I found it while walking through the home-goods section of T.J. Maxx, the American retail equivalent of the Garden of Earthly Delights, at 8:00 on a Tuesday night in 2015. It was two days after Easter, and in this Hieronymus Bosch land of shopping anarchy, the shelves were stocked with pastel-colored objects of uncertain usefulness: sacks of fruit-medley popcorn dyed green and purple; a giant tub of millennial-pink Himalayan crystal salt. Somewhere among these novelties I spotted a carelessly abandoned gadget calling itself the Dash Rapid Egg Cooker. The cashier who rang me up did not share my enthusiasm for the cheery cockiness of its packaging, which proclaimed that it “Perfectly Cooks 6 Eggs at a Time!” Baffled, she asked me a question, the answer to which would have embarrassed anyone but me: “Don’t you know how to boil water?”
No. I didn’t.
And at 22, not only did I not know how to boil water, I didn’t even know how to turn on a stove. Now, these may both seem like gaps in knowledge that could have been easily rectified with a 60-second trip to the kitchen, but you see: I did not have one.
Earlier that day, I had finally moved into my first solo “apartment”: the garden-level basement of a Manhattan brownstone that was rented to me by an absentee owner, which, in lieu of a real kitchen, came outfitted with a minifridge, a hot plate and a microwave. That evening, after a long day of unpacking, I sat down on the building’s stoop, ate my way through a bag of discounted Cadbury Mini Eggs and, after 20 minutes spent wallowing in disbelief at where life had deposited me, broke into a series of earthquake-size sobs. But it wasn’t misery making me dry-heave — it was relief.
At 22, not only did I not know how to boil water, I didn’t even know how to turn on a stove.
In 2013, I fled my old life for New York, the promised land for stunted young adults evading responsibility. I had spent my childhood, teenhood and earliest adulthood consumed with daydreams of an imaginary future in which I lived alone — my only ambition in life. In these painstakingly detailed fantasies, the greatest luxury I could imagine was that my space and my empty hours all belonged to me and me only. In these visions, there was no one snatching “storybooks” (the beloved Indian-parent euphemism even if you read adult fiction) from my hands and barking at me to get up and make tea whenever guests came to visit, or grating at me to bring out hot rotis straight from the stove and put them onto the plates of fathers and uncles. The milieu I was raised in tried to drill into me the idea that keeping a home, and the domestic labor it entails — the cooking, the serving, the dusting, the wiping — were acts of profound nobility. That they were crucial to the formation of the only life I was predestined for, one that came prepackaged with a husband and children, two species, I had been warned, that were equally incapable of feeding themselves, and whose supervision would fall to me.
In rebellion, I refused to learn even a single tenet of good housekeeping. If I remained useless in the kitchen and egregiously incompetent at household chores, then I could at least retain some control over my life — and no amount of yelling, berating or shaming from parents, elders or concerned strangers could sway me from this zealotry.
At no point during this teenage mutiny, however, had I considered what I would do if these prolonged daydreams were ever granted. It escaped me that actually living alone as an adult involves being in possession of some basic skills I had avoided acquiring. Yes, now I was finally king of my kitchenless fief. But what was I going to eat? Cinnamon Toast Crunch and rubbery takeout every day, for eternity? That night I paid the skeptical cashier $19 for the spaceship-shaped device and took it home, feeling the first cracks of doubt emerging in my lifelong belligerence toward domesticity.
It escaped me that actually living alone as an adult involves being in possession of some basic skills I had avoided acquiring.
The Dash Rapid Egg Cooker is exactly what the name declares, a device that has precisely one purpose: It cooks eggs, rapidly. In the rare case of reality’s matching up with an advertising slogan, they are indeed perfect. I followed the instructions, starting by placing just one egg and pouring in the few centimeters of water it needed to cook. Through some magic of steam and electrical engineering, the Dash magically conjured an egg of ideal consistency in less time than it took me to brush my teeth, wash my face and apply my acne cream (I did thankfully have a bathroom).
As French chefs and inept bachelors of various nationalities can attest, mastering a perfect egg is the gateway to mastering a cuisine altogether. A good egg is breakfast, lunch, dinner and all snacks in between. A good egg is the foundation of bigger cooking ambitions, now that you have mastered the trickiest basic of them all. A good egg is the start of complete self-sufficiency, because it is a meal and an accompaniment all in itself. On that April night nine years ago, giddy and drunk on my own invincibility, I ate the first thing I had ever “cooked” by myself, for myself: a half-boiled egg, sliced neatly in half on top of plain supermarket white bread that I lathered with cold scrapes of salted butter and thin slivers of red onion.
Until then, mine was a life that often felt cobbled together from accidents and gambles. That immaculate half-boiled egg, with its semi-liquefied insides roiling on my tongue, was the first thing I felt I’d actually earned on my own. I still didn’t know how to boil water. I had a job that paid me the queenly sum of $30,000 per year, yet it was still more money than I’d ever conceived of.
More important, I finally — finally — had the only thing I ever really wanted: my independence, my time.
Iva Dixit is a staff editor at the magazine. She has previously written about the joys of eating raw onions, the evergreen popularity of Sean Paul and why “Oppenheimer” is for the girlies.
