“Cook, cook, cook”

By the light of the lone street lamp that illuminated an otherwise pitch-black street, a tall, well-built  woman in around her forties walks fast, looks at her Nokia phone, and then picks up pace again.  Just as she reaches her destination and enters a house, her employer looks up at her exasperated, “Amma, thoongiten”

She might have dozed off, but the real reason behind her being perpetually late for work is her binge watching of a series of highly addictive, flamboyant Tamil serials from five to seven- thirty pm , after which she hurries to do the only one thing she says she’s good at –  cooking.

“I didn’t study fully. I didn’t complete my education. This is the only work I can do,” she says about her work as a cook for three different families. The difficulty according to her is not in cooking for them but in catering to the individual tastes of each of those families.

If one wants asli North Indian food, another wants a spice less, salt-free meal, yet another wants pure, authentic South Indian meals. “For me the challenge is keeping all this apart, without similarities creeping in.”

Her day starts early in the morning when she gets up to make breakfast for her twelfth standard son, who is notoriously disinterested in studying.  “I have to be with him too. If I’m not there, he goes off to a cousin’s place to play,” she says.

She reaches her first job at nine am, and by the time she is finished cooking breakfast and lunch its 10.30 am. She then goes to the adjacent North Indian house to cook for an old couple, and by the time she’s done, its one pm. She then goes back and cooks for herself. Exhausted, she naps until five after which her favorite hobby of the day happens, serial watching.

Her house is in Malligaipoo Nagar, just adjacent to the Adyar river. Her daughter, who topped her college in Commerce, now works temporarily in a BPO. “Obviously, my work is not what I will make my children also do.”

The best deal out of her occupation she says is that the plethora of cooking tips that her employers give for making their food, rubs off on her. “One family I work for, they have the minimum possible sugar, use less oil and don’t over-indulge in the salt intake. Earlier, my curries used to swim in oil. All that has cut down at home, I’m so glad.

At one juncture in her life, she had almost quit and taken up a job offer at the famous Amma canteen, a job with an 8k per month salary for making a thousand chappatis every day.  It was a government job, which would provide a steady income and she had the slimmest chances of getting pension, she thought. But later she dropped the idea because despite cooking for three families, she had flexible working hours, could ask her employers for a loan anytime, and could take a holiday without getting fired.

“If not this house, then the next house. There is never a dearth of jobs for maids and cooks. We decide who we want to work for, and we set the terms and conditions,” she says.