butterscotch

I was behind a glass door when it began to rain, in a tiny 'bakery' that seemed to be quite popular for its pastries and patties, judging by the number of young people that were streaming in. Everything was typically small and modest and, completely bizarre to my eyes then - the flaky, triangular puffs filled with yellowed potatoes, the narrow wedges of wilting cake topped with inch-thick layers of golden or green cream. The customers who came in bought only one, or at the most two, pastries, pronouncing their orders to the man behind the counter solemnly and carefully. They behaved as though they were using up the day's ration of treats. The salesman was also a young man; but he was one who looked somehow overgrown, or undergrown, or disbalanced, like a teenager in an adult's body. He moved behind the counter sliding the glass doors that protected the treats to grasp them, to pinch them, one treat and a time, between his fingertips.

The treat would be put in a flimsy cardboard box with cheaply printed letters on its lid spelling the shop's name, then put into an even flimsier plastic bag coloured some colour like neon pink or green. Then the bag would be hung carefully on the wrist of the customer and carried out into the drizzle and the crowded street. The autobiography of a treat.

Not quite over. In a small living room suspended far above the chaos - a living room marked out for that purpose by the sofa sitting there, too bulky for the space - in this living room, in the heat, now humid because of the rain, the box is opened, the plastic bag discarded, and the treat lifted out onto a plastic plate printed with fading floral patterns. The treat is divided up among the eager onlookers and consumed with a delicate casualness, the initial bite lifted slowly, then the cream and the crumbs allowed to smear sumptuously over lips and tongue...each bite washed down with a sip of saccharine fizz.

I felt I knew that one girl who came in to buy the "butterscotch." Her thin, dark arms covered faintly with fuzz. The lack of glamour in the sweep of her ponytail, strands of hair escaping and sticking to the sides of her forehead with sweat. The way her chunni slips from her shoulders because it is made of a synthetic material and the way she keeps pushing it up matter-of-factly while clutching her ten rupee note in her fist. She barely glances at me in response to my stare, making me feel invisible in this bakery among the butterscotches and the black forests, a total stranger to the layers of coded language passed deftly between the young salesman and the girl buying her treat.