No dinner for a sinner

Chetana Vaishnavi

DURING our childhood, there were no video games. My siblings and I would write words on pieces of paper, fold and mix these up. Each of us would then have our pick. Whichever word we got, we had to rhyme it and compose a poem. The word I got was ‘dinner’, to which I added ‘sinner’ and wrote a poem, “No Dinner for a Sinner”, in which I described imaginatively how my mom deprived me of my dinner as I had killed an animal that day. And though I had killed no animal, and was not a sinner, at least twice in my lifetime I was deprived of dinner after being invited for the same. 

On one occasion, when I had arrived in Chandigarh from Srinagar, a few decades ago, a family friend invited my husband and me for dinner. Those were the beginning of our struggling days in Chandigarh. With very little resource, we purchased the choicest sweets and went in a rickshaw to their house. We handed them the sweets and they asked us what was the need for this formality. There was actually no indication of any dinner preparation. After some time, we requested them to allow us to leave as we had the rickshaw waiting. The lady of the house who had invited us for dinner nodded in agreement, and just as we were about to leave, I heard her daughter telling her, “Oh, we had invited them for dinner!” We hurried away, hungry as ever.

Next, it was a close colleague of mine who had been formally and informally dining with us on innumerable occasions. One day, she quipped that it was not fair that she should be continuously partaking of meals with us, but never inviting us for dinner. Finally, she fixed an evening for dinner, to which my husband and I reluctantly agreed. But when we arrived, she was not at home. We were shocked. I am sure she was busy having her dinner in somebody else’s house, as was her routine! 

On another occasion, we had invited a colleague for dinner. On his acceptance, I toiled in the kitchen and waited for the guest. There was no means of communication, because we did not have telephones during that time, and the guest did not arrive. Angry with myself for putting in so much hard work and with the guest for not showing up, we decided to devour the sumptuous dinner ourselves! When we encountered him some days later, he said he had assumed it to be a casual offer and hence he did not take the invitation seriously. Funny isn’t it, you invite a person for dinner and he thinks it is a formality, and then you are invited for dinner, but stay hungry because the invitation was a mere formality? My poem — “No Dinner for a Sinner” — rings clear in my mind. Why is the world so different in thought and action, I keep wondering.