Break time

a short rumination on school meals

In the mornings before work now, I eat haphazardly when in a rush. During lunch hour, I take my time with the lunch my Amma packs me and eat with my colleagues it’s time to get back to work or another meeting. Once, thanks to a slip of a tongue, I talk about getting ready for school instead of work and we laughed for a bit. As an adult who loves food and lunch time now, my primary school self would have been surprised because break times were not fun for me.

There was no designated pantry at school where one could settle themselves in like the workplace I am at now. Us students would be marched out of class and asked to stand along the corridor outside our classrooms, young girls winding around and all the way down the stairs. Our break time was earlier and shorter than what the boys had. The boys were allowed to play outside during theirs. I would sometimes watch them from the grilled window, till a duster was thrown at my head. This was at Sherwood Academy in 2008 Abu Dhabi, the now closed down segregated co-ed school, the oxymoronic structure of which I was part of till Grade Six. 

The people who oversaw this break time were the teachers and the aunties, which is what we called the staff who were made of ladies  that did everything: clean, prepare tea for the principal and perform as an extra set of cameras. The two sets of women would walk up and down the corridors, ensuring we were not trying to walk out into the quadrangle and that our voices were the appropriate decibels for the young girls of sherwood academy, even if it was the only time we could talk freely to each other, sharing chips and fruits form our lunches. Another of the teacher/auntie combo’s duties was to ensure we finished our lunch boxes, lovingly packed by our parents till no speck of food remained. 

Cafeterias did not exist in my world then. To me, they were a myth from the American Archie comics I would buy from Lulu Hypermarket on the weekends. In the comics, they had meatloaf and crackers and hamburgers, which I found out did not taste as good as Jughead made them to be, for lunch. However my lunch menu, lovingly made by my sleepy Amma  in the early morning, was the foods she grew up with back in Kerala, India: upmav, appam with sugar and dosha with chutney, the spicy grittiness of the crushed lentils and oil coating my mouth long after the meal was done. Always soggy from the condensation in my lunch box, the food was already halfway to become the mush I would struggle to swallow. There was one teacher who would always poke my cheek with a sharp nail in an effort to make me chew and swallow. The crescent moon mark would remain on my cheek for the classes after. 

To mix it up some days, sandwiches were the other option. The most western meal that has entered my lunchbox then was nutella in between two slices of white bread cut into triangles, of which the crust remained becauseI was told “good girls eat everything”. The teachers vehemently enforced that sentiment. The most significant memory of school lunch from my childhood was not the conversations with friends or rush for the bathroom before the bell rang loud enough to rock your skull, but the empty wall of the corridor after everyone else went in but me. The upper half of the wall was cream paint on concrete and the lower half was wooden planks, covered in glossy black and brown striped wallpaper. There was a rod that stuck out in between the halves that dug into my back as the teacher made me stand there and finish the food, even after class had started and all the other girls were reciting the times tables. Only after a clean lunch box, food stuffed down my throat and eyes smarting from the ache of my bulging cheeks, would I be allowed to slink back inside, ensuring my footstops did not interrupt the ongoing class. If my feet hit the ground too loudly, the glare of the math teacher, followed by the gaze of my concerned classmates, would land on me.

It’s weird how I had to take it all, consume everything they gave and yet, when the time comes, I also had to be nothing . The space we can take up only counted when our stomach followed the rules as closely as every other part of us. We only counted when we could be controlled. That was one of the lessons us girls learned outside of class. A lesson which I realise, follows you everywhere.