Opinion A room of one’s own – in the kitchen, balcony

For a while, I believed in the words of Virginia Woolf — if a woman wanted to write novels, she must have money and a room of her own. I felt that solitude alone could bring pondering deep enough to go to the root of the problem. A table. A door to shut. A person who is never distracted.

I interpreted that sentence as a wishful, even desperate, demand for space that most of us have in common but is still hard to get.

However, as years went by, it became clear that the feminine creativity, in particular, was not so much waiting for ideal conditions, but struggling to be born in bits — often between errands, during brief pauses, in places that were taken rather than given.

Home, the place often regarded as unremarkable, is where the constant flow of new ideas comes up. House management makes it necessary to combine memory, timing and feelings in an elaborate way. It is a kind of reasoning that people seldom recognise.

You plan, foresee, handle several things at once and fly over the same day, but with a slightly different perspective. No one gives you a cheer, or declares a work of art finished, but your creativity in the form of motion is identical.

Homes in literature have always been ambivalent areas — both a refuge and a prison. It is a “silent” place where thoughts come into being, far from the limelight. And the kitchen, being the centre of the house, not only has the loudest presence but is also, sometimes, the quietest stage. I think of mornings when the kitchen feels like both a laboratory and a meditation hall. The first whistle of the pressure cooker, the hiss of mustard seeds in oil, the sharp scent of ginger rising with steam. You are thinking all the time — adjusting the flame, eyeballing salt, rescuing milk just before it spills over.

I have come to think that thinking is not just a cerebral activity but physical. It occurs through contact, repetition. The way we can fold a bedsheet, recall where the keys are or sense intuitively when someone in the household needs tea — these are intelligences that no diploma can calculate. They derive from attention, and attention, Simone Weil so beautifully wrote, is the purest and rarest kind of generosity.

All the same, one can’t help but notice how gender haunts this place.

The work that makes the house go around — the cleaning, the cooking, the caregiving — is invisible, unpaid and devalued. Women are referred to as multitaskers, as if that were a compliment, but multitasking is another term for fragmentation. The mind that nurtures all those others hardly ever gets to nurture itself.

And yet, there is a quiet strength to that fragmentation as well. To think in fragments is to collect the world in pieces — to know how to begin again each morning, to imagine possibilities from the unwritten. I felt it more acutely than ever during the pandemic. The house was both a sanctuary and a prison. Each corner overflowed with work and, yet, in the exhaustion, a moment of peculiar tenderness — a rearranged shelf, a new leaf emerging on a plant, a window catching the evening light just so.

Maybe that’s what Woolf actually meant — not that a woman’s imagination requires a place of its own, but that it requires acknowledgment. A room of one’s own may be anywhere — in the kitchen early in the morning, a balcony thrumming with laundry lines, a notebook next to a sleeping child.

The author is a freelance writer 

National Editor Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column