Kitchen

 

K is for...Keen

 

Yesterday we viewed the first property. In a gated compound, around 40-45 minutes’ commute. It had an open kitchen, fairly large garden both pot plants and uncontained. Nothing much was blooming, but very green. The masters, one floor up, had an open closet within the bathroom in the US style. The stairs was treads only no risers, with straight steel wire type railings. Also echoed in the balconies attached to the upstairs bedrooms. Contemporary light fixtures. Characteristic Fijian double height sloped ceiling with exposed palm wood beams over the living area. Altogether very modern and neat but also traditionally local.

 

The open kitchen and the open closet are vaguely freaking me out. Indian cooking is not kind to living spaces, to put it mildly. It’s all karahis and stovetop tempering and sizzling spices and ‘frying the masala till the oil separates’ - it deposits a fine film of condensed oil fumes on everything it can lay its hands on. How are those double height beams ever to be scrubbed clean of the oil residues? Similarly, unshuttered closets in the most humid area of a house in a humid climate doesn’t seem like a smart idea. Besides, it's not spacious enough to take both our clothes, meagre as my wardrobe may be. I’ve just got my most basic everyday casuals here, most of my clothes are mothballed back home. But even so.

 

House hunting is really my least favourite expat activity. Right now, I am feeling the lack of my own spaces keenly – over the last decade we have, bit by painstaking bit, renovated, refinished, added to that 50-year vintage, two generation family residence in Kolkata that my PIL built, for our own retired life. It’s been a weird, unprecedented kind of pang leaving it behind and grappling with the idea of making a home, pouring heart and soul into a different, short term building somewhere that we don't own and then having to gather it all up an instant later.

 

Because a kitchen can’t be run half-heartedly and a home cannot be made with zero emotional investment. However shallow and transplant-ready the roots, they must be sent inching down.  And when the time to uproot comes around again, as it will for sure in a year or two, it’s going to be a hard knock. I just wonder sometimes if I still have the strength, the insouciance, the knack of easy transplanting. Every skill, every talent, every ability wears out with age and repetition. All stores run out with constant use. Has mine?  

Nope, not yet. I'll do what I have to do and wring out, as best as I can, enjoyment and learning from this opportunity. It's not exactly a hardship. 

A-Z Challenge 2022