Adventures in Cooking: Food drive of Sakhi

Majida Rashid

“I will not give you fruit when father brings it, if you tease me about my nickname,” I would tell my brother’s childhood friend when we were younger. He reminded me of what I used say when we talked decades later. 

The conversation took me back to an event and made me aware of the power of food and how people use it to punish or reward others. 

Fresh fruit of the season was delivered to our house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, several times a week because my father had given a standing order to a shopkeeper in the vegetable market.  Father also insisted that we eat plenty of oranges. Oranges in Abbottabad were sold not by weight or by the dozen but by the hundreds. 

Our house in Abbottabad had two households. My polygamous father and his second wife, their children and mother-in-law lived on one side of the house and I lived with my mother, who was his first wife, and siblings on the opposite side.

One morning, soon after father left for work, I was standing alongside his second wife in the courtyard. There was a knock at the front door. Before quickly going to her side of the house, the wife told the knocker to enter. 

A man carrying a huge brown basket over his head, oranges peeking through the holes of the weave entered the courtyard, put the basket down on the ground and left.  Father’s mother-in-law came and pulled the basket towards her side. 

I went to my mother’s bedroom where she was sitting on a white Persian carpet and sewing lace on her shirt. After a while, the second wife brought oranges piled on a large dinner plate and  explained why she was keeping the rest for herself. Even as a four-year-old child I knew what she was saying made no sense.   

Over a decade later when I was married and living in Islamabad and going to college, the in-laws, four adults and two teenagers, visited us from time to time.  Other than washing and ironing their clothes, I did every possible thing as a young girl who was not even eighteen to make their stay comfortable. I even cooked for them every day.

But when I returned home from school after having spent a long day without eating anything, there would be no food waiting for me. They would finish all the food that I had cooked the previous day, leaving me nothing. They knew that my timetable didn’t match with the college bus and I had to walk two miles each way. But in my naivety I never thought there wouldn’t be any food for me.

Due to my youth I didn’t recognize their behavioral pattern and I never considered refusing to cook for the couple of months they were staying with us. 

One of my older sisters-in-law would forbid me from drinking milk, telling me to leave it for her younger brother. On many occasions, even after she was married, she would bring food to the house and eat it with her mother and sister in a locked room where I was not invited even though I would be the only other adult in the house. 

I attributed their behavior to their poverty. We think only poor people don’t have food.  

What I never realized then was that taking food away from me was not only their show of power over me but also their way of rejecting me. They never liked me. 

Decades later, when we were living in Botswana, Africa, my husband took me on a vacation to Pakistan. Two days later he disappeared with my passport, my return ticket and my national identity card because the night before we had an argument and I refused to go with him when he came to pick me up from my sibling’s house.

I experienced a vision of black walls, cold sweats, no money, no hope and no appetite. But my sibling insisted that I eat and I complied even though the food tasted horrible. Only now do I realize that food provided the physical and mental sustenance I needed to carry on.

The dust of the drama had not yet settled when a family member called and said they had not eaten for two days. If being abandoned by my husband didn’t put a knife in my heart, that call did.  

My daughter says, “Mama you bring women from the neighborhood like stray cats.” 

Then the first thing I do is cook fresh food for them. I also take cooked food to small stores that I frequent without realizing the reason behind my action.

Humans have used food to show love or to reprimand others. History is full of stories where armies lay siege to a town to cut off its food supply. To flex the muscles of leaders of other countries, powerful governments impose food sanctions until those leaders get in compliance. Why would individuals be any different? 

Children also pick up the food game to show their power as was apparent from my conversation with my brother’s friend. I was mimicking my successful lawyer father’s second wife because he lived with her and not my mother.

To avoid feeling the pain of my experiences I had pushed them deep down. Only recently when I attended a workshop that required participants to ask friends and family to donate food was my attention brought to the ‘Food Drive’ of Sakhi, after a friend donated to the organization. It also jogged my memory of my experiences around food. Sakhi, a nonprofit based in New York, provides hope to the survivors of domestic and gender violence.

I’m reaching out to you and asking you to close your eyes and think how you felt when you couldn’t have your favorite cup of coffee or a bite of food. Then think of those people who go without food either because they may not have money to buy food or their abusers withhold food as a tool to get obedience and submissiveness. 

To learn more about the organization, visit www.sakhi.org. Please donate now.  Thank you.