The Mystery of the Missing Cream

Now and then, I remember good old things and practices and long for them like a child, knowing very well that they have all receded irretrievably into the distant past. They are out of sight, but not out of the minds of people alive like me... to remember them and pass on the experiences to generations thereafter.

One of such precious things was the milk supplied in bottles. My father hankered after the days when his father had his own cows in his native village and enjoyed early morning coffees made with fresh, unadulterated milk. After him, I am pining for the delicious milk which was delivered in bottles—spotted with dew—at our doorstep at dawn.

These bottles had caps made of aluminum foil. It could be removed and replaced easily and undetectably. I used to be crazy about the inch of cream that formed below this cap. While others were asleep, I used to wait for the milkman to deliver the milk bottles and leave. Then, I would enact the drama of stealing the coveted cream.

I would remove the cap with infinite care and replace it with factory perfection—after, of course, transferring the cream floating like an iceberg in the neck of the bottle to my watering mouth with my index finger’s help. The taste of the ice-cold cream still lingers in my mouth after sixty long years.

I took the precaution of doing this only two or three times a week, and I also made it a point to pilfer the cream only from one of the three bottles supplied to us.

Even then, I could not hoodwink my mother, who could not accept the absence of cream now and then from one of the milk bottles. She took the poor, innocent milkman to task, who pleaded not guilty and dropped a clue to the recurrent disappearance of cream:

"I am not tampering with the milk bottles, Madam. You may ask your son; I deliver the bottles in front of him only on most of the days," he blurted out.

My mother put two and two together and decided I was the one who was behind the theft. When I volunteered to explain the disappearance of cream from our milk bottle by blaming the poor Tom next door, her suspicion deepened. A cat can lick the cream, but how on earth can he replace the cap so cleverly? She must have wondered.

The very next morning, she feigned sleep and saw me with her three-quarters-closed eyes move on tiptoe towards the main doors. She waited till I was up to my neck in the game and pounced on me. I was caught "red-fingered!"

I have recalled this incident many times and sighed with a nostalgic pleasure-cum-pain in my aged heart. I wanted to write about my bottled-up feelings regarding those "medieval" milk bottles for long. Now, they stand written about.