S K Sinha

Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India

“She has eaten everything!” Kaamini remarked with admiration, looking at our daughter’s plate.

“Even my son doesn’t leave anything in his plate,” Shaalini my wife replied.

We were in a reception party hosted by a relative. A son from the host’s family had been newly married. A cousin of my wife Shaalini was also there with his wife Kaamini and children. Shaalini and Kaamini got along well. Since the two ladies had met after a long time, they were sitting together at the same table. Kaamini was coaxing her youngest daughter to eat all that she had been served, but her daughter was full and did not want to eat any more. There were still one puri, a little rice, and some vegetables left in her plate.

“How nice that Arpita does not fuss over eating!” Kaamini commented, praising our daughter. She was embarrassed that her daughter was wasting so much food.

“We have told our children to take only what they like, and take only that much which they can finish,” Shaalini replied, telling Kaamini the rule she had set for the children to observe at a party. Kamini wanted to hide her embarrassment behind her comment that Arpita was not fussy, but her daughter was fussy about food. Shaalini made it clear that the credit for Arpita not wasting food lay in the training she had given to her children.

“Sanjay is very particular about it. He hates people wasting food”, Shalini told Kamini referring to me. My wife was trying to impress on Kamini, without directly blaming her, that it was her fault if her daughter was wasting food.

I was standing a little away from them, but overheard their conversation. Shalini had given some credit to me also. My hatred over wasting food is rooted in my childhood. I fondly remember that woman who used to come to clean our toilets. It was that woman who taught me not to waste food. The conversation between the two ladies took me back when I was a ten-year old child, in the mid Nineteen Sixties.

“I can’t finish it,” I said to my mother.

“Okay, eat as much as you can. Leave the rest.”

My winter vacation had started. It was around twelve in the noon. I was about to finish my lunch. Rice, dal, potato-and-pea curry and fried brinjal– I had been served for lunch. My mother had served a little more rice than I could eat.

My house was an old fashioned house. In the middle of the house was an open space, square in shape, which we called aangan in Magahi. Around that open space was built a two-storeyed house, the ground floor and the first floor. All around the open space there was a corridor –some five feet wide, and all the rooms had their entry and exit from the corridor. This corridor and the aangan were the living space for us. Most of the household chores were carried on there. We passed our day working and sitting in the corridor and the aangan.

I was sitting in the corridor on a divan made of wood. It was used without a mattress on it. We called it chowki. This had a multipurpose utility. We at times slept on it; the children studied on it; my mother chopped vegetables on it; and we ate sitting on it. When some lady from the neighbourhood came to see my mother, they used to sit on the wooden plank and gossip. It was a bed, a study table, a dining table, a chopping board, and a sofa too – all-in-one kind of a thing.

Sitting on the chowki I was taking lunch. My mother was sitting on the floor reclining against a pillar. She preferred sitting on the floor. In a corner of the corridor, near the passage which led to the exit of the house, was sitting the woman who came for cleaning our toilets. She was not supposed to touch the doors or the walls of the passage leading to the toilets which were tucked in the far corner of the house.  When she left, my mother took some water in a bucket and sprinkled it on all the doors and walls which might have been touched by the cleaning woman, almost washing them. The floor which had been traversed by her was washed. This ritual appeared strange to me.

“She is an untouchable,” I was told later when I asked my mother.

“She is an unclean person by blood due to her birth. The society has prohibited her from touching anything or anybody in our house.” My mother said to explain it further.

Before she left it was her usual custom to sit in one corner of the veranda and gossip with my mother. She brought all kinds of news from different localities which she visited for cleaning toilets. She would update my mother with the latest news like which housewife was carrying, what led to a quarrel between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law in Manman Babu’s house in Chand Chaura, how Ramjatia the maid working in Bhagwat Babu’s house had been accused of stealing a brass thali and in protest left her job there, etc. etc. Apart from cleaning toilets, which was her main job, she worked as a part-time correspondent of a weekly newspaper.

When my mother asked me to leave whatever I wouldn’t be able to eat, I knew what she meant. The left-over would be given to that cleaning woman along with some freshly cooked food from the kitchen. I recoiled in disgust, with some sympathy for that woman. I did not want that woman to take the left over from my plate. But the woman never minded it. She accepted it with pleasure.

We normally do not eat anything left by our own brothers and sisters. We consider it spoiled. Then why an outsider, even though she may be living in abject poverty, should be given the left over to eat? Because she belonged to a caste which was considered the lowliest of the low? This was an insult to her poverty and to her caste. My thoughts were obsessed in protest against this discrimination.

