Hiding places

Do you remember when we were young and we had some precious mementoes - perhaps tickets to one of those rare movie shows we'd seen, an old key chain that held special significance, a broken bracelet given by a 'best' friend, an autograph book - all saved up in a small tin and hidden out of the siblings' sight?

As the youngest, I was often made to run made-up errands just to get me out of the way while the elders either hid their souvenirs or used them in my absence. It was only natural that I lived in fear that someone would discover my own pathetic treasures and throw them out or worse still, display them and poke fun at them in a family confab. Luckily, that never happened. The older ones kept sibling rivalry to the 'higher' echelons of the family that I could not penetrate and I was happily left to my own devices. My box of treasures filled and even my unimaginative hiding places kept them hidden from prying eyes.

Eventually, the box was discarded, not because I had no more treasures but because in my own home everything was precious, no longer to be kept out of sight, now to be discussed and the history behind each item to be recalled. But some things don't change. There was still the desire to hide away some treasures. For me, caught in the quicksand of domesticity, what needed protection and preservation and needed to be out of sight of covetous eyes were the goodies saved up for the time when the kids would be around to enjoy them.

Soon the refrigerator and the deep freeze and the kitchen store started bursting at the seams. Unfortunately, so often were things dumped in without labels and without planning that all three places became black holes of eternal loss. Things went in and never came out. The kids came and went, occasions were planned for, cooked for, celebrated and 'postmortemed', but the herbs and the spices were never found. The sauce was made without the secret ingredient, the curry without the extra spice and everything tasted pretty much the same when the family was around as when our home was empty.

At last, it became too much to bear. The oft-talked of sauces and seasonings had to be somewhere! Since I had no recall of having used them and collective taste buds had no memory of sampling them, it could only mean that they still lurked somewhere in kitchen-space. When a full fledged search was mounted and we went in with the equivalent of an excavation team, discoveries popped up from unlikely places. We found dozens of recipe books, special cleaning agents, gadgets stored for the day when my fingers stiffened and I could no longer chop and dice - but not what we had set out in search of!

If there are so many books here, what's in the book cupboard, asked one wise guy, and off we trooped to the 'library'. In trademark style, books were stacked, heaped, piled, and stuffed in with only one aim - to store as much as possible. Foraging among them, we found some we hadn't realised we'd stocked for a rainy afternoon read, and soon, original mission forgotten, we dug for more. And as we did, there was an avalanche of sorts, with charts and pamphlets and drawing paper cascading into our arms - and with them, a couple of cartons of all those precious kitchen ingredients.

Obviously they'd been hidden well. And now, it stands to reason that when real valuables, actual silver and the gold, need to be put away, the safest places are not the locker or the steel cupboards, but the fridge, the kitchen or the many book cupboards!

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India