LFC KOLKATA | DECEMBER 2025
Food has always been my way to break the ice. But at the last LFC meetup, life had been fuller than usual. My husband was unwell and on dialysis, and I had missed the previous few gatherings. I still wanted to attend—to be present, to share something, anything.
So, I went looking around the house.
That’s when I noticed the paan ka dabba. ‘Dabba’ might be a misnomer of sorts because it’s actually shaped like a car. It sits in a glass cabinet in my dining room, more like an artefact than an object of use. It belongs to a different time, when paan was more of a lifestyle, yet this dabba has always occupied a place of importance for my family. I thought to myself, maybe this is what I will bring to the LFC gathering.
The dabba is almost a 100 years old, made of kaansa (heavy bronze), and shaped, fascinatingly, like a vintage Rolls Royce. At first glance, that’s all it is—a beautifully detailed miniature car, replete with wheels that move, headlights, windows, and even a little ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’ winged figurine adorning the hood. When I first saw it after I got married, I had no idea what it was. I remember thinking how unusual it was, how carefully designed. My husband had smiled and told me there was more to it.
And there is.
Upon tinkering with it one finds that the top flips open! Inside, there’s a tray, and beneath it, small engraved compartments for paan masalas and ingredients. Lift that, and there’s space to store paan leaves. The bonnet opens too—on either side—meant to hold prepared paan, neatly folded, ready to be offered. Every part moves. Every hinge works. Nothing is ornamental.
This dabba came to my mother-in-law as part of her trousseau when she got married in the early 1950s. She married into a large joint household in north Kolkata, on Vivekananda Road. That house itself is nearly 200 years old today, and at the time, with it came not just people, but objects and habits that carried over generations.
In those days, partaking in having paan was an event. After a meal, everyone would wait and my mother-in-law would take out the dabba, prepare the paan, and share it with the family. It was a post-meal ritual, of sitting together a little longer.
Later, when the family moved to Assam, the dabba travelled with them and took its place as a decoration on their mantelpiece. My husband, then just a small boy, thought it was a fascinating toy car! He would drag a stool over, climb up when no one was looking, take it down, and give little goddess idols rides on it.
Years later when I got married, my mom in law introduced me to it; I discovered the grandeur it had seen in those days. I was amazed at the craftsmanship and the design—so precise and purposeful. When my mother-in-law passed away about a decade ago, this was one of the things my husband insisted we bring along with us, in her memory.
At the LFC meetup, when I placed it on the table, people were puzzled. After some guesswork, someone finally asked, “Is it a paan ka dabba?” And then I opened it.
That’s when the atmosphere of the room changed. People gathered around, phones came out, photographs were taken. As I opened each compartment, lifted each tray, showed how the bonnet worked, there was collective amazement—not just at the design, but at the idea and process. That someone once thought paan deserved so much care, so much beauty.
For me, that moment mattered deeply. Such objects are slowly disappearing, and along with them, the skills, the craftspeople, the everyday rituals that made them necessary. Holding on to this dabba feels like holding on to a way of eating and of living. For Bengalis, paan still makes an appearance at weddings, marking celebration and the successful closure of a meal.
Bringing the dabba to the meetup felt like giving it another lease of life, after being locked away behind glass all these years.