and as a professional. I've done my share of being away. I'm not someone charmed by the idea of spending nearly every weekend out and about. Home is my favorite corner of the world, and my "me time" is spent right here, in it. Home was never the confinement. It's the one place I actually want to be. What I want back is simply the time within it.

Every person wears multiple hats, and switches them according to need and circumstance. Bhanu Banerjee could take off the comedian's hat the moment he walked through his own door, and everyone around him understood that the man at the door was not obligated to keep them laughing like the man on screen. The question I keep returning to is simpler than it sounds: can a home cook ever be given that same door - the one where the hat comes off and stays off?