Indian dads at diwali
By the end of Diwali, the average Indian father is 20% water and 80% assorted mithai.
He belongs to an old and well-fed syndicate known as the sugar daddies. They control the family’s mithai supply, purchase the children’s silence with kaju katli, and oversee the disappearance of several kilos of sweets while maintaining they’ve barely had a bite. Over generations, what many think of as the occasional greed has been refined into the sophisticated art of laddoo laundering.
Like any laundering operation, it starts with a legitimate front. The sugar daddy pays full price for two kilos of premium stock and grumbles about inflation until the shopkeeper agrees with him. On his way out, he accepts a complimentary laddoo as compensation for the distress of paying retail. This is his first undeclared acquisition of the season.
Next, the sweets must be introduced into circulation. A man eating from a box is indulging himself, but a man eating from a tray is a gracious host, even if the guests haven’t arrived. He offers generously and insists that reluctant visitors take another piece. Any refusal creates surplus inventory which he is legally obliged to absorb.
He also specialises in distressed assets. Broken barfi, chipped kaju katli and laddoos that have lost their structural integrity cannot be presented to respectable company. Occasionally he must break a perfectly good piece to check that the rest are firm enough. He has rescued entire boxes from the embarrassment of being served imperfectly.
The real skill, however, is in layering. The sugar daddy has perfected a system in which four quarters need not add up to one. A quarter of a laddoo disappears before anyone wakes up, another over tea, a third during an unrelated walk past the fridge, and the last because leaving a quarter of a laddoo in a box is frankly ridiculous. By evening, the asset has been fully liquidated, and he remains pleased with his portion control. Indian dads at diwali
Certain transactions are exempt altogether. Anything eaten standing up was merely encountered, not consumed. