Invaders spice-attacked

My line-up of exams had turned me out to an insensitive creature, that until a little while ago I didn’t realize how our Poor Aunty Manel had felt when I was turning a deaf-ear at her continuous mumblings about the recipe for ‘Kurakkan Kenda’ which she never got.
Pasting a mental sticky note at a reachable corner of my mind, I started to think of my mother’s territory, which has been guarded by a number of regiments and battalions of vessels and some countless number of kitchen utensils.
Since food was not on top of my lists, kitchen was not my most favourite haunting place in the house. But it always has a mystic sense of fascination which often draws me there when Amma prepares her ‘thuna paha’ and other spices at home. It is not the food, but the colour and different shades of spices that make me put down my book and run to the kitchen.
Cooking with Amma always keeps me on toes. She doesn’t like anyone messing up with her jars of spices. She wants them to go back to the shelves immediately after spoonfuls of them being put into the curry. This is something I never could follow. I always wanted to have me surrounded by these talking jars even though Amma kept on insisting that first they should go back and then I could flirt with the curry. One day, by the time I finished parking them in their original places, the hearth had cooked a curry on its own! So much for cooking with the Queen, I felt like the knave who stole the tarts.
But, this does not stop me from breaking into the kitchen especially when she needs a brave knight to scrape her coconutty-fellows every night.
I love the feel of cute cutlet balls on my palm, but I hate the smell of sardine that survives all the scrubbings afterwards. It is a treat to see them dancing in the pool of hot oil. Once they are out from the pan, the sight of Malli and Thaththa devouring them when they are still in their fiery state, fill my tummy. Amma made a great fuss about my becoming a plant-eater, but now she praises me outright for eating every part of the plant she cooks without letting out a word.
But mostly, it is my chocolate cake that lures people to fall in love with me. I have always prided myself of not celebrating a single birthday without serving my friends with a piece of Daw-special messy chocolate cake. As some one I overheard uttering, “I prepare the world’s best fried chicken,” I don’t want to crown myself as the maker of the world’s tastiest chocolate cake. But I have seen Nangi living a couple of days on my cake and my cake alone! So, I guess there’s certainly some tummy-filling charm in it.
Apart from the culinary work, kitchen is the place where Amma and I have our conspirations on how to surprise Thaththa on his Birthday or what to buy for Malli when he is appointed a prefect in the primary section.
It’s surprising why Nangi can never cope up with the smell of frying chillies or I guess it is her wrong timing when she is suddenly thrown out of the place with a heavy cough on every rare occasion she volunteers to help Amma. We made a good laugh of it the other day saying that even the kitchen hates her.
After all, it would be a good idea to work on self-activating spice launchers in view of vicious foreign invasions, specially at a time like this when we expect so many!