Never wanted to cook

When I look back, I realize I never wanted to cook. I used to tell my mother that I would always keep a cook, because I wasn’t meant to be one. But life often takes us in directions we never imagined. I still wonder—someone who loved phones and technology, how did I end up spending so much time in the kitchen?  

Cooking was never my passion. In fact, I disliked certain things so much—like asafoetida (hing)—that I never even wanted to touch it because of its strong smell. Yet fate had other plans. Slowly, I began cooking, and eventually even started building online recipe collections.  

Now, I do enjoy cooking to some extent, but as the years go by, I feel my interest in it is gradually fading.  

-l

Cooking sometimes needss a break

It has been 20 years since my marriage, and in all that time I have cooked almost every single day. If I were to count the exceptions, they would barely add up to a month—or perhaps a little more—scattered across all those years. At times, it feels as though the cooking never ends, stretching from morning until night without pause.  

Yet now, I find myself losing the joy I once felt in it. I don’t fully understand why. Maybe it is because, in most middle-class homes, the wife is expected to be everything at once—the cook, the laundress, the cleaner, the caretaker of the family. And as I step into the 21st year of marriage, the expectations from my husband remain unchanged, as though time itself has stood still.  

It leaves me wondering: when will these roles evolve, when will the weight be shared? For years, I have carried the rhythm of the household, but somewhere along the way, the music of it has begun to fade.