Role reversal

Most of my earlier blogs have been grim or serious. Today I would like to share the lighter side effects of Mr Hodgkin's stay with us. It all amounts to many role reversals that are quite amusing. Even since I embarked on mission Ranjan, I gave up a hat I had donned for years. I mean my chef's hat! Cooking use to be my favourite hobby. Here again I was following my father's footsteps. Papa was a mean cook. While reading law at the Middle temple, he found time to cross the Channel many times and pursue his passion for cooking. With his law degree he also acquired a Cordon Bleu ribbon. He became neither a lawyer nor a Chef but a diplomat with a passion for cooking. Cooking was his one and only hobby. He always told me that that it was better than any other hobby as you created and got appreciated almost on the spot. Throughout the first 4 decades of my life I have been fortunate to taste his food a myriad of times. He was a man who could spring up a starred dish with whatever he found in the fridge. The more stressed he was, the more delicacies he churned. Some of my favourites were his fried rice, his crispy sweet and sour fish, or his small potatoes cooked two styles in the same frying pan. They are my Proustian madeleines. Many know Anou the cook. But you will be surprised if I told you that I began cooking late in life, when I was almost 30. Stressful family issues brought out the cook in me and just like Papa the more upset I was the more complicated the dish I produced. I remember many times when I use to cook with tears rolling down my face.

Cooking was my best stress buster.The array of cook books that adorn the shelves of my large kitchen, it used to be my mother's bedroom, are ample proof of that. When Ranjan was diagnosed with cancer, I should have been cooking life a Fury so stressed I was/am. But strangely the exact opposite happened. I did not feel like cooking at all. In fact I now shun the kitchen and my books are gathering dust. I guess I had to be put my life on hold and cooking was an integral part of who I was.  I am eternally grateful to first born who sensed that this would happen and organised things while she was here. The house is now being run efficiently by my younger one ably supported by the house staff. It is a boon as I truly do not feel like cooking! My day is spent looking after Ranjan and dispensing all his pills and brews. Strangely I even do not feel like cooking for him. My Chef's hat lies in wait for better days.

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, there have been amusing role reversals post cancer. Ranjan spends a lot of time watching the box, particularly on days when he is feeling tired and I often find him watching cook shows. And believe it or not, he even remembers some recipes and asks for them tober made. he has not yet entered the kitchen and donned a hat. Maybe that too will happen. Our household will be looking very different in 2014.

As Ranjan does not move out much he has been watching our maid clean the room. Ranjan has always been punctilious about cleanliness and had the irritating habit of finding the one speck of dust that had escaped the eye of the person dusting the house. Last week he finally decreed that carpets could not be cleaned with a broom as we have been doing but that I needed to get a vacuum cleaner! I wonder what other surprise awaits me in the next six weeks.