One of my earliest memories around things breaking is taking them to my father.

A toy that had stopped working. A jar that wouldn’t open. A tap that was leaking. A cupboard hinge that had started creaking. A saucepan handle that needed tightening. I don’t have one cleare memory of when this began. But I remember the pattern.

If something needed fixing, my mother would often say, “I can’t do this. Call Achan.”

This would be entirely unremarkable except for the fact that my mother is an engineer.

Not just any engineer. She has a master’s degree from IIT Madras, went on to do a PhD, and spent almost her entire career as a scientist in space research where she climbed right to the top. I grew up knowing my mother was exceptionally intelligent and technically accomplished.

And yet, at home, there was an entire universe of things she simply didn’t do.

My father dealt with the car. He checked the water tank. He supervised yard work. He spoke to the man who came to pluck the coconuts. He dealt with the residents’ association and the people who appeared at the gate asking for donations. He climbed up to inspect things. He fixed things. He operated the vacuum cleaner and dealt with cobwebs in places nobody else could reach.

And on the other side, by the time I was fourteen or fifteen, there were things I was expected to do.

Assist in the kitchen, even though I was terrible there. Set the table. Help with the dishes. Dust or mop if the domestic help wasn’t around.

Nobody sat me down and presented this as a gender philosophy. There was no household manifesto saying screws belonged to men and dishes belonged to women.

There didn’t need to be.

You watch, you absorb. Eventually, the division of labour morphs into a non-conversation about competence.

There are things you do, and things somebody else does.

And then, I’ve never learned how to do this becomes I can’t do this.

If you had asked me ten years ago whether I could put up a clothesline, I would have said no.

Why?

Because I didn’t know how to tie the right knots.

Google existed. YouTube existed. Rope had existed for several thousand years. Knots are among the oldest pieces of human ingenuity. I am an engineer. I have functioning hands and a reasonable capacity to follow instructions.

None of this apparently occurred to me.

A clothesline belonged to that vast category of things I didn’t know how to do because I had never needed to know how to do them, because somewhere in my head they belonged to somebody else.

Usually, a man.

When I was twenty-one, I spent a brief period at Infosys in Mysore. One of my good friends there was from Haryana, and she told me she was looking forward to getting married.

Part of the reason, she said, was that whenever she went home, nobody came to the railway station to pick her up. Her family was always too busy.

I thought this was rather sweet. She wanted someone waiting for her when she arrived.

No, she explained. That wasn’t really it. She wanted someone to carry the luggage.

I remember feeling strangely sad about this. At twenty-one, the idea that one of the attractions of marriage was having a man in your life who would carry your bags seemed like an impoverished way to imagine a relationship.

She married soon after we finished training. I went off to business school. A couple of years later, we spoke again, and because her original comment had seemed so ridiculous to me that I had never forgotten it, I asked her about it.

She was happy.

Her husband was lovely, she told me. And he never let her carry anything.

There is an irritating complication here, which is that she may simply have known what she wanted.

There are perfectly reasonable arguments to be made for traditional roles. There are arguments for chivalry. There are people who derive enormous pleasure from being cared for in particular ways, and people who derive enormous pleasure from doing the caring.

If a woman likes her husband carrying her suitcase and her husband likes carrying it, what do we care, really?

The problem begins somewhere else.

It begins when a division of labour becomes a theory of capability.

I like it when he carries my suitcase is not the same statement as carrying heavy things is something men do.

My husband usually fixes the tap is not the same statement as I can’t fix a tap.

The difference seems trivial until you realise how much of your life can disappear into it.

I know a man who, shortly after getting married, had an argument with his wife about doing dishes by hand.

His objection wasn’t that he expected her to do all the housework. He was perfectly happy to hire domestic help. He would pay for it.

What enraged him was the suggestion that he should wash the dishes.

How dare she ask him to do that?

I find that distinction fascinating.

Because once again, the dishes themselves were almost irrelevant. The work would get done. He was willing to pay for it.

The offence lay in what doing the dishes appeared to say about him.

I have seen versions of the inverse response directed at women.

A woman fixes something mechanical and there is sometimes a little flicker of surprise.

Oh. You can do that?

A man performs work coded as female and, in some environments, risks feeling diminished by it. A woman performs work coded as male and can become unusually impressive simply for having done it.

During Covid, when the house help wasn't around, and my mother developed a fungal infection on her nail bed, my Achan and brother helped her with the dishes and she is still singing their praises.

The task has acquired symbolic weight wildly disproportionate to the task itself.

I once told a young Frenchman about an Indian friend who desperately wanted a Ducati Monster. Her brother had one. She loved it and intended to earn her way up to buying one herself.

My friend was about five foot four and perhaps fifty kilos.

His immediate response was to snort unattractively and say, yeah, like she can handle an 890 cc bike.

