One of the most understated luxuries that most middle-class Indians living in India have access to is the ability to hire a home cook. It is understated because it is not perceived as a privilege, given the easy accessibility of labour and the ensuing low cost because of the supply-demand nexus. It is also often a necessity, given how much time working professionals in cities spend commuting to work and back, and the inability to do regularly stock up on groceries. It is not unimaginable to consider finding someone who will come to your home and make chapattis, some vegetable or a rajma chawal. I have, however, always found it challenging to tell someone what to cook for me. It runs counter to my conditioning. I like to decide for myself after consulting what I have in my fridge. I enjoy the process of buying vegetables and considering at that moment how I would use them. I am ever conscious of the intuitive logic at play in the whole business of meal planning.

During the decade I lived in Delhi, my female friends and I mused a lot about what Carrie Bradshaw had termed ‘secret single behaviour’. Many of us were the first women in our families to truly live independently, not in hostels but in apartments. We were running our households for ourselves and not in the service of a husband. We wore this as a badge of honour. Still, many of my friends had home cooks long before I could afford to and even long after I could. In the beginning, I felt envy, but then I realised I simply didn’t have it in me to make demands on another person, even if they were being employed by me. My friends could ask their cooks to cut fruits for them, to fill up their water bottles in summer, to make them tea or coffee. Me, I felt programmed to do all this myself. Because my upbringing didn’t accommodate any forms of entitlement. I had learned, through cooking with my parents, that you needed at most an hour to cook a full-fledged meal. If you planned well, you needed even less. Why pay someone to do what you very well can do yourself? My father would spend a few hours every alternate week making all the Goan masalas for our curries and freezing them, so that prepping only involved chopping an onion and defrosting the masala. The prawns would have been portioned off in the fridge, too. The rice cooked itself. The key to eating well was learning to organise one’s kitchen, knowing where things are, and keeping track of what needed replenishing.