Cook, clean, pray: An essay on what it means to be an ordinary working-class woman in Srinagar

Wake up at Fajr Namaz or sometimes even earlier to knead piles of dough for the large joint family.

As soon as the dough is done, roll the rotis and cook them. There is a reason to do it super early. Cooking would mostly be done on subsidised cook stoves called heaters in the local parlance. These heaters have replaced the chulhas (mud ovens) and kerosene stoves. As the subsidised electricity ran erratically, cooking whenever electricity was available, often in the wee hours of the night, was necessary. Most of the time, lunch would also be cooked and wrapped in thick layers of old tweed pherans.

Though there are bakers in the city who bake bread for breakfast, how would an ayaldar (someone with a big family) afford the baker’s bread? The quantity of bread needed for the vast family would surpass the budget, so the women decided to make rotis at home. Besides, there is a lot of Barkat in making bread at home. In Kashmir, Barkat entails abundance, deriving more from a lesser monetary value.

Clean and mop the house and wash clothes manually daily.

So much so that the weathered hands looked like crumpled tissue paper; one would go on washing the patios...

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