If “thanda legey jaabey” (“you will catch a cold”) is a Bengali’s trademark remark, a close second contender for that status would be “ombol hoyechhe”. (“you have indigestion”). Regardless of your symptoms – stomach cramps, short of breath, headache, broken finger :-), the latent doctor in a Bengali will invariably sprinkle that wise diagnostics phrase “ombol hoyechhe”. By the way, every Bengali is a freelance doctor!!
You probably also know that Bengalis are famous for their consumption of sweets. We have sweets for breakfast, lunch, snacks,dinner… Our long breaks for sweet-eating is interrupted only by our short breaks of sweet-eating. For whatever reason, sweets do not give us “ombol” 🙂
For years, I dodged all my relatives offering piles of sweet by lying to them “I have a sugar problem. My doctor said No sweets”. Like I explained before, doctors trump sweets for Bengalis. That was that. Till my sister decided to go ahead and marry a real doctor 🙂
That story later! Here, you can see how last night my mom was setting the “table” for dinner. Note that the food had not arrived yet. But four different varieties of sweets were already there. Just so that we are clear on our priorities..,