Lunch 11/12/2025
1. It took me 10:15:66 minutes to finish lunch, put rest of the food on table, put plate to the wash basin and wash my hands in the washroom.
2. Grandmother had served two rotis without bison ghee ( as requested) and a small bowl of moong pulse with three spoonfuls of potato-mooli leafy greens and about half teaspoonful of chutney made with guava, garlic, onion and coriander mixed with salt.
3. She asked me repeatedly if I was keeping an oath. Why wasn’t I eating enough like before. Why wasn’t I taking tea. When I told her I was taking tea, in fact I took tea in the morning -she didn’t believe me. I told her I would prepare tea in the afternoon. Then I asked if she had tea. She said she takes tea many times everyday. I told her I was taking tea only once everyday. Then she left the room with the bowl which had khichdi and potato brinjal vegetable curry in it.
4. I had a roti, one teaspoonful of rice ( not more than 75-80 boiled rice grains) and one teaspoonful of potato-mooli leafy greens with half a glass of water.
5. I have continued with a similar regimen for twenty days now. Almost three weeks. I recall how after the VocabTrainer program finished on November 20th and for the next week I felt very troubled. The coercion was of the worst kind of abuse ever experienced in my life. It brought me to questions about the family, village, neighborhood, city or country : were they going through an acute famine. I was reading a book on Halifax Disaster and I thought we were supposed to cut down our requirements including mobile data used, electricity consumption, water consumption and of course detergent powder ( which was now being supplied rarely, that’s , once per two months. I used to wash my dishes regularly but now no more). I compared the Halifax Disaster with COVID 19 and thought it was the reason. It wasn’t.
6. I decided to find out why were they continuously giving out normal portions which I wasn’t supposed to eat. I was supposed to be a transformed individual who not only touched feet of elders but also cared about whether parents and grandmother had food before me or not.
7. It wasn’t gentle. What I couldn’t figure out was why were they insisting on not just serving normal portions but also on consuming medicines which might have increased hunger in case I was suffering from bulimia. They kept doing that without any sense because eating full meals meant subjecting oneself to even more of abuse of the same kind. I thought it was Sallekhana, Paryopvesh or Euthanasia given without declaration.