If, some years ago, I was to imagine my weekend afternoons being overtaken by serious bouts of cooking, I would find it difficult. But, strangely enough, that is how many of my weekends are now spent. And as I see, spluttering in the kodai, colours and textures from my childhood, fragrances and aromas that clang bells of familiarity from an increasingly distant past, I know why I am doing this.

As long as I lived in Calcutta, this is what I could make on the gas: Omelets, poached eggs, coffee. I absolutely hated cooking. I hated the hellish heat of the kitchen and all that it held, the steam and spluttering oil that would shoot off in all directions, and the mildly chaotic manner in which people inside seemed to function. I could never fathom what possible pleasure anyone—my mother being one such sample—could derive out of toiling for hours in that severely hot and dangerous place (with all its sharp blades and scalding surfaces).

When I first tried to cook in Pune—the other girls I shared the flat with found it too much work to maintain a functioning kitchen and ordered dabbas instead—I didn’t know how to make rice in the pressure cooker. Did you put water in the cooker, or inside the bowl with the washed rice, or in both?

The first time I lived on my own—still stubbornly continuing with my attempts at cooking and not copping out—I gave myself some sort of food poisoning after eating a large amount of lau that was still uncooked. Well, I had come home from work at my usual time, which was around 1 in the night, and then I got down to cooking lau (lauki, white gourd, whatever). The vegetable looked like one that gets cooked fast enough. So, in a kodai that was as thin as a spoon, I put in the chopped lau, spices and water. And then I waited for it to get soft. It refused to comply. I kept pouring in water, which evaporated in a blink, leaving the lau hard. I don’t remember how long this pantomime went on, but at some point I was starving, and terribly tired and sleepy. So I decided to eat whatever it was in the kodai. It was a bad decision.

I have come a long way since then. And it makes me smile.

Yesterday, a Saturday, I thawed the tilapia in my freezer. I had to ask Ma for the recipe (like I still do for so many things). The last time I—we, as a family—had eaten tilapia was when I was less than 10. We had stopped eating it because it was sold live, and I would insist on trying to keep the fish alive in buckets of water. It all led to much tears and heartache. However, in keeping with the contradictory spirit of all animal-loving non-vegetarians, I had absolutely loved the taste of tilapia and its tomato gravy.

Yesterday, when I finished cooking, and tasted the red-orange, coriander-sprinkled gravy in the kodai, I was once again a small girl, sitting at a large mahogany dining table, my head barely higher than its edge, picking at a fish that I loved without quite knowing it. It was a taste that had wafted in some unknown corner of my memory for more than twenty years.

I taught myself how to cook out of a stubborn belief that I should not be dependent on anyone else for this most basic requirement in my life. I have detested the idea of eating crap food from neighbourhood eateries every day, or being at the mercy of some dabba-delivery aunty somewhere. Food—decent food—has always been too much of a fundamental need to do that.

But after the initial years of frustration, seriously hard work and injury (sliced fingers and burnt hands), I have now reached a stage when I actually like it. (Here, I must add that I have a cook who comes in now and then to keep my fridge stocked, so that I don’t have to come home every night and prepare dinner. And I have taught her to cook stuff I like, cook it my way.)

Now, cooking means conjuring a bit of my childhood from which I am moving increasingly far, and to which I can never, of course, return. Food is perhaps the only element of our childhood we can hold on to even as adults. Every other element—toys, books, films, friends, even music perhaps—lose their magical quality. But all it takes is the right combination of vegetables and meat and spices and condiments, and I am once again running around on the terrace, in my shorts and pigtails, looking for snails under rotting pieces of wood, and pulling gently at the cat’s tail to see if she wakes up and spits at me.