Tiffin truths

Illustration/Uday Mohite

At the beginning we are all Gwyneth Paltrow. I mean the beginning of anything really - new project, new romance, new haircut, new role as maker of your niece's school tiffin.

My niece has come to stay for a month and I was excited by the idea of making breakfast and tiffin every day. I'm a clever cook. I could surely come up with 40 exciting options. Dreams shimmered, of me in apron and lipstick, a tiffin-influencer, with symmetrical grids of colour co-ordinated desi bento boxes. I remembered how Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's namaste wellness empire began as a newsletter from her kitchen. Unfortunately I couldn't find a faintly remembered post on ‘healthy lunch box options for kids' between the jade eggs and flower acids, so I was on my own.

For a few days my cottage core fantasies had full play, starring home-made hummus, cucumbers cut just right, spring veggie (bole toh foreign countries ka spring) wraps and fruit salads. Soon I hit a wall. Making designer tiffins, while nagging a kid to wake-up-go-shower-wear-your-socks and meet your own deadlines, requires more yoga than mujh se hoga.

I turned for ideas to a friend who has kids and who loves to cook. "Give her my favourite childhood tiffin" he advised. "Bread butter and ketchup." I was scandalised. "Try it. She will thank you for life."

This reminded me that I probably had the same tiffin every day for much of childhood. It was an era where children were considered innocent, yaniki not bright enough to understand they were being hoodwinked into eating boiled-egg sandwiches for six years. This was true of many kids - one had the same paratha and pickle every day, another the same bread upma - but I always burned with envy, feeling their sameness was somehow better than my sameness. Ketchup was tomato non grata in my home. Once a neighbourhood friend of mine was allowed to eat ketchup and rice and seeing this forbidden delight, I agreed with alacrity to stay for lunch, instead of dutifully saying ‘no thank you aunty' to a polite invite and going down. It made the berating about my shamelessness, which followed, bearable. It's testament to the truth that the tastiest home food is other people's home food.

Childhood seems to have been reformatted now, as an accessory to designer mommy-dom, a professionalised mommy-dom even, where capitalism offers new rewards and swanky praise for old gender roles among the well-to-do. Let me say, it is no surprise to me now that holistic parenting has made spa days the new mother's little helper aka the journey of Goop and its like. Well if you're a domestic goddess with the bank balance, guess you need it.

As for the rest of us and their masis - we must confront that moment in the afternoon when the tiffin-box is returned and feels suspiciously heavy. "You didn't eat it?". Answers may be "I didn't feel like" "I didn't have time because I went to fill my water bottle" or, horror, "it wasn't so yummy" and "I ate Ria's chips". I can feel that there-are-children-starving guilt trip on the tip of my tongue. I can feel the prickling of order-some-Maggi on the tips of my thumb. We may start out as Gwyneth, but we will end up as Glenn Close. It's okay. Pass the ketchup.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com