What's the stupidest thing you've done for love?

I used to cook in the dead of the night while my parents were asleep so the guy who held my fancy wouldn’t have to survive on hostel food.

Now, that sounds like a pretty normal thing to do until you factor in how I didn’t know how to cook, my only culinary experience being boiling tea(I had about a year’s experience, by then!), and that the kitchen was right outside my parents’ bedroom.

I’d start looking up recipes for Indian food once the clock struck twelve and would start planning what to cook first and shove into the fridge before I could get started on the next item. I’d end up spending the entire night on preparing these meals because, hey, how am I supposed to know you’re supposed to cook lentils in a pressure cooker and not a pan?!

I don’t even want to remember how I used to knead the dough at that time, much less the shape of my rotis. Them being cooked and not raw (completely) was an entirely different matter.

I’d spend hours waiting vigilantly in the kitchen, sometimes with the lights switched off, muffling my yelps when I’d burn my fingers trying to peek inside the pan to see whether the daal was cooked or not(I didn’t use mittens). Do you know how difficult it was to pull off these stunts with your parents sleeping barely three feet away?!

It’s a wonder they never woke up when I burnt sabjis (vegetables), dropped swear words when I burnt myself, and ran to the living room holding a full pressure cooker wrapped up in kitchen towels so I could hide the sound of its whistle going off at 3:45 AM.

Yes, I somehow learnt to use one, I just didn’t know they let off such shrill whistles. Grr.

This….comic show went on for about three months at the very least. Every single day for three months! Daal, beans, okra, paranthas(aloo and gobi![with pretty charcoal patterns!)], halwa, I cooked EVERYTHING.

Come to think of it, I was pretty naive thinking my father wouldn’t notice food disappearing from the food stores and a half charred pile of utensils desperately cleaned out(I tried) in the previously empty sinks (My mum was already paralysed by then).

If he did, he never mentioned it. Except for the time I tried to cook rajma(kidney beans) and it was such a disaster that even my father couldn’t recognise what it was when he unearthed the tupperware a month later while deep cleaning the freezer(Don’t look at me, I don't know anything!).

I’d even started buying veggies from my pocket money sometimes on the way back from university to cook them later (Gawd!)

My best accomplices in this charade, though, were four of the greatest friends I had in the MechE Department (yes, I’m an engineer, too) who were my daily food testers (read: guinea pigs). Anything I had cooked just HAD to go through them first so we could weed out something truly horrible. They even acted as tiffin boys, bringing my testament of love to their department and collecting the empty containers at the end of the day.

To this day, they absolutely refuse to eat when I want to cook for them. Unless it’s chocolate cake, of course, because I somehow rock at that.

I’m ending this by satiating your curiosity about the guy, who may or may not have eaten the food that was sent up to him, but never gave me anything but a compliment for the effort(which led to an enthusiastic conquest for new recipes every evening). That relationship never happened.

I am grateful for this experience, though, if only so because of the look of disbelief my mother’s face presented when I made an entirely edible meal for her many months after this debacle.

It was stupid, yes, but I did it out of love, and it played a hand in making me independent for when I needed to cook for myself. Never disclosing the amount of trips to the ER, though!