In Aligarh jail, it is the men who do the cooking. Women eat what men cook here. Jail staff say they could find no other solution to the skirmishes the women got into in the kitchen.

ALIGARH: In Aligarh jail, it is the men who do the cooking. Women eat what men cook here. Jail staff say they could find no other solution to the skirmishes the women got into in the kitchen.

Men cook in peace, jail staff say, while the women squabble endlessly. Gender stereotypes at work? Staff swear they are only telling you their own experience. Two years ago, there were separate kitchens for men and women inmates. So severe was all the squabbling in the women's kitchen, and so relentless, that a decision was taken to shut down the women's kitchen.

During festivals like Navratra and Ramzan, however, women are allowed to cook special meals in their own kitchen permissible to devout people on fast. Jail staffers say managing the women during that time is hard.

The officer in charge of the women's wing in the jail, unwilling to be named, told TOI, “There are many reasons for all the spite in the kitchen — caste is one big reason. Someone from another caste just has to touch a utensil, and there is a tantrum. Once the food is cooked, there is endless bickering about its quality , about someone jumping the line... It's a headache."

Women posted in the jail said much time is spent firefighting in the kitchen. Once the routine cooking by the women was discontinued, tempers have also stayed more manageable, staff say .

Bhurra, serving time in jail for murder, told TOI, “There are 100 of us who cook for the 3,000 inmates. The food we cook is also taken to the 121 in the women's wing and 10 kids. What I understand is that while we men manage to cook in peace, the women get into such terrible fights that they could end up killing each other. We have heard tales of kitchen fights escalating to battles — someone's hair pulled, someone else showing off the good food she got from back home, an getting so angry one woman getting so angry that she just wrenched out the gas pipe from the cylinder. Then, finally , we started cooking for them too."

A woman in the jail, however, said the fights were petty. She explained how one woman took a whole hour to boil a little milk; or how some woman's child was hungry and crying, but the burner was kept busy; how one woman had taken to making tea for herself five times a day.

Superintendent Viresh Raj Sharma said the women's kitchen had been shut down by the time he took charge.“The problem, I think, is nobody wants to cook but everybody wants to eat,“ he explained, with the air of someone who had got to the very essence of the matter.