The Magic of Ice Cream

God must have been in a particularly bad mood when he made the Indian summer and a particularly good one when he invented ice cream. Well, maybe he didn’t actually invent it, but it sure does feel that way. Especially for someone who comes from Gujarat, ice cream is a kind of religion of which kesar pista is the ruling deity. For ice-cream is the almost perfect form of bliss that no amount of cynicism of today’s world can dent. Eating ice cream is like an act of surrender- we relinquish control over our senses and a desire to shape the world. We lose five minutes of our existence every time we get a cup for in that time we are slaves to our senses. We extricate ourselves from the world we live in and inhabit one where pleasure runs barefoot. Ice cream allows for nothing intellectual, nothing self-conscious and nothing negative. Ice cream slows time; the world takes on the dreamy quality of slow motion sound. We are addled into benevolence; the world looks like a good place. As a colleague of mine once remarked, “Have you seen a villain eating ice cream?”

Ice cream is an intermediate form- it is a solid which is in fact a contained liquid; it is the warmth of our mouth that makes something frozen and hard turn into something lush and liquid. We savour the slow death of the solid and the exquisite birth of the liquid as the pleasure paint that is ice cream fills our mouth. Ice cream has no use for our teeth; for it lives in a world where nothing is hard, brittle or fragile. The bland fullness of texture overwhelms the senses as it numbs them, making us forgiving of all that the world is throwing at us as long as we eat ice cream.??No wonder ice cream is a favourite comfort food- heartbreak in Hollywood is signified routinely by the woman diving into those impossibly large cans of ice cream. It provides comfort because it fills us up in a way that leaves no room for thought. Ice cream consumes us even as we consume it.?

It is the fate of all creamy things to be considered sinful and ice cream is no exception. Pour some hot chocolate sauce and ice cream becomes an experience in sinful profusion. It becomes clear to us as to why there are no bones in our tongue as it twists, wiggles and squirms its slavering way through the gooey mass of thickened sweetness.?

The defining idea of ice cream however lies in its ability to evoke an age of innocence. Ice cream makes us all go back to being five years old and feel deeply nostalgic about the simplicity and purity of earlier times. Growing up in middle class India meant that ice cream was an occasional treat to be savoured in the full. The wooden spoon would hit the paper bottom time and again as we scraped out every single drop of wet ice cream that we were firmly convinced still remained in the cup. The bell of the ice cream man was like a distant sound of hope as we opened negotiations with our parents. And once in a while, we managed to actually get a slice of that mythical three layered treat called Cassata; the epitome of everything impossibly indulgent.??

As in many other Gujarati households, we had the institution of the ice cream party, which as the name suggests was a celebration centred around ice cream, and little else. Why waste one’s appetite on anything else when there was ice cream present? An ice cream machine of the manual kind was hired and if memory serves, about 16 litres of the magical substance was churned using the combined muscle power of all present. Copious quantities were consumed, punctuated only by the occasional bite of something savoury, like potato chips or bataka vada, just to provide enough variety so as to be able to consume more ice cream.?

And who can forget the ice cream cone, especially the softy? The softy is perhaps the most romantic form of ice cream as it is designed to for us to take it in our hand and proceed to make love to our mouths. The softy makes the ice cream an extension of ourselves as we launch ourselves into the ice cream and lose our tongue and hearts to it.?

Vanilla remains the favourite ice cream flavour because it captures its essence best. It is white, smells of luxurious escape and is something one can sink languidly into. The taste of vanilla is a hint, a whiff that the mind does not need to work hard to process. Vanilla elevates ice cream from being a dairy product into something more refined.??It doesn’t matter much how you serve it- even the thick unappetising slabs we are served at weddings transform into something heavenly once it enters our mouth.?The chocobar was another favourite, for it provided the perfect interplay between the creamy richness of vanilla enrobed by the warm meltiness of its chocolate cladding.?

In a world that is becoming increasingly complex and divisive, ice cream remains our escape to the better side of our selves. As everything around us accelerates, it is worth remembering that ice cream is the slowest food there is; you cannot gulp it down in a hurry. While we are eating ice cream we know that everything else is trivial. At a time when we live a life of perpetual distraction, diving into an ice cream might give us a few minutes where nothing, not even a text message can divert our attention. More than any other time in the past, this might just be a time when we should all be eating more ice cream.?

(This is a version of a piece that has appeared previously in the Times of India)