Grace took the twin slices that were joined together, and which she had almost eaten, and bit off a bite and ate and sipped at her tea. Mosoget likewise took two conjoined slices and likewise bit a bite off and ate it and likewise sipped at her tea. The teas were steaming nicely. The ginger powder Grace had brewed the tea with had added a nice taste to its already nice taste before the ginger powder was added to it. It was impossible to smell the ginger because the happiness perfume wafted up to the periphery of its own circumference through the epitome of chaos, the kitchen. Bits, pots, cups, trays, dishes, plates, basins, cutlery, bits of wood, pieces of furniture, and most of what Grace owned, were in odd piles spread apart all over the well lighted kitchen. The disorder, it was whispered, was a way in which the impeccably clean Grace was protesting against Commissioner Omenda’s standards of cleanliness. Had Commissioner Omenda entered the kitchen, Grace would have felt the wrath of his cane, for to him the chaos reigning there would have been another species of her inability to be clean up to standards, which he could not accept, and which provoked his wrathful cane frequently. But Commissioner Omenda had prohibited himself from going into the kitchen. He had had frequent impulses to inspect the kitchen, to satisfy himself of its cleanliness. But he had strictly enforced the prohibition about which Grace did not know. Taking it for granted, as any other woman from this village would, that her husband never setting foot on her kitchen was a wifely right, Grace never thought about why her husband had never been in the room where she cooked. Commissioner Omenda was aware of that right. And that right might have contributed to his self-exclusion from the kitchen. In fact, the impulse that tortured him the most in his life hit him with force soon after the adoption of The New Constitution in August 2010. Has the new dispensation not empowered women? Why should a room in my own house be out of bounds to me? Be exclusively my wife’s? Yet the new laws of the land have demolished gender differences? he had asked himself, turning in bed, beside Grace. A jurist, it was claimed that Commissioner Omenda must have known that his exclusion from the kitchen was not founded in any constitution. And being the keenest student of himself, it was further claimed, Commissioner Omenda must also have known that his prohibition from the kitchen had stemmed from his upbringing and that he had merely clothed the prohibition in a not so elegant juridical illusion. Village memory recalls that the kitchen was according to village custom an exclusive female territory. And mothers ensured that the custom was observed. But in her upbringing of her sons, Limited took the custom a notch higher. Not only did she inculcate in the sons the belief that men were never to step into in the kitchen, but also the superstition that men were forbidden from knowing what went on in the kitchen and that what came out of the kitchen tasted well but that men were forbidden from saying how what came out of the kitchen tasted, for men were forbidden from knowing the taste of food. Her eternal command when she was giving her young sons food was this: Eat, then thank the cook, then get up, and go back to your work! It is suggested that Commissioner Omenda was conditioned by the severity of the upbringing more than his brother Moran. Eat, then thank the cook, then get up, and go back to your work! By the time Commissioner Omenda was an adolescent, he had compressed the command into a formula: Thank you for the food! Commissioner Omenda ate indifferently. And the only reason he ate was that eating was inescapable. But also when eating all alone, as soon as he had eaten the last morsel, he uttered with indifference: Thank you for the food! He never commented on food or on anything that came out of the kitchen, also when decorum demanded that he should do so. By close to the beginning of his puberty, he had a full-blown terror of the kitchen, which he saw as place where for him to be would be the decapitation of his maleness, the kitchen which he saw as a place where it would be most dishonourable for him to be. How did Commissioner Omenda develop that terror? Village memory poses the question. And stops there. The pure terror is said to have metamorphosed into Commissioner Omenda banning himself from his kitchen and he finding justification for the banning in national constitution. Now that Limited and sons for many years lived in a small hut having one room, how did she keep her sons out of her kitchen? Never did and it is claimed never will a question tax this village more fruitlessly than that one. What a ridiculous reason for violating my wife’s right to her kitchen that would be! Commissioner Omenda had finally concluded, on the first dawn of December 2010, as Grace was sleeping soundly beside him in their bed. Inevitably, the vacuity of the argument he had constructed to gain access to the kitchen so that he may inspect it for un-cleanliness had shown him his potential folly. And so Commissioner Omenda had let Grace have that room where meals were cooked. And that room it was where Grace could be how she wanted to in her home. In that room was Grace safe from the intrusions and impositions to which Commissioner Omenda subjected her. There she was safe from his standards of cleanliness she was confident she knew nobody could achieve. There in that room, and not anywhere else in her mansion, was she happy. This evening, as she sat there, and as she was at the centre of the happiness perfume, happiness would have been the preponderant emotion in her. But alarm and astonishment it was that preponderated in her emotions. She bit another bite off the slices and sipped at the tea, while looking at Mosoget in the eye.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 17:53:52 +0000
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