Of foreign lands and boiled potatoes

Enough. This is the third day in a row that one has burnt the rice. It’s the same thing every evening .. one puts the rice to cook, begins reading/writing/watching TV, and is only jolted back to grim, paddy-ridden reality when that rice-burning-what-to-do smell reaches the living room. By the time one reaches the kitchen the smell has taken on the altogether more acrid notes of the rice-burnt-must-throw variety.

The trouble began when one, in a fit of wanderlust, chose to leave the foreign-but-not-so-distant land that one was inhabiting (inhabiting for reasons that are not worth going into at this point, primarily because they have never been too clear to oneself either) for a very-foreign-and-very-distant land where, horror of horrors, baahar-ka-khaana just wasn’t the sort of thing you did daily. When this fact dawned upon one – this was the day before one had to leave for said land – momma dearest was requested to impart some of her considerable culinary expertise to yours truly. Not surprisingly, one didn’t get very far along the learning curve before it was time to go.

Thence it came to be that one landed here bearing little more than the Precious Secret of Alu-Curry. And that particular preparation (accompanied by rice) has constituted one’s evening meal for precisely ten months now. And one still burns the rice and spends the rest of the evening filling up the ol’ belly with extra boiled potatoes and other random edibles.

Naissance

" I must invent my own System, or be enslaved by another Man's.
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create. "
-- William Blake, Jerusalem