Saro and the Pink Plastic Waste Plate
Every family has a Saro.
Saro is a man or a woman of the extended family, whose relation to any particular individual of the family cannot be clearly traced, nevertheless, he or she is a permanent fixture in every family event including child birth, naming ceremony, engagement, wedding, house warming, death, drunken brawl, scandal or divorce.
Our Saro was a woman, who could have been my aunt or grand-aunt, or neither, around 65 in age, and with no pretensions of social grace or abidance to privacy norms. She claimed that her great grandfather(whose name she conveniently forgets), was once the richest man of the land who fed and supported the ancestors of our family in their impoverished years before falling into the clutches of poverty himself due to the “black eyes” of jealous kin and neighbors. Hence, she regarded it her birth right to make us pay the dues of our successors by impressing her presence on us every time she was hungry or angry, usually with her brood of noisy grandsons and granddaughters, who infested the house and the kitchen in a matter of minutes, like a swarm of locusts in a paddy field.
Her otherwise tolerable and at times entertaining visits started getting frowned upon, when objects mysteriously started disappearing from different houses after each of these random drop-ins. One glass of a 6-piece glass set, pendants left on dressing tables, free change from fish mongers and flower women in half open drawers, a brass idol of Lord Ganesha; such small-scale, yet noticeable thefts. No one said anything, but that Saro was behind the crimes gradually became accepted in the family circles. Other than imposing a strip check on her every time she departed, the women folk of my family tried almost everything else to keep things under control, partly out of pity for her. Everything worth stealing, including crockery and vegetables, tins of baby food and undergarments on the clothes line, were locked up, the gold chains and bangles on the kids were removed as she crossed the gate and kitchen stock was counted and recounted after she left. Yet, in spite of all the precautions, something was always found missing.
It was around this period that we decided to ‘modernize’ our home. The first step towards it was to acquire a waste plate, a plate to dump our food waste during the meals. Our non-vegetarian eating habits ensured its share of fish and chicken bones, along with curry leaves and red chili that were a mandatory accompaniment of our daily diet. Mother either tore off a sheet each from one of my older notebooks or we managed on an edge of our respective eating plates, until the waste perched perilously on the tip, offering an ugly sight and threatening to fall off any moment. To change this practice for good, father bought home a lovely pink colored plastic waste plate from a Chinese items fair in the town, where everything was available at Rs. 6, though the products might be of questionable and suspicious quality and provenance. That did not prevent us from being so overjoyed and excited about the new plate that for over a week, the plate was the central piece on our dining table and everyone refused to deposit any waste on it. Finally we relented and with much chagrin, put our plate to use. For over two months after that, after every meal, mother washed it clean and wiped it dry with the kind of love and care she had bestowed on us in the first few years after our birth.
On one of her routine visits home, after she had scoured through our rooms, tables and kitchen wares, Saro had her fill of our breakfast, entertained us with the meaty gossips of a couple of our relatives and left after a teary reminiscence of her generous great grandfather. And with her disappeared our plastic waste plate. I spent no time concluding that it was Saro’s job though my mother, the idealist, refused to believe anything that she had not seen. Thus Saro remained innocent and our fish bones once again happily rested on pink notice papers and my note book pages. Father refused to buy a new one, we didn’t push him, and I suppose we were all rather sentimental about our pink plastic waste plate which cannot be expected to have a worthy replacement ever.
Around the time, much to the relief of my grandparents and mother, my vagabond uncle decided to get married. Getting the blessings from all the elders of the family, with a new dress, betel leaf, whole betel nut and Rs.101 was a part of the custom. Saro could not be excluded from the list and early one morning, my uncle, mother and I boarded the 6 AM local bus and reached her house. In an age where telephones were as rare as millionaires and snail mail really lagged behind a snail, informing the host apriori regarding a visit was unheard of. Thus Saro, who seemed to have been having her breakfast, was genuinely surprised to see us. We walked in to her house which held an array of unmatched crockery, unimpressive decorations, and was in a state of poor maintenance.
And then my gaze fell on her dinner table which was nothing more than a wooden desk with a wobbly leg. On the table sat our pink plastic waste plate, from which she was apparently eating. Having seen the care we gave to our plate, she perhaps believed that we served expensive nuts and pastries on it. Or perhaps she knew what it was for and did not care. We saw Saro blushing, and exited the dining room without a word.
Next week, my mother again boarded the 6 AM local bus to Saro’s house. But this time, she had with her a ceramic dinner set. Mother said she was paying the dues of our ancestors who had once who thrived on Saro’s grandfather.
I knew better.