One week after Spain, I’m back in India. I’ve brought Rocky with me. Not because I wanted to, but because he hid in my suitcase. According to him, raccoons don’t show up on baggage scanners. “We’re like vampires, you know?” he tells me. “Stealth experts!”

I tell him I’d never heard that vampires don’t show up on baggage scanners — anyway, why would a vampire hide inside a bag? — but he’s not listening. He and Bins are busy in the kitchen. “You’re distracting my sous chef,” says Bins to me over his shoulder. He’s frying up a mound of onions in a fancy new frying pan that’s neither non-stick nor cast-iron but some newfangled ceramic-coated aluminium device.

“What’s a sous chef?” Rocky asks. “The MAIN chef,” says Bins, lying expertly. He knows that if he says it’s more like “assistant”, our little furry friend would get offended and go off in a huff. “It’s the one who does the chopping and peeling and dicing of all the stuff that makes a dish delicious. Without the sous chef everyone starves because the food’s too boring to eat.” Rocky beams. “Yes!” he agrees, peeling ginger with his teeth, “that sounds like me!”

Bins has been in Delhi for two months now, on his own. We’ve not managed to find ourselves a replacement for our late, excellent, much-mourned cook. Initially Bins managed with takeouts and the help of our upstairs neighbour’s cook. Then he discovered that it’s cheaper and more adventurous to teach himself to cook. I’d been hearing about his culinary adventure while I was still on the other side of the planet. Now I’m witnessing the transformation first hand.

“The main thing,” explains Bins to Rocky, “is to cook the onions just right.” Rocky is up on the counter, tail in the air. “But onions are soooo STINKY!” he complains. “They hurt my nose!” Bins shakes a finger at him. “No, no, my friend! It is a noble invention, the onion,” he says. “When it melts with the heat, it forms a hot, silky medium in which all the other eatables relax like...like...” he searches for an apt analogy. I chime in with, “Naked ladies in a hot tub?”

Bins grins in my direction. “Well! That’s a steamy way of putting it, but why not? If, into the silky bath of the onion, we add ginger and garlic, they infuse the naked ladies like perfumed bath salts!” Today’s menu involves two veggies: bhindi and karela. Rocky has never seen or heard of either. “Eeks!” he squeaks after biting into the karela, “this one’s poison-bitter! Who wants to eat THAT?” Bins gives him a philosophical look. “Just you wait,” he declares. “Once those veggies have spent a little time in their onion bath, they lose all their bad temper and begin to smile!”

Half an hour later the three of us are smiling. Rice, dal, bhindi, karela and crunchy fresh cucumber — “Yum!” purrs Rocky. “Hooray for onion baths!”

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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