Flip of a Coin.

1.

I am excited. And with good reason. I have a date. First date in months. Such a fine lady too. Met her by coincidence. I had a spare ticket for the concert and she didn’t have any. The stars were aligned. We hit it off during our chat in the intermission. After a rather exciting concert I asked her if she was free some evening. “You set the evening, I will set the menu,” I said giving her my email address. Just when I had given up the message arrived setting today’s date. Lucky it was Saturday. I could spend the week deciding the menu and the right wines and the morning shopping.

I like to present myself as a man of simple tastes and limited talent, particularly so when I put on the chef’s apron with the drawing of flames shooting out of food on a saucepan. Accordingly, the menu is pretty run of the mill – start with cold zucchini soup, entrée of chicken cordon bleu with broccoli, carrots and roast potato and sherry trifle for the dessert. Two bottles of South African chardonnay of the right vintage and my carefully saved bottle of fifty year old port will help the food glide down the palate. The soup and the trifle with exactly one and a quarter cup of vintage dry sherry were prepared in the afternoon to the tunes of Carmen being broadcast on the radio. The vegetables are chopped and ready, chicken and blue cheese ready to go in the pan. It is still an hour before the scheduled time. Just enough time for a gin and tonic.

It is funny how gin sends me back to those days when I was young and foolish, though didn’t know it then. Having graduated from an elite business college in Bangalore where I had secured admission due to family connections, I found a job as an assistant to the assistant vice president of a company partially owned by an American multi-national. I was just getting my feet wet when Boston told us that they were sending an expert to train us in modern management techniques. On a beautiful morning in November Amanda Graves arrived in our office fresh as a daisy. She showed no signs of fourteen hour travel on three planes or the jet lag of twelve hours. We looked at her and wondered when she learnt all she was going to teach us – she looked barely out of her teens. Still taught us she did, a lot, for the whole week till our brains were full. We had a farewell dinner for her at the President’s palatial apartment. I had the great fortune of being seated next to her.

It is a short story, no point making it long. During the couple of hours we shared at the table, love was kindled in our hearts. I offered to drive her to the airport next morning and she accepted with alacrity – which I would have regarded unseemly in an Indian girl but found very flattering coming from an American woman of the world. On the airport when I was carrying her bag to the check in, she asked if I would like to be transferred to Boston. It took a second to flip a coin in my mind – servants versus dollars. Dollars won and I said it would be wonderful. Within a year I was in Boston. In another three months we were married and I moved in her apartment.


2.

Problems began as soon as we returned from the honeymoon. We woke up at the reasonable hour and there was time to relax and read the paper before breakfast and drive to work. Amanda suggested I made a pot of coffee. No one had ever expected me to do anything, leave alone making coffee. I had no idea what the women did in the kitchen to make coffee, or anything else on that matter. I was shocked. I gulped and asked, “What do I have to do to make coffee, never made it before.”
Now it was Amanda’s turn to be shocked. She sat up straight with a jolt which almost tossed me out of bed, “What do you mean never made the coffee before? You have coffee in India, don’t you? What do you drink when you get up?”
“We drink coffee of course. But the servant makes it. My mother would have been shocked to see me enter the kitchen.”
“Oh God” exclaimed the self-proclaimed atheist, “what have I got into?” She went down, made the coffee and thrust a mug in my grateful hands with scant grace.

When we got home from work she looked at the floor and remarked, “Two weeks away is a long time. The floor needs vacuuming.”
“What is vacuuming?” I asked innocently.
There was an explosion matching the one in the morning. “What do you do to clean the floor at home? Lick it!”
I disregarded the insult remembering the wonderful honeymoon we had. “Servant uses the broom and mop every morning after breakfast. No man of my class will be seen dead holding a broom.”
“One of us will be dead soon if the floor is not vacuumed before dinner. And you better vacuum it if you want any dinner. Go to the cupboard in the hallway, find the vacuum and work out how to use it. I want the whole apartment finished before I serve the dinner.” She issued the order and went to the kitchen. Fortunately, I worked out how to plug in the machine and use it to pick up the dust. I was amazed how easy the work was, though not as easy as it would have been to watch someone else do it. Amanda examined the floors, pointed a few corners I had missed and after I had done them and put away the vacuum we had the dinner. Amanda was a great cook and although the food tasted plane to my palate it was edible. She showed me how to make coffee and told me that making coffee morning and evening was my job.

