Desi girl: A healthy school lunch for us includes parathas, curry and, a personal favourite, shami kebab

For the typical desi mum, a ‘healthy school lunch’ means something entirely different from pots of yogurt, wheels of cheese and vegetable crudités . No way. Desi lunchboxes are filled with desi goodness.

I was out of the country on holiday for the past few days and came back to a city quite different from the one I had left behind. The city I departed from was half-empty, enjoying its last few weeks of summer holidays, and the one I returned to was absolutely teeming with post-holiday traffic.

As happens at the start of every school year, I had not factored in the buses when I set off for my destination and ended up being 25 minutes late for lunch with a friend. “Oh, so you think getting caught behind a school bus is tough?” she glared at me when I expressed my frustration over the reason I was late. “Try being the mum who has to send three kids to school every morning. Try getting them out of bed, getting them dressed, feeding them breakfast. Try packing three healthy lunches every morning!”

While waking up the kids and getting them dressed is something I find difficult to relate to, the part I can totally understand and empathise with is the healthy lunch dilemma. For the typical desi mum, a healthy school lunch doesn’t mean little pots of yogurt, wheels of cheese or vegetable crudités. No way. Desi lunch boxes are filled with desi goodness.

Last night’s leftovers are a pretty good place to start. Rice and curry? No problem. Plonk it all in with a couple of plastic spoons and napkins on the side, and your kids will have the most gourmet lunch in class. The rice is sometimes swapped for a chapati or paratha, with chutney or pickles on the side. Yet another twist is when the leftovers consist of a fairly dry curry. That’s when you go to school with a curry and paratha “roll”. If that isn’t a reason to want to go to school, I don’t know what is.

Even when desi mums go the traditional sandwich route, they manage to keep things interesting.

My typical school lunch – I still crave it, by the way – was a shami kebab sandwich. Two slices of white bread slathered with mayonnaise, with a nice, fat shami kebab in the middle. The shami kebab is a small patty made of double-cooked meat. Chunks of boneless meat are cooked with a mix of spices and lentils, ground to a paste and finally mixed with chopped onion, coriander and egg before being fried or grilled.

While my friends would be struggling to down their bland chicken-spread sandwiches, I would delightedly be tucking into my spicy, savoury shami kebab.

I also remember a strange boiled-egg phase, when all my classmates were bringing boiled eggs for lunch and I insisted that my mum pack one for me in my lunch box as well. That phase ended when I accidentally took a raw egg to school instead of a boiled one.

I hear that even desi mums are getting lazy these days and that lunch boxes are filled with salami sandwiches or (the horror) chicken nuggets. That makes me sad. Lunch boxes should not be homogenised. My friend (a chicken-nugget kind of mum) was still glaring at me, so I decided to keep my thoughts to myself.

But I demand – albeit inwardly – that the shami kebab sandwich be brought back.

The writer is an honest-to-goodness desi living in Dubai