Kitchen

Hunza Ghanchi, Pakistan

You step on-to the rooftop and the eerie silence gnaws its teeth in your cheekbones. The smell of someone frying samosas so faint in the air, you wonder if someone will hand you your childhood back. Why do you think that Kitchen is a sacred space? Inherently holy? What have these floors and the cupboards and the walls and spoons and plates have given you? What have you given them? The human presence, your presence. Inside the kitchen, you exist between spaces. The spaces between sentences, between moments that you have lived but hardly. Things in here are serene and other-wordly but so utterly human. Why but? Are things in other worlds not human? Human enough? Everything humanly is not serene. Inside, the cupboard is left ajar and you have a slight peak of the spices staged inside. With so much care. You feel the orderliness of the setting clogging you up. But as long as the shan masala packets are facing the wall and not you, maybe the sky breaking into pieces outside the kitchen window wouldn’t be so bad.

The duality of the kitchen almost matches yours. You wonder maybe that is why when you are ten, it was a place of sweet calmness. Somewhere to rest peacefully. Everything is connected. Your back against the white-wall, head leaning on the fridge. A personal, very valuable capacity, your very own, however lonely. Now all of a sudden you are sixteen and seventeen, and eighteen. The walnut-wood drawers keep getting emptier. Your appreciation, an affinity, they keep running out. All the empty cabinets are now filled with mourning. What will you do when the cabinets start overflowing with different stages of grief? You have felt every one thousand of them. All of it in the spaces of your broken bones.

Here, there are small acts of bravery. You move little. You do a lot to make those moves. You wrap your slender hand with pointy bones firmly around the steel handle, like a black pearl necklace around your neck. You tap the cupboard, you search for the right flavor. You don’t know what goes best with the last ounce of resistance and a gulp of surrender? A splash of loneliness kneaded with idle dreaming. And pensive dolefulness. Inside the three walls of this sacred space, guilt almost gets the best of you. You are standing near the sink now, washing your hands. A second later, you’re drowning. The water is all around you, it is like a big transparent embrace.

Question. Stop questioning. How are things divided into parts? How do little pieces and things come together to make a whole? floors, cupboards, counter-tops, walls, spoons and plates? Something inherently holy about kitchens and human presence there. Your presence.

You know things don’t come easy. Yet somehow everything seems to be easy in the Kitchen. Breakdowns in the kitchen. Laughter in there. And fights in there, too. Hugs near the washbasin. Hand-holding near the fruit basket. Love. Especially love in the kitchen. The mere essence of existence. Liveliness. Breathing. So much suffering. And you, you insufferable.

Hunza is a 18 years-old Pakistani writer-poet. Their work compromises of and combines hand-written texts and doodle-art, and often photography and reference artwork as well to illuminate the themes of grief, home, self-awareness, survival, and romanticism of the mundane. They are also dabbling around with literary non-fiction. Hunza’s work was also recognised by and published in a local e-magazine. Besides writing, she enjoys sports, nature walks, and reading.