Three names on a tiffin
A steel lunch box from Bhuj, scratched with three names in three different hands. Nobody in the family can agree whose it was first.
There is a steel tiffin in my mum’s kitchen with three names scratched into the lid. The first is in Gujarati, small and very neat, done with something sharp and patient. The second is in English capitals, deeper, slightly crooked. The third is just an initial and a date, and the date is wrong. It says 1979, but the tiffin, according to everyone who was alive at the time, arrived in 1984.
It came from Bhuj. That much is agreed. After that the story splits three ways depending on who you ask and how long they have been sitting at the table.
My aunt says it was her father’s, that he took it to the workshop every day for twenty years and that the neat Gujarati is his. My uncle says the neat Gujarati is his — he was the careful one, he says, Dad was never careful with anything — and that the English capitals belong to a cousin in Nairobi who borrowed it in the nineties and gave it back with his name on it, as if that were normal. My mum says it was always hers and everyone else is making it up.
What it actually holds
Nobody argues about that. Three tiers: dal at the bottom, rotli in the middle, something sharp and pickled at the top, wrapped in a bit of newspaper so the oil does not travel. The bottom tier has a dent on one side, worn smooth, from being set down on the same kind of surface thousands of times.
I asked if I could photograph it and my mum said yes, then cleaned it first, which slightly defeated the point. The scratches survived. The dent survived. The argument about whose it was will outlive all of us, and probably the tiffin too.
I have started scratching my own initial into the base, very small, where no one will check. Not to win. Just to be in it.