Sucheta Dasgupta | The Mystery Of The Two Dinner Plates

This story doesn’t have a particular point. It is completely off the beaten track of our day-to-day worries, obsessions, pastimes and, perhaps, debates.

It is just a recall of one of those conversations in childhood that did not make perfect sense until it suddenly did after some 37 years.

The predominant feeling is that of satisfaction, of a riddle answered, a mystery solved after all this time.

And surprise, too, for I hadn’t really known that one existed.

So this is what Sister C. meant when she said she had successfully staged an intervention by raising money to go on and buy a pair of newly-marrieds two dinner plates on behalf of women’s rights.

How so, we asked her and she explained that it was to put an end to the fights that they might have had eating from the same plate. And it worked, too, she averred, smiling at me, and then turning away and meeting the gaze of my vigorously nodding friend. You are the one that understands, she told her, as she nodded again and they shared a sort-of secret smile.

She was the only one in class who had. Seated next to her, I, for instance, was baffled.

During our last year in school, our teachers organised a three-day sex education course over a winter weekend. Sister C. came from our sister school in Asansol especially to deliver it. Aside from being a teacher, Sister C. was a social worker advocating for impoverished women. This she mentioned to justify her habit of occasionally citing borderline-patriarchal scriptural passages to bolster her otherwise sound advice and arguments. Perhaps, those texts could be read differently, but it is not what I wish to discuss here. My friend had been the one to call her out on the intent behind those passages. But Sister C. said she did have a reputation for being success-oriented and practical.

On the second day of the course, just before lunch, Sister C. told us about a young struggling Hindu couple who had married for love and been disinherited by their respective families. They were not actually working class, the people she usually worked among. The wife, in fact, taught in her school and that’s how she and the other teachers there came to learn that they were starting to have fights. They were too poor to buy a plate, Sister C. said, and so they ate from the same vessel. Apparently, it gave rise to quarrels.

Was it over who ate the other’s portion? How could anyone be so petty after braving so much trouble just to be together? It left me confused and I remembered that feeling along with the words that had been shared in class. This is how memory works; often, we passively record the events as they happen to us even if we don’t make sense of them then, the understanding of them sometimes comes later on, even while at other times it doesn’t.

And thus, the ‘bado holey bujhbi’ (don’t you worry at all, you will know once you grow up) axiom can occasionally be true. Jodi bujhini je seta mone thakey. A tall ask if you ask me. Under most circumstances.

For instance, I have been told ‘bado holey bujhbi’ at least three to four times in my life. I only remember the fact of feeling deflated that followed it, not much else. Of either the buildup or the sequence of events. Or even the events themselves, they had been far too inconsequential to make it to one’s long-term memory. Besides, mostly, people don’t register what they do not understand, do they?

While sometimes they do carry into the future the memory of their humiliation, decision, pique or bafflement that accompanied the affair. For me, the first two of these four pertain to a different experience from the one under scrutiny, but their value as binding agent of other, more important, memories is indisputable. Okay.

At breakfast this morning, trying to scrimp on the dishes my partner had just washed and dried, it dawned on me that the couple from Sister C.’s story did not eat from the same plate simultaneously. One of them always used it first; the other cleaned it up and ate second. No prizes for guessing the order of feeding.

No prizes, either, for guessing who did the dishes. And the cooking. And the cleaning. Invariably. Always. Even if both of them did socially important work outside the house.

So buying them dinner plates had been a women’s rights intervention, after all. Which was more in the nature of a circumvention. Sister C. just didn’t have the heart to explain it to us. Yet the fact that she didn’t also speaks to how imperfect it was. And I think my friend had won their argument.

Because, after they had shared that secret smile, my friend had not looked away. She had sat there next to me, smiling up at Sister C., holding Sister C.’s gaze, until Sister C. gave in, nodded at her, tapped the air twice with her index finger and said, you’re right, you win, I’ll give you that one, and smiled more deeply, turning a bit red.

Mystery solved in 2026 on the morning of Durgasaptami day.

It’s been some weeks since, quite accidentally, I interacted with this friend’s namesake. She is now a person in my friend circle. It is perhaps what triggered the processing of this memory.

My partner likes to say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.