A Kitchen that was not supposed to get dirty

Just as it had been my wish, I got to visit a lot of new places on my travels in 2005. There was a woman who had come for individual sessions several times and who then invited me to her own center to offer program to people closer to her town. I went to her center when Yashendu was on his second trip to Germany in summer 2005.

She had a big house with a very nice and big kitchen which looked really new and equipped with the latest cooking accessories available. It was however rarely used, as our organizer did not cook. She preferred eating ready-made food and some green vegetable paste which she put on bread or mixed in muesli. Although that green bottled stuff was probably healthy, Yashendu and I could just not understand how she could live from that without ever preparing her own fresh and warm food! In the mornings, we ourselves only had bread with butter, sandwiches or something similar but in the evening we needed something warm, something cooked! So of course, we offered to cook dinner for ourselves and her.

I actually had program in the evening, so I only helped Yashendu with chopping the vegetables. When our organizer offered to help, we passed her the potatoes but as she had really zero practice, she did not manage to peel or cut them. We joked and told her it did not matter, we would manage. She and I anyway had to leave soon for the meditation and Yashendu kept on cooking.

I don’t know if you have ever had a proper Indian meal but usually it consist of rice, one lentil dish, at least one vegetable dish, often a yoghurt sauce or plain yoghurt and of course flat Indian bread of some kind. This amount of food needs not only time to prepare but also a lot of effort and of course a lot of kitchen utensils. Yashendu worked for the complete time while I was giving the meditation and created a wonderful meal with all those ingredients. Yes, he even made the bread!

When we come back from the meditation, dinner was ready and I was already looking forward to it, happy that Yashendu had been so busy in the kitchen. Our organizer however was in shock the moment she entered the kitchen – Yashendu had prepared the complete meal on his own and without a helping hand to clean up! Pots, spoons, ladles, pans and more were standing and lying around in the whole kitchen. Additionally there was a thick layer of smoke under the ceiling. He had been cooking and the kitchen had been used! That is actually nothing very surprising – when you use a kitchen, it gets dirty. The woman with whom we were staying however had never used the kitchen properly and was shocked about its current state.

It was not as much the work of cleaning though – that we would have managed quickly altogether – it was more the fact that the kitchen, which had never been used, was now dirty. She even had a cleaning lady come by every morning, so she could have even left a part of the work for her if she had wanted to! She did not. We ate this wonderful dinner and when we were all finished she declared that we would not cook in the kitchen anymore. There was an Indian restaurant in the next-bigger town where we would go for dinner.

This is how we daily drove 60 kilometers to the next Indian restaurant for the rest of this stay and during every other stay that I had there.

Due to a kitchen that was not supposed to get dirty.