Once In A Blue Moon ~ Theinkwell Non-fiction #2

Rajesh TP

Baba would always come back home late in the evening and we all have to wait till he returns before dinner will be served. It was fun to eat together though. Those moments when the soup is served in one dish and we all have to dip a molded morsel into it before swallowing it, one after the other.
That was our usual way of having dinner. Other meals could be served for us individually, but because we take morsels at night, we have to do it together.

For us, rice was a special meal. We eat it once in a Blue moon. Seriously, the celebration we would have on the day rice would be served is second to none. I remember vividly how I would have to hold my spoon in hand, waiting for my plate of rice to be served.

One Easter Sunday, one of such days when rice would be the meal for the day, Baba had offered to use two of our mature cockerels for stew. We have to go to church without eating. Though we were hungry, we knew what was waiting for us at home would be a sumptuous meal.

While the church service was on, I was busy daydreaming. I saw myself munching a plate of five with chicken only to be tapped by our church usher who probably discovered I was absent-minded. I adjusted quickly so that my mother will not see me acting that way because that may cause a shortage in my ration as punishment for being worldly.

For me, the service was getting unnecessarily too long. After the long Easter service, we walked home as fast as possible. We sang the praise of rice and chicken stew all the way home.

As we continued on the way, my immediate younger brother, Chika said:

What if we get home and find the pots of rice and stew missing?

What a thought! We all shouted him down.

Do not say that again. The pots can never go missing.

At this point, everyone stopped talking about the rice and stew, we just walked, minding our business.

Finally, we reached home. This was when we discovered that mother did not come with us. She must have stayed back in church for some after-service meeting.

Though we starved, the fact that it was rice and stew made us starve the most. My younger sister was already wearing a torn face, I could see tears gathering in her eyes.

A few minutes later, mother arrived and we queued in the kitchen to hijack out plates of rice and chicken stew.

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Mother served all the dishes. I watched closely to see when the biggest chunk of meat would be placed. Behold, I did not look wrong. I love chicken breast, and as soon as my mother's serving spoon scooped that portion of meat into the plate, my eyes stayed glued. Then she announced:

Children, come and take your food.

My siblings rushed to the kitchen, everyone struggling with the door to come in first. When the bustling had ended, my mother asked me to choose my plate of rice as the first child. Then, my siblings took their plate of rice.

We ate with so much vigor. The last time we did eat rice was Christmas time before Easter. So, we concentrated on our dishes like our lives depended on it.

Amazingly, no grain of rice was spotted to have littered the floor. That was back in the day. Nowadays, we tell our wards this story how we cherished rice because it was scarce, unlike in their days when they eat rice almost everyday.

Those memories are with sharing and they made a whole part of me and how I grew up in a large family with competition to survive.