Dear Agony Akka,
When everything about a marriage is near-perfect — except for one single department centred around a sensory pleasure — how might one address the deficiency with wisdom? I have been married two years now and I love everything about my wife: she’s smart, loving, and she makes me laugh. But she has one big wifely failing. (No, no, it’s not what you think: in that department, it’s all good and the earth moves every time — for both of us.) Her failing: she is a terrible cook and seems unaware of just how bad she is. My initial hopes that she would get better with time have not come to pass. Lately, I have tried hinting that we should hire a full-time cook, but she insists on taking the stomach route to my already captured heart. I love her dearly, but my insides are planning a Shaheen Bagh-type uprising. What to do?
— Need A
Little Appetiser
Dear NALA,
With a name like that, the answer to your question seems self-evident, but it seems to me you are more inclined to employing a full-time kitchen aide. It’s not a bad idea in itself but purely to point out the due diligence protocol you will have to observe, let me tell you what having a full-time cook entails.
My parents had just such a helper when I was growing up: Govindamma (aka ‘Gem’) was their cook for nearly 25 years. My amma used to say, only half in jest, that Gem was the mother-in-law she never had. It sometimes seemed to us that Gem had internalised the belief that she was the Kitchen Goddess, and we — her supplicants — were tolerated in the household only at her pleasure. But so delicious were the gastronomic repasts she plied us with that we readily yielded to the extra-constitutional temporal authority she wielded around the house. And we made light of her idiosyncracies. For the most part.
There was, however, one quirk that we slowly discovered, which sometimes impacted her workplace performance and tested our relationship severely. It turned out that Gem was a card-carrying member of the Congress party and was emotionally invested in its political fortunes. Now, something like that shouldn’t have mattered in our household, given that my parents were broadly liberal in outlook. But being non-partisan, they were not entirely in touch with everyday electoral fortunes of political parties. Whereas Gem followed each poll diligently. This had disastrous consequences.
On days that the Congress lost any election — at the national, State, or even Panchayat level — we could divine it without reading the papers. Cooking utensils would clang and clutter at markedly high decibels — as if the entire neighbourhood were banging thalis in response to a prime ministerial edict. The sambar would be too salty, the vegetables burnt, the meat mushy. It got to a stage where I was assigned the task of hiding the daily newspapers so that bad news would not flow to Gem. In a pre-Internet, pre-24x7-television, pre-WhatsApp age — yes, my little chickadees, such a golden era did exist — such ‘news blackouts’ were easy to enforce.
The point, dear NALA, is this: if you’re looking at a full-time cook as the answer to your stomach’s desperate need for solace, make sure you screen her for political preferences. If you employ another Gem, you’ll likely have to endure many burnt offerings, given the Congress’ infinite capacity to lose elections at every level. I can then see you writing another ‘Dear Agony Akka’ mail. Infinitely better that you live up to your name, NALA, and take charge of the hearth. After all, from your own account, you seem to be doing a satisfactory job of keeping the home fires burning...
— AA
agony.akka@gmail.com