We sat down and watched news on TV. It was doom and gloom as usual. We had got used to it and neither of us was depressed. After the news Amanda dropped another bombshell, “I have to prepare for a meeting tomorrow. Will you do the dishes and clean the kitchen?”
“Dishes, what dishes? I have never even dreamed of doing the dishes. I do not know how to do the dishes? We always had servants to do the dishes and clean the kitchen.”
“Well you don’t have a servant here. You do have a wife who is your superior at work. Every thing you need is under the sink. Surely you can work out what you need to do. You have a college degree, albeit from an Indian college.”
I swallowed this insult too and got down to the job. First time every thing was hard and my hands started to itch. But after a few days I worked out a system and the job became easy although there were times Amanda sarcastically showed me dried food on the pans which I had to scrub again. Over the months, the dried food problem disappeared only to be replaced by new ones.

A couple of days later Amanda looked at the dirty pile of clothes, looked me in the eye and asked, “What do you do with dirty clothes in India?”
“Dhobi picks them up every Monday and Friday and brings them back all clean and ironed.” I replied.
“Well, there is no dhobi here. You can take them to cleaners but it costs big bucks. We use washing machine here.”
“Washing machine! Is there something you don’t have machine for?”
“Let us not worry about other things at this time. I will show you how to do it once. Then you are on your own. If you pay attention, you won’t have to pay for my dresses or woolens that you spoil.”
Threat drove home. I listened carefully to the instructions, memorized them as if they were delivered at her management course at work and only had to pay for two dresses and four sweaters over next three years.

It was Saturday a few weeks later. We had finished a leisurely breakfast of pancakes and the newspaper. Taking the last sip of coffee which was now quite presentable Amanda remembered something I wish she hadn’t, “It is our turn to do the lawn. I will attend to the flowers if you cut the grass.”
“Cut the grass? How do I cut the grass? Never done it before.”
There was no explosion, just the witty repartee, “Of course servants did it at home. What a shame I didn’t get immigration papers for them too. You should have reminded me. Now that you didn’t, better get down to it.”
She showed me where the lawn mower was, how to fill the gas, check the oil, start the cold engine and hook the bag for clippings. I did the job, not perfectly but to her satisfaction except when the engine stopped because the bag was full and I hadn’t noticed it. She set me right, showing infinite patience even when I asked the silly question, “what do I do with the clippings?” and she answered with justified but suppressed exasperation, “Dump it in the compost, what else? And don’t just throw it on the top, mix it in with what is already there.”

3.

Now that I could clean the apartment, do the dishes, wash the clothes and cut the grass life became easy. I shopped for groceries according to her detailed list and she did the cooking and general home management. Life became a comfortable routine. If every one knows what is expected there are no arguments and days, weeks, months pass by pleasantly. But this pleasant routine must have started boring Amanda. One dinner time she said, “You should learn to cook. It is not fair that I do everything in the house even though I have a more stressful job.”
“My mother will turn in her grave if she knew that I was cooking my own meals?” I said rather lamely.
“But your mother is not in the grave. She was cremated, wasn’t she?”
“Indeed she was. But I have no talent in that direction. I will need detailed instruction.”
“No problem. I am a trained instructor,” she reminded me.

It started with washing and chopping vegetables and moved up to boiling, steaming, baking, frying them. Then it was grilling or frying chicken, pork and beef. In between there were lessons on boiling, poaching, scrambling eggs. It took a couple of years before I could serve an edible meal. But I must admit to a sense of achievement when I cooked my first meal from scratch. I was disappointed, though, when Amanda went to prepare for the meeting after the news leaving dishes in my charge.

4.

Now that I could do every thing an Indian man marries a woman for, I started protesting Amanda’s rigid rules. She was the boss at work and the example she set in the office had to be followed at home too. I had started to squirm a little when I ran into my old boss from Bangalore. He had started his own software business which had prospered. He was setting up an American subsidiary and asked me if I would like to run it. There was a problem though - he wanted the business to be set up in Silicon Valley. Again I flipped in my head the proverbial coin with two sides, be bossed or to boss. It came with to boss on top and I accepted then and there. When I told Amanda she blew up. “I am not leaving a great job and going to the wretched West Coast. My whole family and friends are here. My family has lived in Boston for generations. Why would I leave behind every one I know and go to live with strangers in a strange environment?”

Well, Amanda stayed behind and I moved forth. I returned once a week at first, then once a month and then not for six months. I spent the evenings developing my culinary skills and developed a taste for wines. For someone who couldn’t tell Red from White a few years ago I had become quite an expert. Of course I shared this expertise with Amanda when we were together. However, she was not impressed. One evening I got papers from her lawyer. Our days together were over. In due course the divorce was finalized. Thankfully there were no children to suffer from the break up.

Even if you are a man who regards modesty as the greatest virtue, and some may say I have a lot to be modest about, there comes a time when ego takes over and one wants to show off the newly acquired skill. This is why the musicians want to perform on stage, authors want to publish thick books, athletes want to climb on the podium. What can chefs do? They can open a restaurant. But not if they already run a company in Silicon Valley. They have to cook for some one special. That is what I am doing - cooking a special dinner to persuade someone to become someone special to me.

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