Ice-candied days

 Those were the little lights of childhood dawning upon the summer-time dusty bleakness with plenty of slurping charms. Without them the baking noons would appear full of famine, agony and melancholy. There would be a sudden surge in our spirits. It was an item of instant gratification. Almost a savior to save us from the broadened, sprawling tyranny of heat and dust. And their carrier was nothing short of romanticized hero. It became so important that the rest of the items over the globe seemed inconsequential specks. The ice-candies with their lure and legacy!

The ice-candies would stand out as life-supporting oasis during the hot, dusty, sweltering days of summer. With colorful ice-candies around even the treacherous hot season would turn into a vintage climate. The sound of his rubber balloon horn would give him the aura of a regal chauffeur of our dreams. He carried the little vase of joy in his wooden chest box insulated with thermocol padding inside and iron sheet on the outside. And we would throng the bicycle with chaste passion.

The schools would be off for almost two months and the children waited for the ice-candy sellers to shout in the streets. The greed for these cheap colored beauties knew no limits. The children would plead for paisas from the elders, get some, take the candy, slurp it down and come back to the house to fish out some old book, copy, notebook, diary, glass bottle, iron wares, plastic discards or anything acceptable to the seller, get their candy, lick it away with even more greed and then more greed would turn them scrap collectors to roam the street, scamper over dry dung and waste heaps to salvage anything that would add to get an extra ice-candy.

It was a fascinating conquest of our fancies, unleashing unbridled gallantry in the heart of even the dourest ones to contrive some rancorous caprice to devise some extra means to get one more ice-candy. The children ran helter-skelter with overstrained nerves to lay their hands upon anything acceptable to the seller. Those who were successful on a particular day tittered affectionately while those who were yet to color their tongues with the bright colors carried a wearisome, damnable look in their lost eyes. They walked crushed and crestfallen, their spirits mutilated and they looked with dusty sighs at the ones carrying the lascivious item in their hands which slowly melted on their tongues with inundating delirium.

With the rise in temperatures and the rapidly thinning morals, the greed would further shoot up to burgeon into banditry. The mysterious charms of the little colorful pieces of ice would metamorphose into a pathway robbery. The more formidable ones among the ice-candy lovers would plot to plunder some cheeky seller. They would hide on the margins of the path just outside the village and pounce upon the wooden candy box loaded on the carrier. A bit more disciplined ones like me would watch from a distance and clap for the fortunes of the destiny-makers.

On one occasion, the wooden chest of ice-candies was on the ground and the owner thoroughly overpowered. A sturdy peasant woman ran with sickle in hand to defend the poor seller and save his provisions. The pointed thrusts of her kicks, slaps, whiplashing tongue and warrior queen kind swipe of her sickle saw the looters routed and running away from the scene of crime. She was able to save almost three quarters of his provisions. The ice-candy seller thanked her like he was her long-estranged real brother. ‘You ought to have some muscles on your arms to hold the bicycle and keep it from falling even if these little ones pull from all directions!’ she reprimanded him. He seemed to have fallen into utter submission and agreed to her thesis. In any case, she was rewarded with the best class of dark orange ice-candy by the humbled and dusted seller who offered his product out of gratitude. She had been harvesting wheat in a nearby field in the sweltering midday June heat. Profusely sweating and slurping on her reward she went back to her work. Well, that was a well-deserved ice-candy if there was any that day.

We had ice-candy looters right within the village also. They were civilized and respected looters using a smart tactic. They were the grandpas, like even I witnessed my own grandfather performing the feat from across the corner. They would begin with severally reprimanding the seller for spoiling the children, even turning them into thieves in their own houses, stealthily taking out wheat, jaggery, books and notebooks, thus trashing them as junk for an ice-candy. Thus reprimanded the seller would be instantly on the backfoot. But they had a solution. They paid a little tithe, a kind of goonda tax. The seller would produce a nicely melting glossy ice-candy as his answer to the village elder’s complaint. And the issue would melt like ice in the heat. Then the elder would slurp the cold, sweet ice-candy with hollow cheeks, completely forgetting that just a minute ago there was an issue named as ‘the ice-candy seller spoiling the morals of the village children’.