The literature of ordinary life

Have you ever noticed that milk possesses a personality disorder?

Leave it alone on the stove while you answer the doorbell or turn around to just water that one money plant near the kitchen window, and it erupts from the saucepan like a volcano that has just discovered it has been left out of the family WhatsApp group. But stand there watching it with the concentration of a cricket umpire, and it merely sits there as motionless as a government file awaiting approval.

I conclude that milk suffers from stage fright. It refuses to perform before a live audience.

This delightfully pointless yet profoundly important observation reminded me of one of my favourite passages from Three Men in a Boat. More than a century before productivity gurus advised us to “live in the moment”, Jerome K. Jerome had already discovered that the moment itself was the story.

He wrote that the only way to make a kettle boil was to pretend not to care. Put it on the fire, walk away and busy yourself with something else. The kettle, like an overpaid film star, would never perform if it knew you were waiting. Three grown men trying to make tea should not have become one of literature’s most memorable episodes.

And yet, it did. Because Jerome wasn’t really writing about a kettle. He was writing about us, our extraordinary talent for turning the simplest tasks into Olympic events.

The greatest writers have always known that life rarely enters accompanied by violins. In reality, it appears wearing rubber slippers, slightly faded pyjamas and unkempt hair. The mundane but relatable happenings in our lives that hardly get a place in ‘serious’ writing usually make an interesting and relatable read, like:

The television remote never disappears. It merely goes into witness protection beneath the most unsuspecting person’s thigh, remaining there in silent protest until every family member has been accused of theft.

Every Diwali, fairy lights emerge from storage looking as though they have spent the year attending advanced knot-tying workshops conducted by retired sailors with anger-management issues.

Socks in my house don’t vanish inside washing machines. They are quietly recruited in a parallel universe where lonely left socks finally find compatible right socks from a completely different place in time and space.

Plastic containers and their lids have all the emotional commitment of people on dating apps. They inhabit the same drawer but steadfastly refuse to acknowledge each other’s existence. Somewhere in the kitchen is the perfect lid. It simply belongs to another container, another decade or perhaps another postcode.

The pressure cooker possesses impeccable comic timing. It can remain silent for twenty minutes, but the instant your phone rings and it’s a call from an interviewer, it begins whistling with the urgency of an overexcited cricket commentator announcing the final over of a World Cup match.

Even a packet of chips has a wicked sense of humour. Open it at four in the afternoon, and it parts gracefully. Attempt the same feat at midnight while everyone is asleep, and it crackles with the enthusiasm of Diwali fireworks, exposing your secret snack mission to the entire household with someone quipping sarcastically, “Aren’t you on a diet?”

Whoever designs those tiny hotel toiletry bottles clearly harbours a grudge against anyone over forty. Without my reading glasses, I peer at the microscopic labels with the intensity of Sherlock Holmes examining a crime scene. After thirty seconds of futile investigation, I decide to play ‘Bathroom Roulette’. If my hair feels unusually moisturised and my arms suspiciously squeaky clean, I know I’ve chosen…creatively.

These moments will never make it to award-winning books. But they make joyous literature.

Charles Dickens understood that the quickest route to a reader’s heart wasn’t always through complex story lines. In A Christmas Carol, the Cratchits’ humble Christmas dinner with its goose, pudding and crackling fire tells us more about love, gratitude and family than pages of lofty sentiment ever could.

RK Narayan found entire universes beneath a tamarind tree. In An Astrologer’s Day, he pauses to notice the peanut seller renaming his wares every evening with the optimism of a modern marketing executive, the flickering lamps of street vendors, and the comforting chaos of an Indian bazaar settling into dusk. Nothing extraordinary happens in those details until Narayan notices them.

And then there is Ruskin Bond, who has spent an entire lifetime persuading us that rain deserves its own chapter, that tea is an emotion masquerading as a beverage and that watching mist drift across a hillside can be as thrilling as a high-speed car chase. Reading Bond feels like being told that it is perfectly acceptable to sit on a verandah doing absolutely nothing because “nothing” is usually where life quietly happens.

Perhaps that is the secret all these writers share.

They don’t chase extraordinary lives.

They pay extraordinary attention to ordinary ones.

The rest of us hurry through the day collecting deadlines and discount coupons. They collect biscuit crumbs of memory. Tiny moments.

Pocket-sized miracles.

Perhaps that is why these passages linger long after we have forgotten elaborate plots and dramatic endings. We remember the kettle, not because it boiled, but because it refused to. We remember the bazaar before we remember the prophecy. We remember the cup of tea before we remember the journey.

And every time the milk boils over the very second I turn my back, I can’t help thinking that somewhere Jerome K. Jerome is laughing quietly into his teacup, Dickens is asking for another slice of pudding, Narayan is strolling through a bustling bazaar, Ruskin Bond is watching the rain from his verandah…

…and the milk, as always, has stolen the last word.

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