Of Plum Cake and Sugar Candy
OF PLUM CAKE AND SUGAR CANDY
DEC 24, 2004 – CHILDHOOD MEMORIES AREN”T ALWAYS THE MOST ACCURATE of things, so when I tell you the story of Jack-a-dandy here, it’s as I remember it from the days I first read it. (In other words, executors of the Jack-a-dandy estate – and they may well exist; in a world that has a Little Mermaid Fan Club, anything is possible – are advised not to sue me for inaccuracies.)
The nursery rhyme goes: Handy spandy Jack-a-dandy/Loves plum cake and sugar candy. And the story is about Jack, a fop (hence the ‘dandy’ in the name) who adored plum cake and sugar candy, so much so that when granted a wish, he asked for nothing but his favourite goodies for breakfast, lunch, dinner – any item of food he touched turned into plum cake and sugar candy. Needless to say, he soon got sick – he probably had the runs and violent vomiting fits as well, but this being a gentle fable for young readers, they typically left out the really interesting bits – and cried out for plain ol’ bread and butter. It all ends with his wish being granted, and the moral – oh yeah, those childhood stories always had a pesky little moral – that you should be careful what you wish for.
What I wished for, after reading the story, was plum cake. I’d never eaten one. It had such a nice ring to it. (Just say it out loud – how much smoother it flows off the tongue than, say, paal kozhukkattai.) It conjured up visions of such a moist, tasty mouthful, that just imagining it made me hungry, the way The Famous Five made my tummy rumble with descriptions of ham and tongue sandwiches, never mind that my great grandmother would have smacked me senseless had I dared to broach even the topic of eggs.
You have to understand. I was a good little boy in a good little Chennai school, surrounded by Ramaswamy and Ramesh, Subramanian and Suresh, maybe the odd Parvez, but not one of the bunch was a plum cake kind of kid. And just as my young life seemed doomed to eternal burfi and badusha consumption, in walked Albert, the new student.
Those days, there was no concept of political correctness. So naturally, Albert became the kind of kid who surely had a heavy-drinking dad, a brother who strummed a guitar in his bell-bottoms, and a mini-skirted sister, Julie, famous for her renditions of My Heart is Beating. In short, he surely was a plum cake kind of kid.
He wasn’t – turned out he hated sweets, hated Chennai, hated our class, hated our lemon rice lunch dabbas, and in return, we hated him back, mainly, I think, for destroying a dream that his mother (named Alice, no doubt) would someday pack his tiffin-box with plum cake for all of us.
Today, all these years later, I’m still looking for Albert – not for the plum cake, though. (Heck, that Bangalore Iyengar bakery down the road probably stocks the stuff now, maybe even a wheat-germ-based, tofu-encrusted, organically-coloured, minus-twelve-calorie version.) No, what I miss is that memory of Albert, of that Anglo-Indianness that’s practically vanished today. The spirit of the season is still around, in the ridiculously fake-paunched, cotton-bearded Santa who hangs outside the neighbourhood mobile phone shop. It’s there in the Merry Christmas wish I holler to friends Arul Devasahayam and Mary Prabha.
None of them, though, is Albert. They’ve assimilated into us – they’re you, they’re me. They speak Tamil. They celebrate Christmas by going to church, like we’d visit a temple for Deepavali. They too wear new silk saris and salwars and kurtas. They too gather around friends and family.
They’re so blended in, they’re not even a ‘they’. And as wonderful as that is, I can’t help remembering the Christmases from my childhood, the one season in Chennai that was like nothing we were used to, a season that reminded us that we were all doing our own little things in our own little worlds before we got dropped into this melting pot of a city. It was a season that was truly different – the tastes, sights, smells, clothes, everything was truly different, especially the people.
The people, they were like Albert, one of us, yet one of an exotic other. They had mistletoe and a spangly tree, and Uncle Luke stuck a pipe in his mouth and played the piano, and they all gathered around in suits and gowns and sang carols. Or did they? Was that only in my head, the plum cake kind of kid, the plum cake kind of family?
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