In my parent’s house, when we sit down to eat, we can’t say no to any food— “Someone has put in their time and energy into making this,” my mother has always said. We also can’t dare to waste food. While honouring another person’s time and energy into feeding us is — or should be — a universal concern, my family’s reasons for respecting what’s on the plate run deeper still. My parents were born into a people who had lived the trauma of three partitions and a famine, and have seen people drop like flies out of hunger. Food for them, and through them, for me, was never a right but always a privilege. I have grown up being told that I am a descendant of people who saw the worst that hunger can do, and survived. So no, I can’t, won’t and shouldn't ever waste food.

There’s a scene early on in Darkest Hour where Winston Churchill (played exceptionally well by Gary Oldman) eats his breakfast — scrambled eggs, rashers of bacon, a glass of champagne and a shot of Scotch — laid out on a silver tray among crystal salt and pepper shakers and shining cutlery. It’s 1940 and he’s going to become the British Prime Minister. In his impatience to dictate a letter, he puts away his lavish breakfast and puffs on his cigar, probably never touching that food again. This is the man who, in three years, would go on to engineer the Bengal Famine that killed three million people.

For my family, and millions of other families around Bengal, our relationship with food dates back to the Bengal Famine. 75 years later, I am still grateful for the rice grain that makes its way to my plate. For years, the people of Bengal would grow rice that would be siphoned off in its entirety to feed British troops and citizens. The food debt would grow so large that it would create one of the biggest famines in world history. The trajectory of hunger follows a very clear trajectory of hierarchy; we lost our millions to starvation and there’s a static silence over this in our books, while we never stop hearing of the hardships and the difficulties of having lived in Europe in times of bread lines and rationed potatoes.

My generation has seen nothing like it and we probably lack the vocabulary or register to measure the trauma of living through a famine of such proportions. But we’ve all heard stories that have survived the generations. A friend’s grandmother once recalled to him how a starving man came to her door asking for some rice. She rushed to her kitchen to get some from her already heavily rationed stock and when she was walking back to her door, she saw the man had passed away. I never met her but I have grown up listening to my grandmother say that we must never refuse food to anyone who comes asking.