Film review: Kitchen chronicles and adjusting to the table manners of a typical Indian household

Warning: Do not eat while watching the film. Although the new bride takes over the kitchen, because she’s well brought up and fits well in this ‘prestigious’ family, when the mother-in-law goes away with bags of home ground spices to help her pregnant daughter, you know at some point the pressure cooker is going to burst. You want it to burst.

The new bride discovers that the father-in-law is so used to his wife doing everything for him, he won’t even get up to get his own toothbrush!

Will she jam that toothbrush in his gob, you wonder. But then you see the docile bride make breakfast from scratch, do the dishes, sweep, mop, make lunch from scratch, do the washing by hand (because ‘clothes don’t last in the washing machine’), make dinner (no rice again, we need ‘chapatis’ for dinner), clean up everything afterwards and when her hands don’t stop smelling of dishes, put up with her husband’s lovemaking.

‘It hurts every time,’ the new wife says, 'could you...foreplay?’

It was like watching your favourite batsman’s helicopter shot going over the boundary for a six.

The result is expected. It hurts the man’s pride, and he’s happy to taunt. ‘I don’t feel enough for you to foreplay.’

The land of kamasutra has generations of men who think they’re entitled to rage at Kiara Advani in Lust Stories (on Netflix) because they grew up being called ‘raja beta’ and nobody was supposed to find fault with anything they did. Speaking of this entitlement, you must watch Spike Lee’s brilliant film Chi-raq (also on Amazon Prime Video). A group of African American women in Chicago, fed up of their boyfriends, husbands and sons dying of gun violence, decide to teach the men a lesson: I will deny all access and entrance… because the men won’t give up their guns.

But there’s no sisterhood that will help our heroine. In fact, you want all the other women in the movie - the mom, the mother-in-law, the aunt - to understand that by telling the bride ‘to adjust’ they’re pushing her into a life that’s just awful. No one comes to her aid when the bride is told off: I thought I told you that you will not be allowed to work after marriage, then why did you apply for a job?

There is so much the film says without telling us that the story of this kitchen is as rancid as the dining scraps she has to throw away in a pit.

Periods again

Just when your government claims that having Akshay Kumar build a toilet inside the house in a movie and make sanitary napkins for his wife in another would make everyone believe that the ‘problem’ was solved, out comes a belief system that won’t go away: do not enter the kitchen because you are menstruating and therefore impure.

For a temple town that has more sex workers for the hoards emerging after the pilgrimage, the hypocrisy of this next scene is astounding. I watched the husband fall off his scooter and the bride rushing to help him. It’s instinctive, no? But then, the husband calls the priest who tells him to take a bath in the river because a menstruating woman touched him!

Remember the award winning Iranian film A Separation? In that film, the very religious woman who works as a caregiver to an invalid old man calls the religious hotline to ask if it was allowed to help clean a man (he’s soiled himself and has fallen off the bed) not related to her.

I wonder who makes these rules? And who dares clean our collective kitchen sinks clogged up with such beliefs?

Of course, everyone knows that some men are genuine partners in their home. But if you see men say, ‘I offered to make but she won’t let me near the kitchen’, you will know exactly why when you see what the cousin does to our bride’s kitchen when he makes dinner.

I have seen women deny themselves a food processor because ‘atta must be kneaded by hand’ and I’ve seen women in the same situation as the bride. Suraj Venjaramoodu who plays the husband and T. Suresh Babu who plays the father are so naturally villainous you want the bride (Nimisha Sajayan) to do them in! Does she? The poet Menka Shivdasani compares the art of chopping lettuce in the lovely poem Why Rabbits Never Sleep, ‘A nazi who invited a prisoner for lunch and demonstrated the art of cutting carrots... Chop, chop!’

The Great Indian Kitchen is like finding long-forgotten leftovers from your good times in the fridge. It’s fungus infested and looks like something evil. It smells hellish too and you have to throw it away immediately. As you cover your nose, you wonder why you saved it…