When they were in their 40s, my mom and my dad would cook at the Sentul Buddhist temple every year on Wesak Day. The area was home to many disadvantaged families, and anybody could come to have a meal. One year, my mom decided she’d cook egg curry with 500 eggs. She needed to boil and, more importantly, peel 500 eggs. It was a dry curry with just enough gravy to coat the eggs with onions, garlic, curry leaves. She would use tomato ketchup, and we would laugh at her, but she said everybody likes it. There were a lot of children that day. The temple volunteers laid out banana leaves and scooped food onto each individual leaf. One of the young boys ate his food then came up to my mom and asked for another egg. He said he wanted to take it home for his mother. My mom told me she felt so sorry for him that she packed him five eggs to take home. She said this is a reminder not everybody is as lucky as we perhaps are to have food whenever we want to. I always remember this when I cook at the temple now.