The Great Cake Adventure: A Story

Cake: The Beginnings

In which Ekalavya Chaudhuri discovers cake.

I recall, from back when I was a fairly smallish child, the earliest family adventure I have in my memory, when my mother and father took me to discover cake. We went into the kitchen as if we were armed forces heading beyond the lines of enemy territory in some kind of Latin American war happening between banana republics, rather than going in for cooking. What I can remember very vividly is that I was handed a beater and told to beat a quantity of butter. When I had done this, I remember, suddenly there was another bowl of butter in front of me. And when that was done, another. It felt to me like a series of movies. Butter. The Return of Butter. The Son of Butter. Butter Strikes Again. Butter Rides by Midnight. 

This roughly was my introduction to the beginnings. The beginnings of what, you ask? The process of making a cake.

Things Hotten Up

When all of this was done, sugar was added to the quantities of butter and beaten in. Following that, a number of eggs among which I am sure some were not quite all right (and which play an important role later in this story) were added to the mixture and likewise beaten in. After this, bits of flour mixture and bits of a mixture containing some sort of condensed milk my mother had bought were alternately mixed in. The end product, a sort of batter-y looking thing with a lot of elongated, irregular holes in it, sitting in a pan, was bunged into an oven. And then we were to wait.

The oven chose to actually celebrate the end of the required waiting period. It did so by briefly emitting a blue light, sort of flaring up. Then, the entire electricity in the house went out. This is a custom in our house. Perhaps my father cuts up and plays around with the wires. I do not know. It’s certainly fact that he’ll often unscrew the four corners of a switchboard and muck about doing things to the wires in there with a couple of gadgets. He says the earthing of the house is faulty and the entire thing requires regular maintenance. I don’t know. At any rate, he somehow fixed things and the electricity came back on again. The cake was taken out.

My mother poked a stick-like thing into it. The stick-like thing broke. However, there was a more curious feature. This was a rather overpowering smell that’d welled out as soon as the cake was taken out of the oven. Pretty instantaneously, the air inside the kitchen  both began to hotten up and grow stiff as a board, and rapidly began to seem to become rather close.

And What Followed After

Affairs rather swiftly followed after.

​For at this point, the maid who had been upstairs hanging up the clothes (like the lady in the poem about the other baked confectionery item) came back down. My mother carved a slice from the cake with a knife (with what looked like considerable effort) and held it out towards her, offering it. Now our maid at this time was one who always had a permanent cold in the head and would speak to you with a clogged-up-with-phlegm voice. I think that’s why she had been being unable to get what we were all smelling initially. Although, from how she was whiffing the air I could see she was now getting there was something distinct and individual wafting on it, and not being able to get what it was was clearly bothering and puzzling her.

As my mother held the piece out to her, though, with the whiff she was drawing then she must have got it at last. She reeled back like she had been struck through the occipital lobe with a blowtorch. And then, brokenly thanked my mother but declined the piece.

After that, for some time, we were at a stalemate. My mother wanted to keep the cake and said we would slowly eat it- though she seemed unwilling to immediately lead by example. My father and I demurred. We were of the opinion that this cake we’d cooked up was clearly quite a tough customer (in fact it quite literally was so), and it would be better to dispose of it.

In the end, over my mother’s mutinous grumblings, the motion was carried by the majority. I think this was largely because my father positively insisted, my opinions were not usually heard at the best of times. The cake was thrown out.

There followed the most singular feature I can remember of this entire unfortunate incident. It involves a certain tom cat which had been pretty much a feature in our locality. (In fact, to this day I suspect it killed three kittens that had been nestling inside of an almirah in our house; I had got a very bad shock the time I opened the almirah and saw them all decapitated and dead.)

At the moment this cake was tossed out of our window, this cat was creeping up, probably to attempt getting acquainted with a sparrow that was sitting at the foot of our guava tree. The cake dislodged the sparrow. The cat, clearly miffed but feeling a cake in hand was still worth some sparrows in the bush, immediately leapt at it. Then it gave a yowl and did what I am certain was a back-somersault while in motion in the air. After that, with a really displeased look that suggested that it was too bad what was put upon a respectable tom cat in our locality, it streaked off into the middle distance at several miles an hour.

It has never been seen by me in our neighborhood, in all the years since.