Icecream
I was all cooked out this afternoon when I lay down for a nap. It was a long weekend off for Diwali and I tried to make at least one special dish on each day. Bengali lamb chop biryani (delicious but must remember to cook it for far less time than the recipe said) yesterday, prawn moilee the day before and roast chicken with lemon garlic gravy today.
I woke from my nap asking for an ice cream sundae. The long suffering spouse has prior experience of these wake-up moments. Today’s craving took him by surprise though. Most of the time, I wake up from mithai dreams. No run of the mill gulab jamun or jalebis inhabit my sleeptime. I dream in 4-D, state of the art exotica. Malai na khaja! Elaneer payasam! Choorma na laadva! Kesari! The atta ka sheera my Punjabi neighbour fed me at a puja years ago!! These are not easy to find on a Sunday afternoon here in my city. The spouse has perfected the art of distracting me quickly and efficiently. He willl remind me that I haven’t had my afternoon cup of coffee yet. If I still want it afterwards, he’ll go looking for the elusive mithai in the innards of Mohammed Ali Road or Matunga. The caffeine takes the edge off, the cranky woman settles down with her embroidery and the dream is forgotten.
Today’s dream was thus unexpected. In retrospect, a case of the uneaten dessert being sweeter than the recently sampled one. My lovely househelper gifted me motichoor ladoos and sohan halwa just yesterday. So my mithai craving is temporarily satiated. Hence, ice cream dreams. Now the clincher: THE SPOUSE LOVES ICECREAM. He has a well earned and long standing reputation for the amount of ice cream he can put away. In his early years, restaurant managers used to plead with him to not eat any more icecream in the buffet for fear they might run out of the stuff. Friends and family have been known to stock their outdoor freezers full of java chocolate chip or strawberry cheesecake or even just chocobars in anticipation of his sheer enjoyment. Each one vies to outdo the other in the variety of icecream they can feed my man. So now you get why I used all capital letters above.
The icecream sundae became a quest worthy of my knight. He spent an hour doing research on its availability in our part of the city. Do you know that icecream sundaes have sadly gone out of fashion? I’m not crazy about the ones with three different sauces and eighteen toppings as well as enough whipped cream to smother oneself in. I just wanted two scoops, with chocolate sauce and nuts. But even that was not easy to find. After much trawling the net and weighing of the pros and cons, he hit the jackpot. And before I could say But…I may have changed my mind…we were in our favourite deli, drinking coffee and contemplating a superlative selection of in house icecream, the chef having kindly agreed to make us a sundae.
We could choose from vanilla bean, strawberry, hazelnut, rocky road, pecan butter, caramel, three different kinds of chocolate. We went with pecan butter and rum and raisin. It was a good sundae, just the right quantity of chocolate sauce and nicely toasted nuts. As we left, we stepped into a swirling, celebratory crowd of holidaymakers, either heading to the ferries for a harbour ride or returning from one, heady with the sea breeze. Every fourth or fifth person I saw in that mad couple of minutes clutched a kulfi on a stick. The afternoon sun melted that kulfi as fast as it could be licked. Pista and malai were the hot favourites though there was also a two toned vanilla and chocolate in some hands. That two toned flavour wasn’t very good, judging from the disappointed look on the licker’s face.
A human faced with a fast melting ice cream is a desperate creature. Some will contort their necks and raise their icecream holding elbow so as to catch the drips on their outstretched tongue. Others will risk it all and stick the entire icecream, held horizontally, into their open mouths. The downside to this manoeuvre, especially when tackling our softer, creamier local icecreams, is that every now and then, the entire ice cream slides off the stick and into your mouth. Instant brain freeze guaranteed. Then there is the clever consumer of melt. This one rotates the stick so that each drip, enters, efficiently and effectively, into the mouth even as it forms. All these tactics were on display in that mass of humanity flowing past us as we exited the deli.
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I had a crazy urge to eat some more icecream when a group of rough looking young men pushed past us. I distinctly heard one say to another: Hiroshima Nagasaki. My mind was instantly distracted from icecream to existential matters. What could that conversation have been about? The Department of Atomic Energy was right across the road from where we stood. Could he have been referring to Hiroshima as an explanation for the work the DAE does? Or was it the reverse? Was he referring to atomic energy to explain the tragedy of seventy odd years ago? Either way, it was illuminating to watch the animation on that young man’s face. And then, two young Japanese tourists passed by. The third and most realistic explanation for that snatch of conversation suddenly became apparent. Deflated, suddenly tired and out of sorts (sugar high, sugar low), I hopped into the car and we drove away.
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