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You remember how gorgeous our house is ? Here is the one exception: our kitchen, the most lovelessly executed room in this otherwise beautiful dreamhouse.

It boggles the mind, for a Californian, to see a kitchen like this: small, mean, gray rectangular room, fluorescent lights, meager stove and sink, cabinets little more than chucked at the walls, sharp edges everywhere, and no ornament at all. Where we come from, the kitchen is where the cool people hang out at parties; it’s where PIE is made; people talk and commiserate and chop veggies and zest lemons; wisdom is passed on, and life is lived. It’s the heart of the house.

This upper-class Indian home starkly reveals a different mindset: the kitchen is for somebody else. All the assumptions and attitudes that follow that single statement are distasteful to put into words; and thankfully, there’s no need: it’s all expressed pretty effectively in very structure of the house.