A solitary winter ice cream

I’m sure he didn’t ask the rest of them whether they wanted to trust the half-hearted chill of a winter evening to keep the takeaway frozen on the way home or to make the most of their single scoop before they can set their disbelieving eyes on how much VAT a single scoop of ice cream can generate just because they get eaten on colour-coordinated couches and between sing-along whispers of hip-hop music. He, like the others, expected me to buy a 250 ml pack, eat it slowly over a week in the freezer before giving it away in disgust rather than having an ice cream all by myself.

With the other people in the parlour he needn’t even have asked. The girl had already spent three minutes figuring out the difference between pralines and Bavarian chocolate and her companion only looked too happy that this contemplation of premium flavours had take her mind off the watch. It was ten minutes past the ladies’ hostel curfew of 9 pm.

As for the six men, who had spared only two chairs in the shop in their attempt to from a semi-circle of couches, they were too bravely clad for the winter to venture out into the road again and too numerous to want to go away soon. Their badminton racquets lay limply on the arms of the couches, shunned by the arms which had bid for them frenetically after every finished set.

Economic comparisons between India and china can only have the uneconomical consequence of ordering double scoops and this alone rules out a takeaway for this 45-year old group. Cups disappeared into the bin with every lull in the conversation but not one grey-haired gentleman moved to say, “I’m off. I should be home now.”

I have known the incomplete ice cream of a conversation with a lover, whole chunks of chocolate abandoned, spoon still stuck inside, the unsaid speared to silence by a word.

I have known the ice creams that pass untasted subdued by the stronger drug of the group, so potent that even as the spoon scrapes the last swirl from the depressed moat of the cup, it seeps past tongues too busy keeping pace with other tongues to notice.

But the best of all is the ice cream I order by myself, ice cream that meets the eye first and the heart last, ice cream that contains memories of all the ice cream I’ve ever eaten, ice-cream that I can finish in five minutes yet carry back in each every chocolate-flavoured shiver that the walk back home blesses me with.