Have you ever eaten food alone? Be it breakfast, lunch,
dinner or some snacks, eating in solitude makes you sad. The very scene of
someone eating his or her food makes any sensitive person sad. This sadness is
not about being left alone or being isolated from the din around. It is a sort
of subtle reminder of one’s own existence; the very basics of existence- one
has to eat to survive. Eventually, when you deduct all your boisterous and
pompous nature, remove all your ego, your social status, your arrogance and
your self-importance and everything from your own self and confront the basic
material for your sustenance and survival, that is food, you become absolutely
alone. That’s why people who eat alone often eat fast or east very slow. Either
they increase the pace of eating so that they can escape from the core of their
existence or they slow down the act of eating so that they could detach from
the food as well as the act of eating, while maintaining their egos and
imaginary positions. That’s why people who live in hotels when they come to the
breakfast or dinner table, either carry a journal or look at their lap tops or
watch a television program which they are not interested at all or finish their
food fast and disappear. They just want to disengage from their relationship
between food and their own self.
Eating alone evokes memories; not consciously but
subconsciously. You sit at the table. The hotel boy brings you the plate, he
brings different items as per order or you collect your food from the buffet.
If you are alone you either watch the performance as if it were happening to
someone else or you do it like a performance from which you are detached. You
order for different things only to create a distance between yourself and what
you have ordered. You do not relish what you have ordered. But still you order
because you want to connect yourself with the surroundings so that you could
create an imaginary connection with the food that you are going to eat. But the
moment you see the ordered item coming to you and especially when other people
in the hall look at your food and your lonely self you feel dejected. You eat
as if you were committing a crime. You commit a crime and you leave the traces
of it. Your eyes are away from the crime scene. You make your tea by dipping
tea bags into hot water, adding sugar cubes, stirring them with a steel spoon
and in all the while keeping your eyes away from the act of making tea. Or you
do all these or pour prepared tea from a jug to your cup as if you were doing
something that you want to finish as early as possible. If you are not looking
away from the food and beverage, you must be looking too intently at it so that
the very details remove the holistic experience of the act. You don’t actually
see what you eat or drink when you are alone.
Solitude at the dining table evokes memories. They pour into
you even if you don’t want to think about anything else. The involuntary
gushing of remembrances makes you a victim of your own past and you often
remember incidents where you had taken food with your near and dear ones. You
remember the kind of happiness you felt once when you had taken the same kind
of food. You remember, at times something that does not have anything to do
with food or eating. You remember walking along a valley filled with flowers or
a desert where there are flowers created out of sand and mirage. Memories flood
in you as if they were waiting for a chink to appear in your guarded nature.
The moment your solitude makes you vulnerable they rush into you. You just get
washed away by memories. But remember, these memories are absolutely formless
often. You will not be able to discern what is happening inside you. The more
you look at the food the more you feel like finishing it and going. The more
you see the delicacies heaped on your plate you feel like throwing them away.
You feel an absolute sense of dejection and sadness because you are not able to
contain the rushing of the memories that you clearly know that do not belong to
you. They are the part of collective memories of this ritual called eating
food.
Eating had never been a private affair for the primitive
man. The hunter and the fruit gatherer never had their kill enjoyed alone. They
share it with a community that hunted by the side or collected berries in
packs. By the time they collect their stuff and congregate around fire or
whatever they deem important, they shared one portion for the invisible, one
portion for the elders and weak, and one portion for the children and women and
one portion for themselves. They ate together as if they were doing a great
ritual for survival. As time passed and people progressed the same ritual got
refined in many ways. People gathered around dining tables fabulously arranged
and decorated. The upper classes facilitated table manners and the lower
classes perpetuated table habits. Eating food was a collective ritual or a
collective celebration. It remains to be so even today. People eat together and
to reduce the coarseness of the very act of eating, they talk about various
things; mainly about things they have eaten in various places. One taste takes
to the detailing of another one. And one memory of food takes to collective
memories. People participate in this ritual enthusiastically that’s why we have
these ideas of working lunch and power lunch. People talk business over food,
or people meet over dinner with wine and discuss things that are important and
trivial at the same time.
The moment you are left alone with your food, you are
severed of the communitarian ties. You are suddenly ostracised from the
mainstream society. You and your food are left alone; you could eat it or throw
it. You are not a part of the collective society any more. What you are left
with are the memories of being a part of it a few hours back. Suddenly you are
alone with your food and you become a primitive man even if you are wearing the
most up to date clothes and using expensive luxury items. You are alone and you
are reduced to your primitive existence; the unavoidable link between your hunger
and the food. Everything collapses in front of it because you are alone.
You may think that I don’t like to be alone and I don’t like
my solitude. I like being alone and I like to take food alone. Those are the
moments when I realize my ultimate connection with the core of my life. The
solitude and the silent communion with the food make me understand how
important it is to shed all egos and self positioning and to create a link with
the primary desires. I enjoy the solitude with food and when you are alone with
food you realize that you are not alone. I have seen people feeling utterly sad
and lonely, distracted and deliberately engaged in trivial activities such as
typing texts into mobile phones, making phone calls, looking at television
programs and so on, when they are alone with their food. But I take it as an
opportunity to become one with what you eat and realise the basics of life. I
prefer not to eat with other people when I am travelling. When I eat with
others I participate in a social ritual. When I am alone and eat food alone, I
enjoy it immensely because I realize the I in me is nothing but a hungry being
that just want to quench its appetite. The moment I realize this I feel the
need to transcend from that basic nature to go to higher planes of existence.
And eating food alone is a sort of meditation for me because each time I push a
piece of food into my mouth, I become one with that act of eating and pay my
respects to the higher power that has created me as well as the food, and once
I recognize the creator I feel the need to reach him/her. The moment I feel the
need to reach him or her, I go deeper into myself, taking my solitude as a path
and transcend my basic instincts to qualities that make a human being divine. I
am yet to take many more lonely meals.
No comments:
Post a Comment