Nisha Susan: Passing judgement is our national pastime
This is a fixed feature in public life in India—the relentless scolding of people who you think have less power than you. Scolding is how you seize power
It occurred to me recently that I have been cooking regularly for 25 years now. We will not include the teen and tween years which included the feverish making of rasmalai and gulab jamun and cakes. That, as my friend Mridula has remarked after closely observing her three children, seems to be an evolutionary adaptation of preparing to leave the nest. (It is amusing and completely plausible that in humans the hormones prepare you to feed yourself but malfunction and embrace carbohydrate chaos instead.) I am marking my 25 years from the time I figured that if I want curd rice at 9pm, I’d have to make it myself. This passage of time has surprised me because I am used to thinking of myself as little more than a novice. How has this happened?
In the last couple of weeks, I have made scalloped potatoes, muhammara (a Middle Eastern dip), biscuits, biryani, berry loaf, caramelised cabbage—apart from the ordinary currency of dosas, sandwiches, rice, eggs, dal and chicken curries. I have assisted one of my children in making black-bottom cupcakes. I have undertaken a personal challenge of finishing most of my dry goods before allowing myself to be seduced by new masalas. I am trying to figure if it is really possible to (and whether one is morally allowed to) put zucchinis in brownies as my neighbour says she does. I have cooked at fairly short notice an all-vegetarian, all-Korean meal for three. Despite this on-going engagement with the math of money, convenience, tastes, health and adventure, I hadn’t registered that the novice stage is long over. In my head, I am still that person whose curd rice is not quite meant for public consumption.
A couple years ago, my mother asked me to organise (from a caterer) just the sambar and one of the payasams for the Onam sadya she was cooking. I said sure but proceeded to cook instead. I didn’t tell her the truth until the sambar and payasam had passed her taste test. I didn’t want her to worry that key performances in her ensemble production would turn out badly. I knew that she knew why I had lied. I was an apprentice cook, after all.
Passing that Onam pareeksha didn’t change anything. Even recently, I taste-tested gingerly and my food too tasted gingerly to me. You know that I am referring not to the lumpy magic of inji/adrak/Zingiber officinale. I am thinking of the tentativeness of flavour in the food I make. It is a kind of tentativeness I remember in my body when I carried plates and platters from the kitchen to the dining table as a preteen being trained in a hypercritical joint family “to live in someone else’s house someday". I was sure I’d drop that plate and sometimes I did. In the ensuing years I have luckily, lived in households of my own making and have very rarely faced the continuous performance review of life as daughter-in-law/wife.
Someone along the way pointed out that my tenuous, anxious grip on things that I am afraid of dropping might be contributing to my dropping things and I near-instantly tightened my hold. I asked myself a couple of weeks ago, does my cooking taste like nothing much to me because my anxious brain is disconnected from the enquiry of my palate? Or is the truth lodged in the material reality of my being a chronic under-salter and under-spicer? Too uncertain to do it fully and then unsurprised that the curry tastes wishy-washy. Since that realisation I have been giving myself permission to dump the whole tablespoon in there. After all, I have put in my time. This vibe shift feels a lot like when I was in class V and a new set of teachers decided that I was the responsible and reliable one—a far cry from the adjectives I was hearing at home. I combed my hair and was class monitor for the rest of human history.
I wish our lives had pauses and park benches to re-assess our impressions of ourselves and to truly consider what other people tell us about us. It takes time. Unfortunately, when you are really young, everyone thinks it is their job to pass on their under-spiced, under-cooked judgements to you. Being judgy is our national pastime and children are recruited without their consent.
When 16-year-old Delhi schoolboy Shourya Patil died by suicide in late November, he left a note saying that he couldn’t tolerate the constant humiliation by some of his teachers. Among the many fragments of reports from his friends and family, I was struck by his father saying, “Yesterday, he slipped and fell, and the teacher scolded him, saying he did it intentionally." This is a fixed feature in public life in India—the relentless scolding of people who you think have less power than you.
Scolding is how you seize power. Shourya, who begged for a better fate for other children in his suicide note, and asked for his organs to be donated, was, in other circumstances, meant to be school monitor for life. We all recognise that child who wants to do the right thing and wants to be loved for doing the right thing. It is so hard to be a child in India and believe that you can be loved for no reason at all, without being utilitarian, without being ornamental. Every child needs someone to believe that you wouldn’t trip intentionally and if on a Thursday you did trip intentionally, you should have the chance to pick yourself up.
A judgy relative from my youth visited my home a few years ago and said, I quote, “I never thought you would live in a nicely decorated house"—I was amazed at her lack of self-control. It was as if the nada (drawstring) of her spiritual salwar was showing and she didn’t know. I am glad to have lived long enough to see it. I wish Shourya had had the chance to grow up and enjoy his fine revenge too.
Nisha Susan is the author of The Women who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories.
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