Do you remember the folk tale about two hungry travellers who were preparing ‘stone’ soup?
They didn’t know how to get the ingredients for their soup so they started boiling a stone in water and curious passersby, intrigued by their claims of how much better it would taste if they could put in a couple of vegetables and maybe a little meat and some salt, brought ingredients to add to the pot — until finally there was actually a soup — enough for everyone to share and enjoy!
Sometimes, when the daily routine gets to you, don’t you wish you could leave such a pot on the stove and have others care enough to do the rest of the work?
I know that thought crosses my mind at least three times a day — and sometimes four, depending on the appetites of the inmates of the house and the number of times I have to get in there and wield the ladle.
Recently, however, an entirely new twist appeared when I set out to make a simple, pour-out-from-the-packet-and-just-boil soup. It was so easy that I grabbed a book and stood in front of the dish, not glancing up from the enthralling story as I stirred.
And then disaster struck.
In one of the moments when I turned a page, I happened to look around — with my spectacles — and suddenly I spied smudges and splodges, speckles and splashes of gravy and sauces and syrup on the stove, the dish, the wall behind, the platform below, why, even the tiles on the floor!
What I had imagined was a spotless kitchen was so only because I had not thought to keep my specs on! The book was laid down, all thought of the plot and characters and what would happen next went out of my head, the soup was abandoned despite the hungry souls hanging around outside, and out came detergents and cleaning liquids and scourers and mops.
Going crazy
Everything in that eight-by-eight space was attacked with single-minded fury. The people lurking behind the door, awaiting that soup, may have wondered about the banging of dishes and cupboards and stove. They could have come in and, like the contributors to the stone soup in the story, made the cleaning process go faster and smoother and more even-temperedly, but they didn’t — largely because I didn’t have the skills of those story-book characters.
Sweet talk was not my forte. Especially not when confined to the kitchen. And definitely not when cleaning months of grime.
Over the clatter of kitchen stuff being thrown around, came a continuous flow of angry words. Something like, ‘Is it written in the constitution that all the dirty work devolves on the woman of the house?’ ‘Where in the holy books does it say...’ and so on. Law, religion, ethics, fair play — everything was called upon at top volume to support me.
And so, instead of drawing people together and getting many hands to work, the harsh blast of my words (my ire compounded by the soup overflowing on the stove and adding to the mess) had everyone diving for cover to corners of our apartment that I didn’t know existed, and bowls, tureens and the people that held them out did the disappearing act.
In my uncharitable mood, I would have welcomed a long period of invisibility — especially if they did not show any signs of appetite for the next month or two — but they were well-versed in the many tempests that erupted out of nowhere in this kitchen.
By the time the frenzy of cleaning was over, they were out again, shaking off the debris from the torrent of words. And all of us sat down to what was left of that soup. Stone cold soup.
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
