Writer’s Corner: ‘Sindhi Kadhi: A guide to suppress your heritage in the lunchroom’ by Vrishti Savalani

The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.

Ingredients:

• A class of 20 kids at each table
• 18 wooden lunch tables
• One teaching assistant monitoring each table
• Three stalls of cafeteria food – Asian, Western and Sandwich
• Two microwaves
• Lunch bags, to your liking
• A bell

Method:

1. Fill up a multi-purpose hall with 18 wooden lunch tables. Don’t worry, they’ll fit. The room is big enough to hold the entire elementary school during assemblies, and the benches can be folded. Make sure you have enough people on the maintenance staff because the only time they have to unfold them is when the kids are out on the playground before lunch. 
2. At the end of recess, ring that bell that was hidden in the nurse’s office between the playground and the multi-purpose hall turned cafeteria. It’s the one with the bright red handle and the rusty gold bell. The one that the kids can hear from the monkey bars on the far end of the playground. Even with their arms raised and covering their ears, the sound of the brass ringing alerts them that it’s time to eat. 
3. Make sure the kids wash their hands at the sink by the door. The long steel basin with three faucets will spread across the wall outside, and the little sign with the pictures will show them how to wash their hands thoroughly. 
4. In the now-cafeteria, have the teaching assistant stand in front of the classes’ bench. She will hand out the lunch cards for kids whose parents paid for school lunches. They’ll line up at the three food stalls — Asian, Western or Sandwich. Even though none of it looks appetizing, at least they’re all in the same boat.
5. For the others, there will be a blue plastic crate filled with their lunch bags that they brought from home. 
6. When all the kids have their lunches, even the ones that had to microwave their homemade meals between the two microwaves at the back, make sure they sit with their friends. Not the ones they mingled with on the playground — the ones from different grades or classes. I mean the ones they see in class every day. The ones that they will only remember this year, because next year they’ll be in a new grade with a new teacher in a new class. Chances are, their short attention spans won’t even hold memories of the kids they’re sitting with. 
7. Some of the kids will have cool lunch bags. Ones that they got when they went to America over the summer, in a store called Target. Cute lunch bags shaped like random animals or with pretty patterns on the outside. One girl will have an ice pack with a frog’s face on it to match her bag. But you’ll pick the dull gray bag from the crate. It’ll be from some Chinese off-brand company that Mom probably got for a cheap price at a market. She isn’t going to spend so much on something that is only going to hold your food — it’s going to get dirty, so what’s the point?
8. The gray bag that you have looks cute, but not animal-faces-on-the-bag cute. It’s got a polka dot pattern around the outside, but it doesn’t come with a matching icepack. It doesn’t hold a fun container either. It’s a fancy glass container that somehow your mom trusted you with, but if it breaks, it’s fine. This too is from some Chinese off-brand store.
9. Make sure you pull the container of curry from the gray bag. The name “curry” is common amongst all your friends. Their parents take them out for Indian food sometimes, so they know exactly what curry is, right? But when you explain to them that this dull brown soup is curry, their brows will furrow with curiosity. This isn’t that bright orange sauce that they’d see in the restaurants. There isn’t any chicken tikka in the sauce, just some green vegetables that are coated in this brown soup. There isn’t any fancy naan bread that comes on the side — only generic white rice, not even Basmati. 
10. There’ll be a sour smell that comes from it too. It’s the tamarind paste. That gives the curry its unique tang to complement the sweet nuttiness that comes from the toasted chickpea flour. It also gives the curry that almost murky brown color. This food clearly isn’t meant for the eyes, only for the taste buds.
11. Pour that curry, the one in that piping hot glass container that just came out of the microwave, straight into the container with the rice. It looks a little more appealing now. The rice brightens up the brown sludge, turning it into a golden tan sauce that coats each grain.
12. Take each bite like you’re sneaking in one spoonful after another. Don’t let any of the other kids know you’re enjoying the taste of this. All they see is the way this thing looks — their noses scrunch at the sight of this, and that’s enough to convince you that you shouldn’t be enjoying this.
13. Look over at the kid who brought the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Think to yourself, what does that taste like? Now look to the other side, where the Korean kid brought Kimbap that everyone is mistaking for Sushi. But even then, the cross-section with the rice, vegetables and seaweed looks much nicer than the muddy rice you have. 
14. Eat up about half of the container. It’s enough to fill you up for the rest of the day till you get home, but there is still some left to show that you were forced to bring this to school and that you didn’t actually enjoy this.