And today's special is........

I had chowmein for lunch today. My Mom made it. Just like the old days when she would prepare lunch for me everyday. For years and years. All through school and college. I would always take lunch from home. And unlike some girls in school who got thick slices of bread with a layer of butter, hard-boiled egg drizzled with salt and pepper and a slightly soft, spotty banana in their "tiffin box" (that's what we used to call our lunch box), my Mom always made sure I had the most delicious meals in mine. My Mom's a perfectionist. And she believed that I needed to eat well to survive the long hours outside home. And since I was a picky eater she always prepared lunch the way I liked it with things I enjoyed eating. I know what you are thinking. Yes, I was a pampered kid. Which meant I never opened my tiffin box to find a cold mound of Maggi that had taken the shape of the box and needed to be sliced into pieces with a knife!

The flip-side of having gourmet lunch was everybody in school was aware of the contents of my tiffin box. Which made a whole bunch of them flock to my side to partake of the meal. And that doesn't mean during lunch break. That meant as soon as the first class would be over. In the interval between departure of one teacher and arrival of the next I'd have some already hungry girls checking into my tiffin box and quickly devouring my ham sandwiches. Which meant by the time we would have the official lunch break (some four classes down the line) I would have a near empty tiffin box with very little food for myself. And the sad part about this whole ritual was that I could never eat the tiffin these other people brought with them because I really couldn't bring myself to eating slices of bread or cold Maggi. It came to a point when one of my class-mates in LH stopped bringing lunch because she would gorge on everyone else's lunch and have her fill. When my Mom started finding out about the misdirected food trail she started providing me with lunch enough to feed four people. But alas, I'd still be holding an empty tiffin box at lunch break. Because no matter how much food I'd carry with me, it would never be enough to feed an army of hungry school girls.

So I spent my entire school life with very little to eat for lunch inspite of carrying an extremely large tiffin box brimming with all kinds of goodies. By the time I went to college I realized it was sort of uncool to carry a large tiffin box with food while the others would be enjoying all the forbidden delights of the college canteen. So I convinced my Mom that we did not have a proper lunch break and we had to eat in the canteen when we managed to find time. Mom was skeptical but I think she understood my need to grow out of the tiffin box. Those were the years when I learnt to enjoy greasy dimer devil, super jhhaal chowmein and gorom cha. So gone were the days of lugging around my tiffin box.

And now after all these years I get to eat Maayer haate banano chowmein (chowmein made by my Mom) for lunch. And I get to eat all of it. By myself. I savored every bit of it and licked the box clean. Gosh it felt good!