It’s a childhood memory shared by most desis: opening a giant tin of Danish butter cookies or Quality Street chocolates in the hope of pilfering some treats, only to find the tin filled with sewing supplies.
I was drinking chocolate milk when someone sent me an internet meme on this and I laughed so hard that I had milk bubbles coming out of my nose.
If it’s a meme, it has to be a universal truth. I was not alone in my suffering at the hands of my mother’s incessant recycling of containers. Apparently, there is a whole generation of desi adults out there who somehow managed to survive growing up in a household where ice-cream tubs in freezers would contain everything but ice cream.
Tupperware was a novel concept in the desi household of the 1980s. Why pay money for plastic containers when you could just reuse the stuff most of your groceries came in? Hence, ice-cream tubs were used to freeze extra portions of curries or kebabs. The giant, round tins of Danish butter cookies and Quality Street chocolates could hold a whole lot of spools of thread. Pringles cans could be upcycled into spaghetti receptacles. Even butter tubs could be reused for chopped herbs, leftover baked beans and shelled peas.
To be quite honest, my 8-year-old self found it a little bit embarrassing to see these recycled and reused containers around my house. My Canadian best friend’s mum used a set of Tupperware with matching pale blue lids almost the same shade as my friend’s eyes. In comparison, our freezer, with its medley of Kwality vanilla ice-cream boxes with peeling stickers on the lids, looked so tacky.
I still don’t know if my mother reused containers out of love for the planet, or out of habit, but I winced and dealt with it, vowing to buy a set of Tupperware with blue lids when I was old enough to have my own kitchen.
Then I grew up – and turned into my own mother.
Every time I scoop out the last bit of ice cream, I am tempted to wash, rinse and put away the container for future use. Each time I have spooned the last spoonful of yogurt from a one-litre tub, I want to clean it and stow it. I have no use for these containers immediately – I have a shelf of Tupperware boxes in all shapes and sizes, all with matching blue lids – but there is something about throwing away a perfectly good plastic container that makes me cringe. Butter tubs, ice-cream containers and takeaway boxes don’t look like “use and lose” items to me.
And so I wash and neatly stack them on a specially designated shelf, secure and out of sight. I don’t often use them to store food in the fridge but, occasionally, when all my Tupperware is either in use or in the sink, I do. And especially when I have food to give away. Because if there is one thing a desi will not stand, it’s people not returning our perfectly good Tupperware.
I learnt that from my mother, too.
Ujala Ali Khan is an honest-to-goodness desi living in Dubai
