We Shared a Tiffin for Ten Years
Half my childhood was eaten from someone else's steel box.
Half of everything I ate between the ages of six and sixteen came out of a steel box that was not mine. Nobody signed a treaty. It just became law, somewhere around Class 1, that when the fourth period bell rang, Bhavesh Patel's tiffin and my tiffin would open at the same moment, rotate ninety degrees, and slide to the middle.
The sound is the thing I remember most. Two steel clasps unclicking a half second apart, his always first because his thumbs were stronger, in a classroom in Indore that smelled of chalk dust and forty children's hair oil.
The economics were simple and perfect. My mother made aloo parathas that could make a grown man emotional, but she made them every single day, and by Class 3 I would have traded my bicycle for anything else. Bhavesh's dabba was a foreign country: theplas soft as cloth, chhundo so sweet it made your back teeth sing, sometimes dhokla with that mustard-seed tempering his mother did that mine never got right. He, meanwhile, considered my daily parathas a miracle he could not believe I was bored of.
Trade routes exist because of exactly this. We were seven-year-old merchants of Malwa, and business was excellent.
We shared everything else too, obviously. Answers, comics, one cycle between us for a whole year when mine got stolen, the blame for a cracked windowpane that was entirely his fault. But the tiffin was the constitution. Fights ended at fourth period because they had to. You cannot stay angry at a boy while eating his mother's chhundo. It is not physiologically possible.
Once, in Class 6, a new boy laughed at us for eating 'like a married couple.' Bhavesh looked at him with genuine pity and said, 'You eat alone from one box. And I'm the one you feel sorry for?' The new boy ate with us from November onwards.
Then came Class 9, and the year I found out what I had actually been eating.
It was small things first... Bhavesh's tiffin getting plainer. Rice and salt with a little pickle arranged carefully on top, the way you dress a plain thing up. Theplas going from four to two. I was fourteen and stupid, but not so stupid that I didn't notice him opening his box a little slower, angling the lid.
What I learned much later, in pieces, was that his father's textile shop had been dying for two years. The family was quietly drowning the way respectable families drown, with the front room intact and the kitchen cut to the bone.
I never said anything... He never said anything.
At fourteen you don't have the vocabulary for a friend's shame, so you do the only decent thing available: you pretend harder. I started claiming I was sick of parathas again, louder than before, pushing them across with theatrical disgust. He would roll his eyes and take them, and we both performed our little play at the fourth period bell, two actors who had never seen the script but knew every line.
Here is the part I did not learn until I was thirty-one years old.
My mother knew.
The mothers always know; they have their own network and it is faster than anything men have built. From some point in that period, my tiffin began arriving heavier. Six parathas instead of three. 'Growing boy,' she said, and I believed her, because at fourteen you believe your hunger deserves everything it gets. I shared it without thinking, the way we had always shared, and Bhavesh ate without ceremony, and neither of us understood that we were sitting inside an arrangement. Two women who spoke different mother tongues and met mostly at school gates had constructed, without one explicit word, a supply line that kept a boy fed and, this was the engineering marvel of it, kept his dignity fed too.
He never once had to receive charity. He was just doing what we had always done. Splitting the box.
I found all this out at my mother's funeral, of all places. Bhavesh's mother, old now, holding my hands in the crowd, crying, saying in her broken Hindi, 'She never let me say thank you. Thirty years I am waiting to say it and now look.' I said... thank you for what, Aunty. And she looked at me, astonished that the parcel never knew it was a parcel, and told me about the parathas.
I had to walk out to the gate and stand there for a while.
Nobody teaches you that love's first language is food handed over without ceremony, and that the people feeding you will go to their graves letting you believe it was nothing.
Grief does strange things with timing. That whole first year after her death, I could not cry at photographs of my mother, but I cried chopping potatoes. I started writing things down around then, clumsy fragments about steel boxes and mustard seeds, because it was either that or carry it around loose. What pulled me in deeper was a page of poems about family, strangers writing about their own kitchens, and I sat up past midnight reading them with the specific relief of finding out your private weather is a climate. Eventually I wrote the tiffin poem properly, the one with my mother counting parathas at five in the morning, and entered it into a monthly poetry contest with my heart in my throat like a schoolboy handing over an exam sheet. Writing it taught me something I now believe completely: the poems hiding in childhood are never really about the past. They are invoices from it, arriving thirty years late.
Bhavesh lives in Ahmedabad now. Textiles, of all things, the same trade that broke his father; he rebuilt it out of sheer spite and it is thriving. We meet twice a year, sometimes in his city, sometimes in mine.
Last month it was mine. A cafe near my office, too expensive, the kind of place that serves a biscuit the size of a coin on the saucer like an apology. Two coffees on the table between us. We talked about cholesterol and children and the death of our old school building, which is a mall now, our classroom approximately where the food court is, and neither of us could decide if that was desecration or the most honest tribute possible.
His biscuit arrived on his saucer. Mine arrived on mine.
And I watched his hand, forty-six years old, gold ring, do it without his eyes ever leaving my face or his sentence pausing: break the biscuit, and put half on my saucer. My hand was already moving to do the same. Neither of us mentioned it. Neither of us noticed... until I noticed, and I said nothing, because some laws are older than the countries they run, and you do not disturb them while they are working.
Two halves, two saucers, fourth period, forever.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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