Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

Watch out: the cook is in the kitchen!
By Aditha Dissanayake
While I find myself still roosting at home, refusing to see if any other pastures in the world could be greener than the ones at home, most of my friends have flown from their nests to strike out on their own in foreign lands. One is the deputy manager in a hotel in Dubai; the other, a research assistant in a university in Delhi. One owns a Prado. The other, a scooter. Both live in their own apartments and do their own cooking.

Here in Colombo I can barely afford to buy a push-bike, let alone live in an apartment. But no one can prevent me from pretending my room at home is the same as an apartment in Al Majira square in Dubai or in Narwana Extension in Delhi, that I too, am living in an apartment and doing my own cooking.

Cooking. I have never seriously tried it before, mainly because I never got the chance to do so. Whenever my mother was away, a spinster aunt or my grandmother descended on us to look after the household, convinced that left to our own devices we might blow up, not only the kitchen and ourselves but the whole planet as well. But now I am pretending to live on my own means and cooking on my own too. So, I make my mother stay away from the kitchen for the evening and begin to prepare dinner, “alone, alone, all alone” as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner once cried.

My menu is simple: rice, dhall, salmon, pol sambol and an omelette for my father because he is a vegetarian. It’s difficult to decide the amount of dhall I should cook but I am too proud to ask my mother. I feel half a pot will do. I decide to boil the dhall in water and add the coconut milk later.

When I open the lid five minutes after placing the pan on the gas-cooker I am amazed to find it brimming with dhall. The small orange buttons had doubled in quantity within seconds. The coconut milk I had prepared is barely enough to cover half the pan. Soon a burning smell engulfs the kitchen.

I pretend not to hear my mother telling the aunt next door who phones to ask if something is burning in our kitchen that I am preparing dinner tonight. I put the dhall into a dish and soak the pan in water. Need I say it, the charred pan happens to be my mother’s favourite out of all the uncountable number of pots filling the kitchen cupboards.

I begin in earnest on the salmon. I decide to serve it deep-fried with onions. Opening the tin is the problem. The tin-opener is so blunt, it refuses to move more than an inch at a time. Once a small hole is made, the juice begins to ooze on to the lid and trickle down the edges of the tin. The smell of salmon begins to mingle with the smell of burned dhall. After thirty minutes of hard labour, bent double over the tin of salmon, with beads of sweat pouring down my face, and salmon juice splashed all over my t-shirt, I manage to cut a semi circle on the lid and to squeeze the pieces of salmon onto a dish.

When I ask my mother, much later, how she manages to open anything with the blunt tin opener she shows me another brand new one and wonders why I had used the old one. I don’t ask her why she hadn’t thrown the old opener when there is a new one, because I know mothers never throw anything away.

I fry the onions first and decide to add the salmon when the onions turn a golden brown, the way I had seen my mother do, often enough. But to my surprise the onions, pink one minute, begins to turn into a horrible black at lightning speed. I switch off the gas-cooker and start taking the charred strands of onion from the pan of oil. I fry the salmon separately, knowing very well that this is not how I should be doing it. But, when the dish is on the table who will know whether I fried the onions and the salmon together or not?

Finally, the omelette. By now I have deleted pol-sambol from the menu. I beat the egg, praying that bird flue should never come to Sri Lanka, add green chillies and onions to what looks like washing powder, and pour the concoction into a saucepan. Then I slap my forehead, with my hand. I had forgotten to pour oil into the pan first. I watch helplessly,as the egg yolk embraces the pan with fierce passion. It takes ages to separate the two from each other. I decide to call it a “scrambled-oil-free omelette.” Perhaps I could tell the world about this new recipe… I will be invited to give cookery lessons on TV...

My father walks into the kitchen saying it’s almost time to have breakfast and we had not yet had dinner. My mother joins him and looks around her kitchen in dismay. “I don’t know how you managed to pass any of your exams when you can’t even boil an egg...” “Of course I can boil an egg. But today I wanted...” I begin in defense, then give up. I realise the futility of arguing with my mother. God clearly didn’t intend me to become a chef of any kind. Except perhaps a chef of dal de la caro.

Post script:
We have still not had dinner. All of us are waiting for the orange light in the rice cooker to change from “rice-cooking” to “keep-warm” because it was only after keeping the three dishes on the table that I remembered I had forgotten to cook the rice.

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