Women and dabbas
There is a classical saying in Hindi “Pran jaye per vachan na jaye.” It means a person will die before breaking a promise. For many Indian women, it’s more like “Pran jaye per dabba na jaye,” meaning if they have sent you something to eat in a box, they are very loath to forfeit the box, or dabba. They don’t care whether you liked the contents of the dabba; they care only about the dabba and absolutely insist on getting it back. I found this out to my cost nearly half a century ago. A friend’s mother had sent me some undhiyu, a Gujarati dish that is apparently cooked upside down underground slowly in an earthenware pot and comprises a lot of vegetables and ghee. It’s marvellously heavy to eat. I wrote to the lady thanking her for the thought and the delicacy and she wrote back immediately saying “I am glad you liked it. Please keep the container safely, I will collect it when I am next in Delhi.” Those days the postal department used to have a service called QMS, or quick mail service. Letters reached Bombay and Calcutta, as they were called then, in 24 hours. Madras took 36 hours. Much to my dismay, I had given the box away to the maid, who had grabbed it gleefully.
I thought it would only be gentlemanly to inform my friend’s mother that the box was now gracing the maid’s kitchen. Her reply was scathing. “Young man, just as you must ask before you take something, you must also ask before you give away something that doesn’t belong to you.” I have kept that letter as a reminder of the expected social etiquette in respect of such dabbas and, over the years, I have been very careful and never ever repeated that mistake.
Given this feminine social code, I thought, all women would follow it. You know, do unto others what you will have done unto you. But that, sadly, isn’t true. It’s actually a very interesting sociological phenomenon. If you ask a woman to return your dabba, she can, as often as not, get very annoyed. Apparently, it’s very bad form. The code thus applies only to men. That’s why when they send each other something, women use cheap containers.
Before I got married, my mother had bought a very handsome set of dabbas for me to take my lunch to the office… made of stainless steel with fancy latches. One day I sent some carrot halwa to a friend’s wife for their wedding anniversary. A few weeks passed and the dabba stayed with her. I forgot all about it until some months later my mother, who was visiting, asked me where it was. I told her and she was very angry. She ordered me to get the dabba back immediately.
When I reluctantly rang up my friend and reminded him, he said his wife had liked it so much that she was using it to send his lunch in it. “She thought it was an anniversary gift.”
My mother never forgave either of them and would always refer to them as dabba thirudans (thieves in Tamil). My fate was worse. I now had to seek her approval before despatching anything. Much to my wife’s dismay, who is a connoisseur of dabbas, she makes sure there are lots of cheap plastic boxes in the house. In fact, there is a class system among these dabbas. Which dabba is used for sending something depends on a whole lot of factors like occasion, social standing of the recipient, gender, etc. The highest compliment my mother would pay was “I liked the dabba very much.” I have now become a collector in her memory.
