An ode to cooking aunties : the lifesaver of singles everywhere
Managing a household is no mean feat. If you could somehow outsource handling the kitchen to someone, imagine how close to perfect your life would be. This article is not about this distant never-land, but a life I led before I got married. The glorious life with two flatmates and two aunties/domestic helps (one for cooking and one for cleaning), an empty living room and a kitchen overflowing with food.
Humble Beginnings : After so many years of living away from family, you get used to almost everything under the sun. Everything…but the food. A healthy home cooked meal can never be replaced by takeaways and zomato home deliveries. We were three single women sharing a flat, with little desire or patience to cook our own food. After months of struggling health issues and weighing scales tipping on the wrong side we decided to employ a cooking aunty. Never did we think how much our lives would change. I guess the fact that we called her aunty would give you a hint of our respect and love for her.
The Settling In Period: The first two aunties didn’t last beyond a week. Mainly because we were poor managers of the kitchen. If we were running low on the spice, none of us could remember to buy it on our way back home. The holy trinity of haldi (tumeric) powder, dhaniya (coriander) powder and mirchi (chilly) powder never seemed to co-exist in our spice box. Add cumin, mustard seeds and ajwain to the mix and you have welcomed utter chaos in the kitchen. Eventually the aunty who managed to survive in our flat took the onus of refilling missing spices, vegetable accompaniments (lemon, garlic, ginger) and billing us every week. Eventually she started buying vegetables from the farmers’ market for us too.
The day she turned into a Mother Figure : I was the quiet kid in the apartment. My other flatmates were noisy and would chat with our aunties everyday. Until the day I fell sick and was staying at home with a high fever, I was never forced to interact with the cooking aunty. She took one look at me on the bed and made haldi dhoodh (tumeric milk). She stood towering over my bed until I gulped the entire glass down. Until that day I never knew the magical potion of haldi dhoodh and how it can calm everything from body ache to sore throat. Honestly speaking, anything other than a broken heart can be fixed by aunty’s magical haldi dhoodh.
First approval for boyfriends : We had the most non judgmental cooking aunty who would ensure any boyfriends who spent the night at home would receive a proper breakfast along with piping hot tea, the morning after. Mostly she would say a silent prayer in her mind that we end up married. My own then-boyfriend-now-husband started looking forward to aunty’s piping hot parathas in the morning, on weekends. She would just do a head count in the morning and make enough tea/coffee/breakfast to feed an entire baraat if need be. One of my flatmates’ entire cross functional team crashed overnight at our house after a late night drinking spree. Aunty made coffee and tea for everyone, without complaining at all. Infact she enjoyed feeding the bechara bachhas (poor little kids).
Feeder of greens and savior of leftovers : Since she was the one who purchased vegetables for us, she sneakily fed us greens. From methi parathas to gawar sabji, our was the sly mother figure who would trick us into eating vegetables we absolutely hated. Most of us didn't even know the existence of these vegetables. Like every efficient household manager, she had other latent skills. She could use leftovers to cook better dishes magically the next day. Nothing could deter our aunty from ensuring we ate all the food to our tummy’s highest content, while keeping food wastage to the bare minimum.
Now that I am married, and I no longer live the singleton life, I have to manage everything from buying groceries, deciding menu for the 4 meals in a day and the gazillion snacks throughout the day. I cant even begin to tell you, how much I miss the carefree days of the near past when my only worry was whether aunty is going to skip her work due to excessive rains or other calamity specific to Mumbai. But I wish her all the very best from the depths of my heart because she had the amazing ability to focus on her core competency i.e cooking food without interfering into our personal lives at all.