As is the rule, the weekend came with its Iftar invitation.
Maybe it’s just me, but has anyone ever felt a sad twinge at not being able to brag out loud to the Iftar host that “in anticipation of the feast, I didn’t eat anything all day”. Because you know that all that you’ll get as a response is a blank “yeah-so-what’s-the-big-deal” stare from everyone around the dastarkhwaan.
The host for the evening was someone who had gone to university along with me, and though we were contemporaries, we never really got around to knowing each other much while we were in college. A decade later, through a chance introduction to do with work, we ended up getting re-introduced to each other and becoming much better friends now than (I think) we might’ve been, had we known each other better during college. Life.
College used to be a time when dinner invitations were occasions when students, specially the ones like us who lived in hostels and survived on the daily rationing of meals at the hostel mess, used to impart an entirely reinvented benchmark to the definition of gluttony. Part evidence of this was realized when my mother asked me during vacations when I was home, about why I was always in such a hurry to gulp down the food. Of course, one had to gulp: be quick or be dead might be overstating it, but it wasn’t very different from the notion of a wild wild west when it came to community dinners at college.
To make up for our lapse, there was a gentleman at the dastarkhwaan who may not have had a reason to fast through the day, so he got the pleasure of saying “oh you know, I didn’t eat anything all day only because I was looking forward to this feast.”
I just gulped the food down.