My experiment with vegetarianism

A Gandhian and vegetarian, my grandfather’s one nod to the omnivorous legacy of our species was that he ate eggs. One raw egg a day, to be precise. To keep up his health, he said. He would crack the egg against any handy edge, drop the contents into a glass and from there let them slide straight into his throat.

Inspired (and encouraged) by my grandfather, I resolved to turn vegetarian too. For months I stoically forewent the delights of pomfret curries and Bombay duck fry. At times even the rats, which had devised perfectly semicircular passages at the bottom of all the wooden doors in the old house, seemed to mock my determination as they raided the trash for fish bones, but I stuck it out.

Then my grandmother died in a faraway place. I squatted beside the kerosene stove on the kitchen floor, crying with my mother more out of sympathy with her than for my already vague memory of my grandmother. There was flurry and activity around me, and before I could grasp what was happening, I was on a plane with my mother. When the stewardess came around to ask veg or non-veg, my mother replied veg on my behalf. But I had been watching the food trays with fried sausages passing by. “No, non-veg”, I said. That marked the end of my only experiment with vegetarianism.