I don’t know whether this practice was there in your house
or not but it was pretty much prevalent in mine. And sometimes it used to bloat to
certain extent that there had been some serious altercation with mum (read Mother).
So, it goes like this. Whenever the dinner time would
approach, mum used to give a clarion call“Guys! Shall I start arranging?” (Arranging, as in the food items for dinner) So, our
normal reply used to be “Yes Mumma. Start arranging. We are coming.” Till this
everything used to be normal. Now even before all the items were heated
properly and brought to the table, she used to start uttering her daily script.
“Where are you people? Food is already on the table. It will get colder.” So what
she used to do was to keep a buffer time and start calling us since she knew
that we will surely be late. A few days just to prove her wrong both me and my
sister used to leave our work just at the moment, go and stand in front of here
with a pair of red angry eye. “WHERE IS IT READY, MUMMA?”
But whatever used to be, we always used to have dinner
together if not there were some individual party or get-to-gather outside.
We belong from a very mediocre family.
One very good feature
of such Bengali families used to be that we always tried hard to set
our moral standards pretty high. Another was that we used to considered education with
highest reverence. We were made to learn question the status quo but until a certain
extent after which the eyebrows of society used to start getting raised.
