Ice Candy Man

The eight year old kid hung on to the parapet of the balcony looking down at the street. He could feel the hot railing on the fair skin of his thin hands. Yet his eyes were fixed on the man pushing a wooden cart on the other side of the street. He was still a few houses away. The edge of the cart was lined with bottles full of colored liquids. Green, red, yellow, maroon, orange, blue, all dancing inside the bottle as the man slowly moved towards the house in which the kid was. The man picked up a copper bell kept on his cart and shook it. The whole street was filled with the high pitched ringing of the bell.

“Uncle, wait!” The boy shouted from the balcony. The man stopped pushing the cart and looked around. He wiped the sweat off his forehead.

“Uncle wait, I am coming!” The boy shouted again in a shrill voice. The man looked up at the kid and slung the towel over his right shoulder.

The boy jumped off the parapet and ran down the stairs, two at a time. He was excited to see all the colored liquid in the bottle. He could feel the coolness of the crushed ice on his tongue. The tanginess of the flavoured syrups made his mouth water. He pushed the big iron gate and slid through the small parting. With a five rupee note in his hand, he ran to the other side of the street without bothering to look on either side of the road.

“Make me a gola.” He ordered the man.

The ice candy man took out a block of ice from underneath a piece of wet jute bag and began to run it on the crusher. The boy enchanted, stared at the hands of the man crushing the ice. The tumbler kept below the crusher filled slowly with the cool crystals through which the burning sun shone as if it had been broken into a thousand pieces. A trickle of sweat ran down behind his left ear as shards of broken ice fell on the cart and turned into water at the blink of the eye. The man fixed a stick into the ice and pulled the whole gola out.

“Which flavor do you want?” The man asked. The enchantment broke for a second.

“That one and that one and that one.” The boy said pointing to green, orange and maroon bottles.

The ice candy man picked up the green bottle and overturned it onto the small mound of ice. The thick syrupy liquid fell and the icy crystals turned green. He then picked the orange syrup and the ice began to change color again.

The boy felt as if the scorching sun had disappeared and it was night. He was on the moon. The surface was cool and white as snow. He had a huge brush in his hand. The brush was dripping with green color. He began to paint the surface of moon green. The temperature fell and he felt a cool tingling in his spine. Then he dipped the paint brush in a bucket full of orange color and began to paint the surface again with broad bold orange strokes. At the same time when he was painting the moon he could see the moon from the earth, some part of it had turned green and some orange, a few patches of white still remained, he wanted to put the maroon color on those spots.

“Hey kid, are you sleeping?” The ice candy man was shouting in his face.

The ice candy was ready and he was holding it right in front of the boy’s eyes. The boy took the ice candy from the man’s hand and gave him the five rupee note. He looked at the ice candy, his mouth watering but he controlled himself, turned around and slowly walked towards the big iron gate that led into the bungalow he had come out of. He smacked his lips as he approached the gate. He looked around. Everyone was holed up in their houses hiding from the sun in that June afternoon. He gave the ice candy a few quick licks.

“Raju!” He heard the voice of a woman calling him from inside the house. “Did you get hit by a truck? Where is my ice candy?”

“Abhi laya memsahib!” Raju shouted, looked at the ice candy with sad eyes and walked inside the iron door.

Based on a story idea by a friend.