Tiffin Quotes

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

Willa’s big blue eyes, Willa’s dimpled-cheeked smile. Tiffin’s shaggy blond mane, Tiffin’s cheeky grin. Kit’s yells of excitement, Kit’s glow of pride. Maya’s face, Maya’s kisses, Maya’s love. Maya, Maya, Maya . . .

This flatshare. I wish I never done it. Wish I'd never opened up my life like that and let someone else walk in and fill it up. I was doing fine - safe, managing. Now my flat's not mine, it's ours, and when she's gone all I will see is the absence of Tiffin and books about bricklayers and that bloody stupid paisley beanbag. It'll be another room full of what's missing. Just what I didn't want.

tiffin time,

parents, bread-butter again,’ I grumbled, shutting a blue plastic tiffin in the second row. Raghav and I moved to the next desk. ‘Forget it, Gopal. The class will be back any time,’ Raghav said.

How could anything be the same? The red of blood lay over the market road in slick pools mingled with a yellow spread of dal someone must have brought in anticipation of a picnic after the parade, and there were flies on it, left behind odd slippers, and a sad pair of broken spectacles, even a tooth. It was rather like the government warning about safety that appeared in the cinema before the movie with the image of a man cycling to work, a poor man but with a wife who loved him, and she had sent his lunch with him in a tiffin container; then came a blowing of horns and small, desperate cycle tinkle, and a messy blur clearing into the silent still image of a spread of food mingled with blood. Those mismatched colors, domesticity shuffled with death, sureness running into the unexpected, kindness replaced by the image of violence, always made the cook feel like throwing up and weeping both together.

Student life is tough anywhere, and more so, away from the support systems one is used to at home. Even for the most adaptable among us, in alien surroundings, eating food that is familiar is comforting.

There was a scavenging peasant moving about, whistling as he worked, with an outsize gunny sack on his back. The whitened knuckles of the hand which gripped the sack revealed his determined frame of mind; the whistling, which was piercing but tuneful, showed that he was keeping his spirits up. The whistle echoed around the field, bouncing off fallen helmets, resounding hollowly from the barrels of mud-blocked rifles, sinking without trace into the fallen boots of the strange, strange crops, whose smell, like the smell of unfairness, was capable of bringing tears to the buddha's eyes. The crops were dead, having been hit by some unknown blight... and most of them, but not all, wore the uniforms of the West Pakistani Army. Apart from the whistling, the only noises to be heard were the sounds of objects dropping into the peasant's treasure-sack: leather belts, watches, gold tooth-fillings, spectacle frames, tiffin-carriers, water flasks, boots.

Indeed, food and femininity were intertwined for me from very early on. Cooking was the domain not of girls, but of women. You weren’t actually allowed to cook until you mastered the basics of preparing the vegetables and dry-roasting and grinding the spices. You only assisted by preparing these mise en places for the older women until you graduated and were finally allowed to stand at the stove for more than boiling tea. Just as the French kitchens had their hierarchy of sous-chefs and commis, my grandmother’s kitchen also had its own codes. The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone’s tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food.

The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone’s tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food. This, of course, was in stark contrast to what was considered womanly or desirable in the West, especially when I started modeling. To look good in Western clothes you had to be extremely thin. Prior to this, I never thought about my weight except to think it wasn’t ever enough. Then, with modeling, I started depending on my looks to feed myself (though my profession didn’t allow me to actually eat very much). When I started hosting food shows, my career went from fashion to food, from not eating to really eating a lot, to put it mildly. Only this time the opposing demands of having to eat all this food and still look good by Western standards of beauty were off the charts. This tug-of-war was something I would struggle with for most of a decade.

And in whatever afterlife your precious Light grants you, your parents will wish Queen Tiffin had miscarried.

I intend the term “hybrid English” here to mean an English that has roots in both worlds—the former colonies as well as the former colonial centre in the case of postcolonial writing, the country of origin as well as the destination country in the case of migrant writing and the target audience’s culture as well as the travel destination in the case of travel writing. In the context of postcolonial writing, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (2002:8) set up the useful distinction between “english” and “English” (also “metropolitan English”), where the former refers to the several varieties of English (“englishes”) that have developed in the former British colonies—including fictional varieties only to be found in postcolonial literature—and the latter to those varieties of English indigenous to the erstwhile colonial centre itself. In the context of postcolonial writing, my term “hybrid English” is therefore synonymous with Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s coinage “english”. Of

tiffin,

My Generation Grew up sharing tiffins, That Generation Grew up sharing memes.

Teach your kids that the reason to do anything should never be ‘All my friends are doing it.’ Encourage them to dig deeper and feel things better. You want chocolates flakes in your tiffin because you enjoy tasting their sweetness in the middle of a boring school day. You want a bike so you can move around quicker. You want to go camping to enjoy your friends’ company in the lap of nature. You want to play the guitar because music gives more meaning to your moments. It’s alright to want something as long as we know why it is good for us.