The vanishing cream

My bottled-up feelings about those ‘medieval’ milk bottles are out

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 who remember and miss them. One such precious memory is of 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 coffee made with fresh, unadulterated milk. After him, I am pining for the delicious milk that was delivered in bottles and spotted with dew at our doorstep at dawn. These bottles had caps made of aluminium foil. It could be removed and replaced easily and undetectably. I was crazy for the inch of cream that formed below this cap.

While others were asleep, I waited 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, of course, after transferring the cream floating like an iceberg in the neck of the bottle to my watering mouth with my index finger. The taste of the ice-cold cream lingers in my mouth, even 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 from one
of the bottles.

“I am not tampering with the milk bottles, madam. You may ask your son in front of whom I deliver the bottles 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 lift the cream, but how on earth can he replace the cap cleverly? She must have wondered.

The very next morning, she pretended to be asleep and saw me, with her eyes closed three-quarters, tip-toe towards the main door. She waited till I was up to my neck in the game and pounced on me. I was caught red-fingered. I recall this incident many times and sigh with nostalgic pleasure and pain in my aged heart. I wanted to write about my bottled-up feelings about those ‘medieval’ milk bottles for a long time. Now they are out.