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Had your tiffin?
C.K. MEENA
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The government might ban junk food in schools but what about junk food at home?
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Let us not forget that there were mothers who couldn't cook to save their lives and that even the best of them had their disasters
PHOTO: AP
STARTING TOO EARLY There's a budding generation whose mothers can't cook or whose cooking they will not remember because they've tasted so little of it
I shall carry with me to my grave the memory of Daulat Dastur's tiffin box. It was made of aluminium but that was not its most remarkable aspect. On certain days its contents would drive me insane with desire. When the lunch bell rang we would rush with our boxes towards the parapets in the corridor and I would make it a point to sidle up to Daulat. Would she, wouldn't she, have brought chapathis today? Yessss! Just one bite, please please please. Thick, soft, dry and lightly dusted with flour, they came with a choice of two fillings: small cubes of potato, red and yellow from the turmeric and chilli powder, fried to a crumble, and ripe banana finely sliced and ghee-fried in strips of black and gold. To my great good fortune Daulat was enchanted with the pale contents of my steel dabba, the home-churned butter and sugar that accompanied the inevitable idlis, and so it was a fair exchange. "Yummy," she would say as she licked the sweet butter off her fingers. If there is one thing that school taught me it is that the grass is always greener in your classmate's tiffin box.
The four-tiered tiffin carrier had grown outdated by then, and boxes were more hep. In the following decades I would see the metal tiffin box replaced by the plastic lunch box — note the change in both material and terminology. The colonial word "tiffin", for food that is eaten midmorning or at midday, is not yet obsolete. "Had your tiffin?" is a common-enough south Indian greeting; you also have the Udupi restaurant that calls itself a tiffany, as in Sri Someshwara Tiffany's. But the tiffin box has gone the way of the dodo and the lunch box is in danger of following suit.
Why carry lunch when the canteen is at your service? Canteens first sprouted in colleges and have now taken root in schools, possibly as a result of popular demand from working mothers. Busy mama slips some money into child's hand and says, eat in the canteen today. Child is thrilled because (a) she loves junk food and (b) it's not cool to carry a lunch box anyway. Her glee eases mama's guilt. Everybody's happy.
If you're that one-in-a-thousand father who cooks lunch for your children every day, please accept my warmest salaams. Women usually feel custom-bound to commandeer the kitchen. Traditional women still wake up at 4 a.m. to cook elaborate breakfasts and lunches for the family before going to work. These are the kind that grinds masalas from scratch. Most urban women, however, take shortcuts.
Now, shortcuts are fine. But there is a significant tribe of twenty-somethings who are taking convenience to the next level. They're offloading their babies onto crèches at the earliest (one tried her luck with her 14-month-old son) and popping junk into lunch boxes. Along with the three Rs the toddlers imbibe the three Cs — cola, chips and chocolate. The government might ban junk food in schools but what about junk food at home?
A group of young urban mothers sat in wide-eyed wonder while a nutritionist gave them commonsensical tips on what to feed their pre-school kids. A round of questions followed, and according to the nutritionist the women didn't know the first thing about parenting, let alone cooking. "Why do they have children at all?" she told me in rhetorical exasperation. One of them had complained: "My son won't eat anything but chocolates and biscuits." The boy was barely three. So who got him addicted in the first place?
While we're on the subject of addiction, I've been secretly gloating over the ban on cola although I don't agree with it on principle. If you ask me, all colas taste awful, make your nostrils burn, don't quench your thirst, and come in useful only when you want to disguise the taste of cheap rum. But college students, being adults, have the right to drink or smoke whatever is freely available in the market. When it comes to schools, it is mothers who should be more worried than the government about what their children drink. Cola is no health drink, capiche?
Speaking of health, maybe this is the right moment to dwell in loving remembrance on that enduring illusion called "mom's home-cooking". I call it an illusion because it is always recollected in rosier hues than it deserves. Let us not forget that there were mothers who couldn't cook to save their lives and that even the best of them had their disasters. (A friend described her mother's cabbage-and-potato palya to which she developed a lifelong aversion, and another spoke of the beans curry her amma would make when she was in a bad mood.) On the whole, however, earlier generations of women elevated cooking to a fine art. It might well turn into a lost art. There's a budding generation whose mothers can't cook or whose cooking they will not remember because they've tasted so little of it.
So be it. One cannot turn back the clock. The kitchen is the last priority of today's career woman. As for me, I am no champion cook but I do love to eat and I am fortunate that I have friends who are fond of feeding me (and who therefore deserve a column all to themselves). As long as there are people like them who keep alive the art of cooking, the lunch box will continue to delight one and all.
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