A few years ago, I saw an ad on Pakistani TV that made me, and many others, cringe. In it, a little girl is shown kneading a little ball of dough and making a roti, and her mother announces, with a drum roll, to a jubilant family, “Choti ki pehli gol roti!” (“The little girl’s first round flat bread!”) I despaired at our homegrown capitalists’ attempt to turn girls into kitchen slaves at a time when women in Pakistan were beginning to fly fighter jets and run the foreign ministry.

Roti is a staple in northern India and Pakistan, consumed for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Meat eater, vegetarian or vegan, you will always have your roti. It’s so central to our cuisine in my home province, Punjab, that when we want to say, “Let’s eat,” we say, “Let’s have roti” or “I’d like to invite you to have roti at my house.” We of course mean an entire meal that will be consumed with a lot of roti.

Roti is almost always made fresh. And although in restaurants and bread shops, it’s mostly men who, hunched over clay ovens, produce industrial quantities of it, at home it’s usually women who have to sweat over the griddle three times a day, every day. When I saw the little girl with the perfect roti, I worried about her being cheered on to join the millions of women who are expected to churn out roti after roti their entire lives. I also worried about her for another reason: Choti, you may not always get that roti right.

I was thinking of my own struggles.

More than 20 years ago when I went to ask my future wife’s hand in marriage, my prospective father-in-law wasn’t very keen on the match. After deriding my choice of profession and arguing about the futility of young love, he tried to dissuade me by saying, “My daughter doesn’t know how to make a roti.” I said: “I don’t either. We should get along.”