"I did not always know how to eat an ice cream cone, said my 78-year-old father to his grandkids who greeted this anecdote with incredulous laughter. The thought of someone not knowing the 'how-tos' to anything perhaps seemed ludicrous to them. After all, theirs' is a hyper-connected world, where a single tap on a phone can crack open every mystery, in bite-sized, easy-to-consume pieces.
This was in 2020. COVID may have stopped the world in its tracks, but my father, unperturbed, sat in my home regaling my children with stories of his boyhood. As family folklore went, neither he nor our uncle-who emigrated from a small village called Mahdauli in Bihar to the Unites States-knew how to eat an ice cream cone. Household legend has it that my uncle would routinely leave his wafer cones to languish away in the dustbins of New York's bustling streets, after fastidiously scooping out the ice cream.
This memory came rushing back to me as I sat rearranging my father's books in his library at our ancestral home in Bihar. The shelves are filled with copies of Amar Chitra Katha, Tintin comics, Ruskin Bond novels, a few Urdu collections, books we won as prizes in school and numerous copies of Reader's Digest.
The books sat bundled together; quite a few with their spines starting to separate from their yellowed, well-thumbed pages. But even in their battered state they held within them the universe of my childhood-a whole way of life preserved. After a lifetime's journey from Bihar to West Bengal, to Madhya Pradesh then Maharashtra, these treasured tomes were finally home. I picked up a Digest at random, an edition from 1973, and, flipping through it, stopped. There on the page I had opened up to was an article titled How to eat an ice cream cone.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة June 2023 من Reader's Digest India.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة June 2023 من Reader's Digest India.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Calendar Girls
After Molly Baker’s husband died suddenly, her friends organized a year’s worth of support
THE GREAT WILDEBEEST MIGRATION
It's a spectacular sight when countless ruminants cross the Serengeti in search of greener pastures
Soumitra Chatterjee's Tryst with Destiny
The encounter that led a budding actor to a legendary filmmaker, and sparked an iconic creative partnership during the golden age of Bengali cinema
Frozen in Time
The life and work of Vittorio Sella, a pioneer of early mountain photography and the man behind some of the very first images of the Himalayas
HALLUCINATIONS
There was a monkey perched on the IV drip stand to the right of my hospital bed. It scowled at me, but I wasn’t afraid: A brief simian visit was part of my daily routine. I never questioned why there was a monkey in the hospital. I wasn’t lucid enough to recognize that my mind was playing tricks on me.
Music in the Air
Cuba is bursting with sound, and each region moves to its own defining rhythm
SHOULD YOU TRY A DETOX TREATMENT?
It's a popular new-year health habit. But science doesn't support it
Ringing True
He thought his late parents' wedding bands were gone forever
14,000-FOOT MIRACLE
The skydiver fully expected to die when her parachute failed to open. Instead, she's writing the next chapter of her life
I SURVIVED!
THREE UNUSUAL MEDICAL EMERGENCIES, AS TOLD BY THE PEOPLE WHO NEARLY DIED FROM THEM
