But that is
another story. She had decided to marry in 1993, which was also the year in
which I appeared for my Madhyamik — the West Bengal Board equivalent of ICSE or
CBSE.
Note:
I know that this gives away one of those mysteries that I had managed to
keep away from mankind so successfully all these years: my age.
***
This also
meant that I was enjoying the first of the two three-month vacations one
associates with Madhyamik. The other happened immediately after the
examination, which also brutally exposes the humiliating fact that it took
three months to bring out the results.
The first
three-month phase was, of course, the “study leave”, which, in student
language, translated roughly to two-and-a-half months worth of siestas, UGC-granted
programmes on Doordarshan, reading all sorts of books, ogling at girls during
tuitions, and gaining weight; this was usually followed by fifteen days of frantic
slogging on Samudragupta and leading bauxite-producing areas — information that
was supposed to change my life for good.
But this
story is not about Samudragupta, and neither is this about his cousin; it is
about my cousin; if it had involved bauxite, I am not aware of it. This is
about Didibhai, her wedding, and strawberry ice-creams, and the incident.
***
My uncle
and aunt, both nice people, had apparently committed a blunder: they had decided
to include ice-cream in the menu for the wedding reception. One has to remember
that this was 1993, when pocket-money was scarce, and we had to battle hard for
the “cup ice-creams” from the Kwality, Magnolia, or Farinni carts.
This
meant that ice-cream was special. Of course, ice-cream was available at Scoop
and Sub-Zero (opposite The Hobby Centre), but that was where cool grown-ups on
motorbikes took their girls to. For us, ice-cream was generally sacrosanct, and
was one of the reasons that we looked forward to weddings.
Eating ice-cream
from cups has always a mission. It is a three-step thing:
1. You undo
the lid first; the underside of the lid is white, and has an ear of sorts: you
started the ritual by licking the white side clean.
2. Now you move
on to the cup with that fragile wooden spoon (the one that looks like a
truncated spatula) they provide you.
3. Once you
are through with the last scoop-able bit of ice-cream with the spoon, you are
faced with a new problem: there is still ice-cream in the edges of the base of
the cup — edges that are too narrow for the spoon to slide through.
This is where the fingers come in: you run them along the rim and shovel
out the last remnants.
4. Bonus
step: if you still crave for more and can do away with random stuff like inhibition,
just use your tongue.
All this
meant that they wanted to surprise everyone by including ice-cream in the list
— a decision that, as mentioned above, backfired. It does not seem to be a grave
error, but the January of 1993 turned out to be one of the coldest in the history
of mankind.
Kolkata froze
that January. It snowed all day and night, and soon we were below three feet of
snow, out with shovels to remove the snow from our driveways. Of course, the above statement is
a blatant lie, but it gives you the idea. It was remarkably, unbelievably,
undeniably, brutally, selfishly cold — the kind that is supposed to ooze of stalactites
and stalagmites but did not.
As a
result of the intense cold the inevitable happened: there was surplus ice-cream.
Loads and loads of ice-cream, Kwality, strawberry-flavoured, in little,
identical white cups with hints of pink seeping out of the corners: good times
lay ahead, for sure.
***
The customary
discussion regarding the distribution of the party leftovers followed the
wedding as I was sent back home along with my grandparents (which was a
five-minute walk) to study the mysteries of xylem and phloem.
Then they
arrived: my father and someone (I cannot recall who it was) in a taxi. I
was curious. I had to be curious: why would my father cover a five-minute
walking distance in a taxi?
Then they
unloaded the carton. There were 107 cups in all. Our house was apparently the
nearest, and had one of the emptiest freezers. The general consensus, thus, was
to shove the ice-creams in our freezer.
Let us go
over this: a hundred and seven cups of ice-cream in the freezer (well, of
course all of them did not fit inside the freezer; most of them found their way
in the refrigerator). To add to the situation, I was on a three-month-long
vacation.
Then came
the command — the greatest command from a parent in the iconic Mukherjee lineage of South Kolkata: “finish
the ice-cream as soon as possible; you are on vacation; it is your
responsibility to ensure that food is not wasted.”
***
So I got
to work. It was, once again, a three-step thing:
1. Take an
ice-cream cup out of the freezer.
2. Replace
it with an ice-cream cup from the refrigerator.
3. Empty the
first cup.
It took
me a couple of days to realise exactly what was wrong with the process: I
consumed ice-cream faster than they froze. This meant that the freezer was
soon full of semi-cold ice-cream. Since my lust for ice-cream was a stronger
emotion than the desire for frozen ice-cream, I chose to gulp them down.
It took
me (and my entire household) just over a week to polish the lot. I did not need
to go out to buy rolls when guests turned off. I kept a count (and I have
reasons to believe that it is more or less accurate): I had managed to
finish 77 cups of ice-cream in a week.
All
Kwality; all strawberry; almost all semi-liquid and semi-frozen: I, forever the
obedient and proud son, had kept my parents’ command. Unfortunately, that had
come at the cost of losing my willingness to have strawberry ice-creams for
good. It was also successful in taking me off two-in-one (half vanilla, half
strawberry).
***
Morals of
the story:
1. When your
parents order you to do something you like, there is a catch somewhere.
2. Do not
fall for pink, soft things, however tempting they might be, before board examinations.
