“Good food is a celebration of life.”
– Sophia Lauren
“What are we celebrating today!?”
My sister came back home from one of those tedious days at the hospital and went straight to the fridge to rummage about for some food. It’s a weird but comforting thing, looking around the fridge, I feel. More often than not there is not a single piece of food there that we would want to eat and although we have this prior knowledge, we still end up opening the door and shining the fluorescent light on our utterly disappointed faces. Only to shut it, trudge away and then come back again in ten minutes, hoping some new morsel might have appeared miraculously appeared. Well I suppose you could say humans are nothing if not for hope!
Anyway, on this particular day, my sister seemed to be in luck because as she bent down to dig into the depths of the refrigerator, she did find something as was evident from her enthusiastic exclamation, “What are we celebrating today?”. “What do you mean?”, I replied, quickly auditing the whole month to see if I had forgotten any special occasion. “There is a box of Ferrero Roscher chocolates in there”, she said stuffing her face with one, “so there must be some good news”.
That gleeful face opening the second golden sphere took me right back to our childhood days. I remember in vignette tones the musty memories. The first time I had ever opened a Ferrero Roscher was when our cousin was visiting India, coming from the United States. She had brought quite a great load of goodies for us, but as she opened this box, the room suddenly seemed to fill with light. Sorry for the hyperbole, but you know how it is to a kid who grew up on orange lollies and sickeningly sweet bars of Cadbury. This was on a whole other level.
It started with the way the light danced mesmerizingly on that golden paper wrapped ball dressed in chocolate brown frills. It was almost like an enigmatic precursor to a magnificent film that you were about to be treated to. Then there was the truffle itself when you opened the wrapper. Rugged with bits of hazelnuts that you cracked through to get to an airy wafer enclosing a molten lava of chocolate which could melt your brain, but then hitting the center core of a roasted hazelnut. It was like digging through a flavorsome earth to find the gold. The texture, flavor, experience, everything was divine!
This reminiscence thought was of the days when we weren’t living in the hustle-bustle of a big city and this was before it was so freely available in your local supermarket. So, it was something special that this townie had gotten the taste of. And in those days, something so decadent wasn’t cheap. It was a treat, a reward for a job well done, an extravagance to be devoured only when you had earned it. So, occasionally, when we topped our class, or had a festive season coming up or could get to see our cousin again, we clamored for the chocolate. Thankfully, the roscher had really won the hearts of even our chocolate-hating parents, who during those days usually deemed to eat only butterscotch as it was supposed to be for the elevated palate. So fortunately, our parents duly submitted to our requests. I suppose secretly they were also fond of it. Something that cannot be said for their feelings towards us.
Consequentially, it was that sweet treat that my sister had stumbled upon and had innocently thought that it was a reward for a hard day’s work, maybe hers, maybe someone else’s. But that fact of the matter was that I had bought the chocolate just because. I had suddenly craved for it and without a moment of hesitation, had just gone online and bought it. Just because. And it wasn’t up until that moment I realized that what a long way we had come. From then when it was an opulence to now when it was an option, times certainly had changed. It still wasn’t ordinary, but it was accessible. And so, you finally understand that joy of levelling up in life when you see your family relishing an instant of happiness that has been created by you, when you can return the good memories that your parents created for you, when you finally catch that little golden ball that you had been chasing for so long. Perhaps, it was a special occasion after all.
