The school picnic that wasn't a walk in the park - Chapter 18 - The Chronicles of the Youngest Child
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I was all of six and so, so excited. It was my first-ever school picnic, and it was the next day. My parents had paid the small picnic fee, and I was getting to go! I was thrilled that our school buses would drive us all the way from school to Sanjay Gandhi National Park, on the other side of the railway tracks. That was what our teacher, Mrs Balan, had told us when she had announced the picnic a few days earlier.
Now, sitting at home, I told my mother that everyone in the class would bring something for themselves and something to share at the park.
My Amma was the busiest woman I knew. I saw her busy either in the kitchen or cleaning the house almost all the time. The mornings, especially, were when she had the most work. We all knew, even I, at six, that water came through the tap for about twenty minutes sometime in the morning. When it did, we had to fill as many of the buckets stacked in our bathroom as we could. With that water, the six members of our family survived the hot and humid days of Mumbai.
My Amma cooked all the food for the day, washed our clothes and cleaned our home. Of course, I was too young to understand that any additional work asked of her would be an enormous burden on a routine that was already packed. And of course, I also knew that asking for money to buy food would be out of the question.
She did not really make me the kind of tiffin my friends carried every day. Some days, I had bread slices with jam. On others, hot idlis with sugar, and once in a while, a bun with butter. This was partly because my father worked close enough to home to come back for a freshly cooked lunch. So, Amma did not have to prepare a meal in the morning for him, as many other housewives did. Since Daddy ate fresh food, I ate fresh food at home at lunchtime too.
For recess, my snack was always something good enough to keep me from being hungry, but never a complete meal. Most days, I ate my lunch quickly and ran out to play rather than peep into my friends' tiffin boxes. If I did look, I would see chapatis, freshly rolled bread cooked on a pan, with some vegetable, or noodles, or spiced and flavoured rice flakes called poha.
None of these things ever appeared in my tiffin. I had already made my peace with the fact that they were never going to magically turn up in my lunch box.
But now, on the eve of the picnic, I had a very important question: what was I going to take the next day?
My mother made amazing idlis, cakes made from steamed rice and lentils, at home. They were delicious, and I loved them. While I loved her idlis, I really did not want to carry them for the picnic, since no one outside our family seemed to know about eating idlis with sugar. My father generously bought us lots of bananas to eat every day. They were cheaper than most other fruit and easy to carry, so I was sure I would be carrying a few bananas with me the next day.
What I did not expect was to find three huge Kerala bananas packed into my lunch bag. They were ripe but not steamed, and except for my parents, none of us children really enjoyed them that way. To make matters worse, I discovered that Amma had packed sixteen idlis for me, far more than I could possibly eat, and had given me no chutney. Instead, there was a small tiffin box filled with sugar tucked in alongside the box of idlis.
I told her no one would eat the idlis with sugar. Everyone expected to eat idlis with some kind of chutney, ground coriander, grated coconut or ground peanuts. My mother had neither the time nor the energy to make a chutney that would essentially have to be ground fresh in the morning.
I tried again to tell her I did not want the Kerala bananas. But Amma thought she was being generous and insisted that I carry everything with me. She added a packet of Parle-G glucose biscuits in my bag for good measure.
I still remember the long handled pink cloth bag that dangled from my shoulder that day. It was a bother for most of the picnic. I carried it from one play area to the next. At lunch time, I spent a lot of time wandering from friend to friend, trying to find someone who would swap an idli with sugar for something I had never had in my tiffin. Sadly, there were no takers. No one wanted the idlis or the large intimidating bananas. At one point, I even tried to eat one extra idli because I was beginning to worry about what I would tell my mother when I got home.
All that food wasted?
For someone who had grown up with no luxuries at all, wasting food was difficult to imagine. Even at six, I remember not wanting to see my mother upset.
The day eventually ended, and I went home with much of my food still intact. Amma took one look at the food bag and then at my face, which showed disappointment and stress in equal measure. She seemed to have read me well and knew exactly what I needed. It was time to feed me, soothe me and, as much as possible, make up for a day that had not turned out quite the way I had hoped.
In many ways, Amma was a magician. She quickly transformed the leftover idlis into a spicy fried snack and quickly steamed the bananas changing their form and texture completely. The little treat was ready just in time for our five o'clock tea.
Normally, we only had chai and a couple of biscuits at that time. Today, it looked like we would feast.
So, my picnic in the first standard turned out to be quite a hit after all, even though it was best when it was over and we all sat together, cross legged on the tiled floor of our little kitchen, eating what my Amma had magically made from my picnic leftovers.
You can hear me read the story on my Spotify channel 'Lekha writes, then reads - Foundation' or directly on this link https://open.spotify.com/episode/3fXNrEapQocYGtL3UW2u7j?si=cSXjJ1O2TDW6YouR8fW8OQ
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