Kulfi ar Bel-malaaa.....

I live these days in Orlando as some of you have already figured. Last September in California was the last time when a friend of a friend asked me how do I like Orlando, what do I do with all my time here. And I had replied- Its there and its green. This pretty much summarizes the city except the tiny fact that Jack Kerouac lived here for some time and wrote The Dharma Burns.

Well, Dharma does burn. And more so in India. But this post was going to be about the Ice-cream vendor in our neighborhood whom I have never seen in all these sixteen months and only heard. Just the chimes of the vending cart and nothing else, and without the friends here hearing the same notes for years, I could totally be sure that its nothing but a figment of my imagination.

I am sure all of us have something that connects the cities that we have lived in with us. The disembodied chime of an ice-cream vendor in Orlando connects me to the Kulfi-wala of my summer evenings as a kid back in the then Calcutta. Now I have forgotten how the Kulfis used to taste and only remember the smell of fresh Jasmine garlands kept on the ice over the Kulfis. The fragrance would linger even long after he had walked past our house, Vishal, Bittu and Pradip's house, Shachin-da's Shop and was gone for the night.