worldburn

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 3 weeks ago

Today in a cafe two small incidents seemed to me to illustrate the forms of self-involvement that are more common to women, and to men.

A man walked in and ordered a coffee at the counter. He wanted a latte, he wanted it skinny. It was takeaway and he went over to a table in the window and sat down. He was wearing shorts, dusty boots, and no shirt. His belly sagged between his knees. I thought, this is not one of those seaside towns where people wander in and out of the ocean all day and stand in bikinis eating chips. Wherever a woman would not wear swimming gear, a man needs to put on his shirt.

The waitress barged in, late from having missed her bus. She flung down her bag and began telling the staff about her room, which had ‘nearly burned down’ overnight. She described it as the latest in a chain of events which made her wonder had someone put the evil eye on her. What she described was entirely self-generated. She left ‘my candles going’ but ‘only for a minute’, while she was out of the house at the shops. A poster fell down, into a flame.

‘My whole wall got burnt.’ Her housemate put the fire out. If not for that housemate, ‘my whole room would have burned down,’ not to mention the rest of the house. When I looked up, the man with no shirt had taken his coffee and his bare chest and belly out into the cool, breezy day and disappeared. I was reading the foreword to a recipe book, Indian Spice. Its author Pinky Leilani described the importance of recipes in that culture, that they are handed down and closely kept secret. To cook well is a form of power and a source of income in a difficult, impoverished land.

She described how long it took before the family cook, a man in his sixties, had learned to trust her and share with her his recipes. He taught her to cook. Now she has published those secret recipes to the world, they belong to all of us and have lost their power, the power belongs to her.