The cook and the cold water

This tale is about a cook, who passed on secrets through the subtle layers of taste of what he cooked. Today we do not know the cook, we know the secrets, but we do not know what they mean.

In a way like encrypted wireless signals - we can see that they are there, but not what they carry. This cook did a lot of other things in his life besides cooking. When we started studying his life, we found photographs of him sitting around, hiding and organising conferences.

We have been asked by various people to declare The cook as an enigma, a mystery but we have refused. Agreed, he did many things which we did not understand, but that does not mean anything. I mean, I myself do many things that I do not understand. So either everything is bizarre, or nothing is. Sometimes he cooks things that I cannot place the taste of very well. It is not simple to dismiss just as a mixture, as an in-between, it actually was outside the grid of the ordinary palette. Imagine mint with honey and chilli? Each in a distinct nugget, released progressively in the same morsel.

One day the cook went to the riverfront and attempted to rescue someone from drowning. All his movements, cries, anxious pacing reflected the action. But who was drowning? Why didn't he ask for anyone's help?

Sometimes he talks, and describes the sanctity of the streams-of-thoughts born in an isolated mind. Before those thoughts can travel to some other mind they have to be primed. Not developed, not worked-on, primed. As if justifying his self-choreography, refusing to share the plot, the script sometimes. But would he do that? Attempt to justify himself? As an act of empathy yes.

Another day, he went and stood in the middle of the traffic junction and engaged in fake sword fight. He fought air, slicing, dicing through it and then he walked back to where we stood waiting for him. "Unfinished business," he said and walked on to cross the road.

A friend T, actually stares at him for long periods of time every time she comes to our kitchen. But she cannot figure where he comes from, cannot figure who he is. I say, "You need to eat what he cooks." She says she will try it when she is really hungry. But she is never hungry. A nuclear reactor lives in her, breaking down each gram of food she eats, to yield fountains of energy. I am always eating, feeling weak after a short walk. She laughs at me.

I think laughing at me is one of the most intense forms of pleasure that she knows. So, I let her. No embarrassment. Otherwise she is serene and calm, like (not resisting an urge to burst into romantic poetry) cold water on smooth pebbles.

I do not know what our specific relation was, am I a neighbour? Employer? Friend? I see the cook often. Sometimes coming to his kitchen, at other times going for short walks in the neighbourhood. Sometimes meeting him alone, and sometimes with friends. We call him the cook because he usually wears an apron and spends a lot of time in the kitchen. And of course, he cooks (maybe everyday) and passes messages through his cooking.

He has started working with radios today. A transmitter which can broadcast into the vast suburb that we live in. "I want to start broadcasting from tomorrow," he stated. What will he broadcast, I wondered.

The next day, I saw him cooking busily, with microphones fitted all around the kitchen. I didn't quite understand and then realised that he was broadcasting the sound of cooking. "Why?" I asked.

"This is the sound of desires that were alive, and now are ash on the gravel floor," he says. "The sound of cooking is food that is being cooked in a place which you can't see, can't smell. Sensations, taste maybe re-compiles from memory but there is no finish, no closure, nothing to feast on," he continues. I hear him and I wonder why this makes for a good broadcast. And why now. And why is the cook talking in this dramatised, pained medley of riddles? There were no answers then and I left. I walked out to the swamp, and smelled the stink. In this story this is the moment when the cook exits stage.

I enter. Periodically I multiply myself with myself and become a multiple, a we. Nostalgia is often smooth, thinking back about people and events renders them as picture perfect, minus of any weakness, confusion and any need to shit. Have you ever reminisced about a morally-upright leading light hero of history shitting, or pissing for that matter? I highly doubt it, we don't like to even think of them sleeping. I realise if history disappears things get more real at least by a few notches.

I think back about heroes well known and not, acting self-consciously. Blinded by pursuit, startled by their own adeptness. I think of those heroes sitting silently shitting, brimming with energy, contained in a small chamber for a tortuous amount of time. I think of them in this way and history disappears. Play-spaces for fictions re-appear, there being no separation, no way to wean out anything from anything.