The candy store
Candy remains a distinct memory of my very first week in the U.S. It was a university town. As a graduate student who had just arrived from India, one of our “seniors” from the Indian Students’ Association drove us to a nearby big box store to buy comforters and trash cans and such mundane necessities of daily life.
I remember the candy aisle from that day. Rows and rows of brightly colored packages of hard candy, soft candy, sour candy, gummies, licorice, lollipops, and bubble gums encircled us to say nothing of the chocolates and truffles and caramels and cotton candy. They were piled sky-high. In the shop lights of the gigantic store, they seemed to wrap us in magic in a rather kaleidoscopic fashion as we stood enthralled, still jet-lagged. Come December break or summer, most of us made trips back to that candy aisle to take back gifts to India.
Candy. A word that naturally comes to mind during Halloween although I never was aware of the festival as a child growing up in India. Still, the mind is a funny thing. A word can bring up an image, an image can bring up a memory, a memory can bring up a scene and then the scene can draw you into a swirl of thoughts. For Indian immigrants, such time travel also involves the mind zipping through long distances across continents connecting disparate times in different places wrapping reality with nostalgia just like a sweet-smelling candy in a shiny wrapper. An immigrant will sometimes discover a thing of value to a child as an adult and still love it with the innocence and wonder of childhood. Such is the candy aisle for me.
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Indian candy
Fortunately, though not familiar with Halloween then, my childhood was not devoid of candy thanks to my loving parents. In the late 70s in Kolkata, when I was a toddler, Aamar-er-dokan (Amar’s shop) was located right outside the gates of our Railway Colony where we lived. Amar had gigantic balls of chocolate candy lined up inside glass jars that I could barely reach as they were above the level of my head. Some days when I had the good fortune to travel to the store with my mother I’d be rewarded with one gigantic, round ball of foil-wrapped chocolate that I could hardly roll around in my mouth.
As I grew a little older, Cadbury’s 5 Star became an object of desire in its golden wrapper. Then came Dairy Milk. “Cadbury” was often synonymous with chocolate in those days. A visit from a relative would sometimes lead to an ecstatic moment when a bar of chocolate was revealed from said relative’s pocket after the touching of feet had been completed.
I remember such a visit when several of us cousins were together in our ancestral or “native” place when four or five bars of Amul chocolate in different flavors became the focus of dispute amongst us when my grandmother suddenly appeared seemingly out of thin air. Without batting an eyelid she confiscated the bounty and immediately got to work using the boti relentlessly to settle the dispute. A boti is a Bengali woman’s iron blade that is used to cut fruits, vegetables and fish by holding the wooden base fixed to the ground with the foot by squatting on the floor. Our grandmother sliced up the bars in purposeful sweeps as if they were all fish-heads being chopped up for curry until everyone had a piece accompanied by her legendary no-nonsense glare.
Birthday candy
Candy has always been an intricate part of our childhood. Birthdays in our all-girls’ school would involve the birthday girl wearing a nice “color” dress while the rest would remain in uniform. Each student would receive two lozenges to mark the occasion. Occasionally, the birthday girl herself would receive a gift, a plastic tiffin box full of candy, at a time when plastic lunch boxes and water bottles were prized possessions. When there was no candy though, we always had our Indigenous equivalents: batasha (round, flat aerated sugar hard candies) or nakuldana (white pellets of melted sugar) that would be given out after evening pujas as prasad. Yet, we never thought of that prasad as candy.
If you Google search a little, you will come up with many modern industrial histories of candy-making that people look at with nostalgia. In the U.S., candy became a staple of American culture. The history of candy making and trading in India by boiling down sugarcane juice is thousands of years old. In a twist of fate though, as an Indian immigrant to the US, when I think of candy this season, I don’t think of mishri or batasha or nakuldana. I think of a wrapped candy that looks like my 5 Star of childhood. When I wander the aisles of American stores looking for something like it, I try to find its closest cousin. Is it a Snickers? Or a Milky Way? Or maybe the Three Musketeers? Is my taste for such candy now Indian or American or simply British in origin given our past as a people or morphing along with the corporations and their local habitations and names?
Halloween candy in India?
If you Google search India and Halloween this season, you may come up with the “People also ask” section. Two questions that people are asking catch my eye: Do they celebrate Halloween in India? Is Diwali like Indian Halloween?
I must say I do not have empirical evidence to answer these questions correctly. All I know is that our memories create us as they will, not necessarily as we would like to be, even as we continue to create new memories. We can look for the origins of customs and festivals and of our culture and rituals as we know it, whether the festival is Halloween or Bhoot Chaturdashi or Shab-e-Barat, or some other day of ancestral remembrance. However, as matters stand, we have to continue to remain with the living and keep morphing to live. A piece of sweet candy might just ease that process.
Photo by Polina Tankilevitch: https://www.pexels.com/photo/colorful-candy-5469042/
Photo by Photo By: Kaboompics.com: https://www.pexels.com/photo/jack-o-lantern-and-halloween-candy-5420795/
Photo by Yan Krukau: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-traditional-wear-8819845/
