Aloo Ki Sabzi

 For the Six Hundred Sixty-Sixth Time, I Am Eating Aloo Ki Sabzi Again

Yes, I am writing this war agreement after accepting that I’ve been defeated. Again.
Defeated by my cook, defeated by my apartment security guard, Gunjan, defeated by the local and metro (Pink line, I guess), defeated by the city. By the city that never sleeps.

Of course, how can you sleep peacefully when you have to do three thousand and thirty-three household chores by yourself, and you have to give the best presentation at the office—where the colours of the presentation must align with the brand guidelines—while also making sure you have a social life, where you go to some high-end Bandra café only to find out how basic their food is, and you have to talk to your loved ones on the phone for at least an hour (half an hour if it’s a video call), and also develop a hobby, for which you already paid for the full class and are now standing there clueless, asking yourself why on earth am I making this stupid bowl that I am never going to use in my whole life, plus take on some freelance work just to afford the seventh pair of shoes you really wanted to buy because without ityour life would be empty and so on and so forth. 

Yes, I live away from my hometown, away from my family. Sounds like the plot of an Imtiaz Ali movie, where the protagonist is wild, adventurous, and looking for his true self. But in reality, what I’m really looking for is the second sock of my yellow mustard long sock collection, which I definitely hung on the wire after taking it out from the washing machine, and now it is not there.

Taking care of yourself is really stupid. Like caveme,n stupid.  I am like obviously they are not foolish to build a society and all. 

But let me now take you to the most irritating, blood-boiling part of all this: Household chores. How come every single time I come back to my apartment, I have three thousand and thirty-seven things to do? Yes, I get it—some things you do weekly, some you do thrice a week, some you do daily. [Okay, don’t act smart—I also watch those hyper-organised cleaning videos. My algorithm is full of them.] But even after micromanaging everything, I still feel like—ugh, this place looks ugly.

Okay, let’s talk about the hippopotamus in the room. Someone explain this to me:
If you buy groceries for the month…
If you buy veggies every week…
Then why the hell does my cook always come and say, “We don’t have this, we can’t make that. Let’s make aloo ki sabzi” How come, even with regular shopping, I’m always missing the most important ingredient of a dish which I actually want to eat?
 

Every. Goddamn. Day.

She’ll come up to me with that face and say, “Yeh nahi hai, woh nahi hai. Let’s make aloo again.” Living alone and managing the kitchen is harder than running the President’s office in the U.S. I get flashbacks of how my mom used to call my dad every evening with a list: “When you come, bring these.” I used to think—aww, that’s romance. It turns out that was not romance, but a call purely on a work basis. Not the call that would divide my dad’s will in half in the future.

Sometimes I think it’s all a trick. My cook knows I have zero knowledge of cooking.
So she throws random roadblocks at me, like:  “Dhokla can’t be made today. We don’t have Eno.”  What’s the connection? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that bitch is lying.  

And then, there are those two vegetables that are always missing: Tomato and onion.
You buy them in the morning—in the evening, they’re gone. I don’t know what dark truth lies behind their disappearance. But mark my words—I will uncover the tomato-onion conspiracy someday.

Every time I request a dish, within the next 15 minutes, I’m in the local market with my cotton wannabe tote bag, buying fifteen new things.

Once upon a time, I used to say this joke that my memory is so bad that I don’t remember what I ate last night. Now, I don’t just remember what I ate last night, but I also remember what ingredients I bought to make what I ate, and what the prices of those ingredients were, which I bought to make what I ate last night. Obviously, I’m not gonna remember my desktop password, because all I can remember is the price of kala chana, masoori methi, and a 500-gram lemon.

But I want to do other things. I want to go to the theatre.  I want to learn the ukulele.
I want to roam around Mumbai like a fresh blogger who just discovered there’s a whole city outside of Bandra and Andheri.  I want to write—the thing I love the most.

But every time I finally sit down to write—
In silence,
In that perfect yellow-and-white lighting combo,
In the comfiest clothes,
In the cleanest, cosiest corner of my apartment,
With no construction noise,
and a breeze that’s just right,
and a sky so blue it should’ve inspired poetry—
My cook walks up to me and says:

 “We don’t have anything. Shall we make aloo ki sabzi again?”

And for the six hundred and sixty-sixth time, out of sheer compulsion, I say—
Fuck it.  For the Six Hundred Sixty-Sixth Time, I Am Eating Aloo Ki Sabzi Again.