The little girl opened the fridge door and shouted, “Papa, where is it?” “Where is what, my dear?” her father asked as he got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen.
“My prize chocolate,” she complained. “It’s gone missing!” He was surprised to see her creating a hullabaloo over a bar of chocolate. She was so quick to devour chocolate in any form that no bar could survive intact in her possession for more than a day. Except, he remembered, the ‘prize’ she had won at her school’s sports day. She had taken part in the running events for children and come in second in the 100 metres race. Her prize was a packet of thin chocolate. Contrary to her typical behaviour, she didn’t promptly put it in her mouth. She took it home in her tiffin box and put it inside the fridge.
Her father couldn’t help teasing her over her ‘chocolate syndrome’. “I have eaten it!” he announced. He pretended to lick his lips coated with a thin layer of chocolate.
She was stunned. Her own father betraying her like this? Newton’s Law demanded an equal and opposite reaction from her. Her arms swung into action, hitting him with her tiny fists and scratching him with her little nails. “Why did you eat it? It was mine! I had won it!” she continued to hammer him.
“Wait, wait,” he tried to humour her. “I’ll get you another bar of chocolate ... two of them if you like!” “No,” she cried, “I want my prize chocolate!”
“Ouch! Okay, okay, honey, I didn’t eat it,” he admitted under her relentless badgering. “It must be there, in some corner of the fridge.” She went and opened the fridge again. There it lay—her prize chocolate, still intact in its shiny wrapping. How could she have missed it? She held it up with a broad smile before putting it back again in the fridge.
Her father was nonplussed. “I thought you wanted to eat it,” he said. “What are you saving it for then? You know, I may be tempted to eat it again!” She beamed as she let him in on her secret. “It’s for my little brother,” she confided. “He is coming tomorrow and I will share my prize with him!”
‘Little brother’—that’s what she called her favourite cousin. Tomorrow the thin chocolate will melt and disappear in their mouths; what will endure is the thick layer of affection binding their relationship.
Ishwar Pati
Email: ishwarpati@gmail.com