He knew nothing about her riding ability. He knew nothing about her.

That wasn’t the point.

He could look at her and already know what sort of machine she should ride.

Women respond to these stories in different ways.

Some absorb them completely and feel genuinely helpless when there isn’t a man around to do certain things.

Some go violently in the opposite direction, I can do anything a man can do. The task becomes proof.

Some discover competence by necessity. Nobody is around, something needs doing, and eventually you think, fine, let me see if I can figure this out.

Some do it resentfully, with the persistent sense that having to do these things themselves is evidence of something missing from their lives.

I don’t find any of these particularly useful anymore.

If something in my house needs doing, there are now three questions that interest me.

Can I do it?

If I can’t, can I learn?

And if I can learn, is it worth the trouble?

Sometimes the answer to the third question is no. Then I call someone.

This is not a moral failure.

The stranger part is that these inherited stories don’t only tell us what we can’t do.

They also tell us what we should be able to do.

Years ago, when I first began living without flatmates, I wanted plants.

Partly, I think, because I genuinely liked them. But there was something else mixed into it then. Women in my family grew things. My grandmothers had plants and trees. My mother had plants. Flowers and greenery belonged somehow to my mental furniture of a certain kind of woman and a certain kind of home.

And I was terrible at it.

Things died.

I tried to propagate mint from store-bought stems. It failed. I tried again and again. Rosemary took several attempts. One seedling apparently floated away in heavy rains. How?!

Plants that seemed perfectly happy when I bought them would begin a slow march towards death shortly after entering my care.

And I took this far too personally.

A dead plant wasn’t simply a dead plant. Somewhere in my head, it was evidence.

I couldn’t keep it alive. I had failed at something I thought I should naturally be able to do.

At one point, a therapist suggested that perhaps I was too invested in a plant’s life cycle. Seeds sprout. Plants grow. They flower. They reproduce. They age. They die. They return to the soil.

This is what living things do.

I understood what she was saying. It didn’t help very much. I continued to get absurdly upset when things died.

And then, something changed.

There was no epiphany. I didn’t suddenly discover the secret to gardening. I just kept doing it.

I bought more plants. I experimented. Plenty of them failed. Some didn’t. I began noticing where the light fell. I figured out what liked the bright light of an open terrace and what needed shade. I learned about water and drainage and root systems. I created little microclimates. I started collecting orchids.

Along the way, I stopped asking the plants to prove something about me. And they became much easier to love.

Recently, a friend came over, looked around at my terrace and said something along the lines of, “Wow. You really have green fingers.”

I almost laughed. Then I looked around.

There were fifty or sixty plants. Palms. Roses. Hibiscus. Hydrangea. Rain lilies. Jasmine. Ixora. Honeysuckle. A night blooming cereus. Succulents. All kinds of herbs. Even a guava. Eight orchids. Plants I had propagated. Plants I had moved around until I found the particular corner in which they seemed happiest.

Apparently, at some point, I had become a person who was good with plants.

I hadn’t noticed. Perhaps because by then I was no longer trying to become her.

I was just gardening.

I think that is what interests me now about all these tiny tasks to which we attach such enormous stories.

The inherited story can say you can’t do this.

Or it can say you should already know how to do this.

It can tell a man that washing a dinner plate diminishes him and a woman that tightening a screw makes her exceptional.

It can make carrying a suitcase evidence of love, riding a motorcycle evidence of transgression, and killing a rosemary plant evidence of inadequacy.

Sometimes the story produces helplessness. Sometimes it produces defiance. Both can give the task far more power than it deserves.

I don’t particularly want to prove anymore that I can do anything a man can do. There are things plenty of men can do that I can’t. There are things I can do that plenty of men can’t. There are things I could learn and have absolutely no interest in learning.

The more useful freedom is smaller than that.

A few days ago, I needed to put up a clothesline.

At one end, I needed something that would hold. So I learned a round turn and two half hitches - take the rope around the support twice, then secure it with two half hitches.

At the other end, I needed to get the line taut. So I learned a trucker’s hitch. You make a loop in the standing part of the rope, take the free end around the opposite support and back through the loop, and suddenly you have a crude little pulley system. Pull the free end and the line tightens.

Neither is particularly complicated. People have been tying versions of these knots for centuries. I simply had never imagined them as knowledge that belonged to me.

It took several attempts. I got irritated. I went back to the instructions. I tried again. Eventually the rope tightened and held.

And that was it.

No breakthrough. No triumph over patriarchy. No discovery of my limitless potential.

Just a piece of rope doing what I needed it to do.

Sometimes a knot can just be a knot.

A screw can just need tightening.

A plant can die.

A suitcase can be heavy.

A motorcycle can be a machine you have or haven’t learned to ride.

And perhaps one of the true pleasures of getting older is discovering how many things you once thought said something profound about you.. were just bloody tasks.