I ate the whole thing to ensure that the cleaning woman got only fresh food, not the left-over. I promised to myself never to leave any uneaten food in my plate. I am happy that I have stuck to that promise ever since. I am happier that I have been able to inculcate this habit in our children too.

In the Institute where I went for higher studies the mess supplied us daily with bread and butter for breakfast. The mess served other items also like dosa, idli, puri-sabji and upma. The majority liked the Indian breakfast but there were some who preferred bread “in order to keep light” as they claimed, but we suspected they suffered from weak digestion. The boys who ate bread ate them whole, that is, the crust of the bread too. But there was a small group of girls which was famous for its coquettishness. They deliberately left one or two slices in their plates. Later they were invariably seen in the canteen during tea break eating idli and samosa. They ate the bread after tearing off the side crust. Their palate was too delicate to withstand its roughness.

After the breakfast was over, I saw Dashrath collecting all the left over slices from the plates of those girl participants.

“Why do you collect these left-overs?” I asked him one morning.

“Saa’b, I have to join duty at six o’clock. I come from Malakpet. It takes me one hour to cycle down from there to the institute.”

“So?”

“My wife also works as domestic help. She will have to cook breakfast very early in the morning.”

“How considerate this man is! He wants his wife to have enough rest before she goes to work.” I admired him for this consideration but did not express it.

“I have four children to provide for. I have admitted them in private schools. The fees are high; I want to save as much money as I can.”

“Saa’b, I don’t want my children to become like me. I have two daughters. I must save money for their dowry too.”

I could say nothing in reply. I had nothing to say, save feel sorry for him.

“They have not put it in their mouth.” He tried to justify his collecting the left over.

“And why should food be wasted?” He wondered.

Yes, why should food be wasted? Poverty had taught him the value of food, a lesson which the children of a well-to-do family have never had the occasion to learn. Food was easily and abundantly available to those rich girls – those nawabjadeez, as one of my friends contemptuously called them. They never suffered from hunger. Ask a man who has been starving for days and he will tell you what food means to him.

“A great famine struck Bengal in 1770.” These words of my history teacher rang in my ears.

And what followed by way of description was pathetic.

“The artisans and the poor were the worst sufferers. They starved to death. The streets of Bengal were strewn with the dying and the dead. The poor farmers sold their cattle, their implements and even their children to buy food. When all was exhausted they ate grass and leaves of the trees. The situation so worsened that some fed themselves on the flesh of the dead human beings. Almost one-fifth of the whole population was wiped out in that great famine, more than a million people”

We were aghast and silent visualising the trauma of this great famine.  As if this was not enough, the teacher quoted some historian to bring forth to us the horrifying impact of the famine.

“The river Hugli had become a cremation site. It was full of dead bodies, all swollen and in a state of rot, floating downstream into the sea. A large number of corpses lay abandoned on the banks of the river. Birds and beasts of prey, dogs, jackals, vultures, all fed on the flesh of the dead bodies. The stench had become unbearable.”

And what a coincidence! On the same day in the class of English Literature the teacher narrated the story of Scylla and Charybdis, which again had food as one of its themes.

He was teaching us Homer’s masterpiece The Odyssey. That master narrator, in that book, tells us the story of the return of Odysseus from Troy to his island home on Ithaca. On the way he had to go through many dangerous experiences. He had to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla was an abominable monster with six long skinny and skeletal necks and ugly heads. She had three rows of fangs in her mouth. She had twelve feet, all the feet hanging in the air. She was sunk deep up to her waist in the cave of a steep huge rock. It was nearly impossible for a ship to pass by Scylla without some seamen being snatched with the fangs of her mouth. The same thing happened with Odysseus. Six of his best men were seized away by Scylla while all the other seamen stood helpless, unable to save their mates. They saw with their own eyes six of their companions being devoured by that monster.

The teacher used this story to tell us the greatness of Homer.

After having passed by Scylla, Odysseus and his men land on a shore to pass the night. They were all hungry and exhausted. They cooked food and satisfied their hunger. After they had satiated their hunger and thirst, they remembered their dear ones snatched away and devoured by Scylla. They wept and lamented at the loss of their companions. While they wept they were overtaken by gentle sleep.

The teacher then read out a comment from a book to bring out the underlying significance of this story.

“The greatness of Homer lies in recording the whole truth. They first cooked their supper, and then drank and ate to satisfaction. And after weeping, or actually while weeping, they dropped quietly off to sleep. Homer knew that even the most cruelly bereaved must eat; that hunger is stronger than sorrow and that its satisfaction takes precedence even of tears. He knew that when belly is full, and only when belly is full, men can afford to grieve.”