After three and a half years, the standards in our kitchen — precarious anyway after Lakkhi’s departure — had declined strikingly. A good cook is near impossible to find. People who take up that line of work are conversant with the stereotypical protagonists of Bengali cuisine — daal, maacher jhol (fish curry), kasha mangsho (dry mutton curry), even the sought-after malai curry, made with prawns and coconut milk — and they know the motions of cooking, of vigorously and convincingly scraping the kadhai with the spatula; but only have a dim sense of what the food tastes like. This may have to do with Bengal’s economic setbacks; yet great artist-cooks were in more plentiful supply when Bengal, in the twentieth century, was as economically devastated as it is today, if not more. Partly it’s a symbol of rural and urban Bengal’s gradual loss of its past, with its delicate artisanal textures. This food too was delicate. Now it is watery. For there’s a thin line separating the delicate from the bloodless, in art as in food. Partly it has to do with the nature of Bengali modernity, which emerged in the nineteenth century as a secular puritanism — evident most clearly in the tenets and practices of Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore’s Brahmo Samaj. This puritanism, which rejected the Hindu gods and goddesses and their antics in favour of an immanent radiance, and which, in the realm of the arts, preferred the implicit to the over-the-top, also kept its distance from strong and violent flavours in food. That modernity is on its last legs, as is its food. What was once implicit is now insipid.
For these and other reasons, feelers needed to be sent out to Lakkhi. Besides, R, who works at a research centre from morning to evening, doesn’t have time to toil over food and research at once. I, who live in Calcutta when I’m not travelling or in Norwich, and who once honed my culinary skills in England, am presently too lazy to take on the responsibilities of the kitchen. My mother is in her late eighties, and can hardly be expected to rustle up meals. Also, what we spend on Lakkhi’s monthly salary and food is roughly what R and I would spend on two or three dinners at decent restaurants. Our approach regarding Lakkhi isn’t unique to Calcutta; it’s the machinery — cheap labour — on which India, even the world, runs today. I say this not to exculpate myself, but to point out that I’m complicit not in a local mode of exploitation, but in a global arrangement. Lakkhi was doing bits-and-pieces work when we sent out the feelers; she was reluctantly happy to, on a marginally higher salary, take up her rightful position again. Calm came back to the kitchen — the false calm around the returned exile, the resumption of a status quo that conceals inner trouble.
I actually like Lakkhi, and I think she likes us. She takes from us little in comparison to what we take from her; but sometimes she also gives. Her gifts are food she’s cooked at home and brought with her when we’re still at breakfast, before temperatures have spiked—taal fritters, brown outside, white within, with a faint sweet aftertaste; the quintessential pithé, cooked in the way my mother abhors, in milk; little trumpet-like flowers from the pumpkin plant that grew from seeds she planted next to her home, which will be deep-fried in a yellow besan batter.
If I’m right, then it’s not the sort of liking that arises from conversation and shared views. But I remember first experiencing this mutual — what is the opposite of antipathy? — affection after she invited us to her older daughter’s wedding in 2004, just after the rains. She’d insisted we must come, and we were intent on going. We saw Subhasgram as in a waking dream — the level-crossing, the railway tracks, the road, the array of built-up houses, the row of bricks that were partly submerged in the undrained monsoon water, and which we negotiated gingerly to reach the porch of Lakkhi’s sister-in-law’s house — which, signalling the auspicious day, had a light raiment of fairy lights. There, I experienced the onrush of Lakkhi’s love, her unexpected hand stroking my arm with a sisterly pressure, her mixture of happiness and sadness when we made our way back, wavering on that line of bricks. She didn’t serve us food that evening, but sat beaming beside us as we ate. It was a small room, with folding chairs and long tables on trestles; and, briefly, during the wedding, our old selves — with their distrust and animosities — died. That strange, transcendental mood lasted till we left Subhasgram.
After Lakkhi took up her job for the third time, there was yet another glitch in her narrative of employment in our household. Her husband, the grocer, developed cancer of the mouth: the outcome of dedicated gutka-chewing. Christopher Hitchens, just a few days dead as I write this, said in an interview that death didn’t scare him, it was a nothing, an annulment, no surprises there, but that “a sordid dying” did. “Cancer can do that to you,” he told Jeremy Paxman sombrely. I think Lakkhi’s husband and most (mainly poor) gutka-addicts I know, who use the narcotic as a pick-me-up in the day, are similarly unafraid, and can’t not know of its corrosive reputation for causing cancer, but toss it mouthward, without a care for tomorrow. But gutka punishes with a “sordid dying,” and this is what happened very quickly to Lakkhi’s husband. She was put on paid leave, but would come anyway to cook for us well after midday. On some days, she’d have to be with him in the government hospital for his treatment. That invariably spelt trouble for us and our lunch. Lakkhi’s husband’s mouth, in the meanwhile, was out of action; he was being drip-fed by a tube inserted in his throat. I asked Lakkhi if he’d had chemotherapy in the hospital; she didn’t think so. She looked a bit vague, exasperated, and out of it. I asked for the doctor’s papers. Having promised me she’d bring them, Lakkhi vanished for ten days. We heard soon after that her husband had died. Then, wounded but mildly relieved, Lakkhi, like one who’s come back from a rough vacation, took up employment again.