Every parent has stood in a kitchen at 7 am, packing a tiffin on pure muscle memory: fold this, wrap that, don’t forget the extra bite. National Parents Day (26th July) usually gets cards and phone calls. But if you grew up in an Indian household, the real tribute is smaller: a snack, the one that turned up in your dabba so often you stopped noticing it, until you moved out and missed it.

Some snacks are handed down the way stories are, through hands that never measured anything. Here are a few that quietly said “I’m thinking of you” long before anyone said it out loud.

The Tiffin That Never Missed a Beat: Methi Thepla

There’s a particular kind of morning chaos in Indian homes, someone hunting for shoes, someone else checking if the milk has boiled, and in the middle of it, a mother rolling out thepla like it’s the calmest task in the world. It went into school bags, hostel trunks, and later, suitcases bound for other cities. Nobody asked for it by name. It was just there, the way a parent’s care usually is.

The Sunday Afternoon Ritual: Bhakharwadi and Mini Bhakharwadi

Sunday afternoons followed the same lazy script: the newspaper, the tea gone lukewarm, and a tin of Jagdish Farshan Bhakharwadi being passed around. Fathers reached for “just one more” while insisting they’d stopped counting. The Mini version came later, made for smaller hands, but it carried the same taste, the same tin, the same Sunday.

The Monsoon Memory: Methi Fulwadi

The first rain of the season did something to Indian kitchens that no calendar could. Everyone wanted something fried and hot, and in some households, that meant Methi Fulwadi. There wasn’t much ceremony to it, just a plate by the window, tea made “just right,” and rain doing the rest of the talking.

The Travel Companion: Khakhra

No parent ever let a child leave home, for a train journey, a hostel, a new job, without a stack of Jagdish Farshan khakhras wrapped in cloth. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just there, in case the day ran long, in case a piece of home was needed somewhere unfamiliar.

The Jar on the Kitchen Shelf: Suko Lilo Chevdo

Some snacks lived in the tiffin. This one lived on the kitchen shelf, in a jar that always seemed to refill itself before anyone noticed it was empty. There was no real occasion for it, a handful before dinner, a quiet offering when nobody quite knew what to say.

Parents rarely say what they mean out loud. It shows up instead in a tiffin packed a little too full, a tin that’s somehow never empty, a jar that refills itself. This Parents’ Day, maybe the simplest way to say thank you is to reach for the same snack they once packed for you, and notice that the taste, and the memory, never really left.