Just for kids

Today is Children’s Day. Apart from the irony of belonging to a country where children are still used to get work done – as in that horrific phenomenon that is known as child labour – I am in many ways a child at heart, even though I am very long past that age. I still play with my food. I still like eating stuff like French fries and slurping my way through large and very thick chocolate milkshakes and making that dreadfully louche sound at the end when the straw siphons up nothing but a few brown bubbles. And I still find that food tastes better when someone else makes it for you than if you make it yourself to a greater degree of perfection. Especially if you arrange it artfully on a plate to look like flowers or even funny faces.

But there was much that I was not allowed to eat when I was a child. Like crawlies, which at that stage in my life I did not consider to be creepies as well. I had a young Japanese-Indian friend with whom I would go grubbing in the dust in the garden. She would pick up the long black crawlies, the ones we call millipedes but which are really not, biologically speaking, as far as I know, and stuff them happily into her mouth. Her mother knew she did that. She said nothing. But let me stretch one fat starfish hand towards a long black crawlie and my mother would descend like an avenging angel upon my hapless head, snatch me up from my vantage grubbing spot and bear me off homewards, scolding even as she hugged me, as if my proximity to the long black crawlie had somehow contaminated my being in some way.

And then there was the friendly neighbourhood chanawala outside school. He sat there, evening after evening, his huge smile beaming upon us clamouring babies all nicely dressed in natty school uniforms, waiting for either the school bus or our assorted parents to take us home. I had been warned that I was never to partake of his offerings that were so interestingly filled into a tight cone of notebook paper, but at that age – or any age, for that matter – resisting temptation was not very easy. One day, I almost managed to grab myself a cone. I had practiced saying “sing-chana mix” for a long time and was all ready with my coin clutched in one hot little hand. I ran out with my small friends to where the chanawala sat, set to launch into my great adventure. But just as my foot stepped out of the school walk and on to the pavement, I heard my name being called in a very familiar voice. It was my father, waiting for me at the gate, all ready to hold my hand to walk me to the car parked just down the street. I still have not said my line and bought my little cone of sing-chana, not yet, not even today, so many years later.

Perhaps the most memorable edible I ever met with as a child was the Hedgehog Cake. Made by a fond parent for her young daughter’s birthday party, it was served up to us kiddies after a veritable orgy of chips, sandwiches and a fizzy drink, all eaten in a living room that was almost instantly a scrapyard of party debris. There were chip crumbs all over the carpet and the rexine-covered furniture was patchily sticky with the dried residue of various sugary colas. And all of children were happily smeared with bits of whatever we had eaten…or thrown at each other. The piece de resistance was the birthday cake in the shape and decorative finish of a small round hedgehog – iced in chocolate, it had sprinkles and bits and pieces of frosting, chocolate and candy studded into it like hedgehog spines. When it was cut, it was rather more plain inside, layered chocolate and vanilla sponge with a gentle slather of cream icing in between and the occasional M&M (or Gems, as they are called here) added for interest.

I was completely fascinated. So much so that I actually wrote down the recipe, painfully in my rounded knitting-like scrawl. I still find it occasionally in the Betty Crocker box when I am looking for clues on how much sugar to use for flan or how long my basic wholewheat bread should bake.