Crunch, chomp, slurp and smack. When this writer imagines food with closed eyes, these sounds make up her incidental music. But this one time, they were replaced by unlikely thuds, slaps and plops. It happened when the writer was a kindergartener — scared of fellow four-year-olds who rooted for a curious sport of dashing with open tiffin boxes in a 500-square-feet room. Sights of squished overripe guavas, flattened noodles and torn cheelas followed. Food Fight, a book that’s set to release in January, 2023 took us back to this shabby memory. What we remember in retrospect, though, is Madame D’silva’s feathery voice, utterly unfazed by the chaos.

Aditya Shah and Karan Shah. Pic/Ashish Raje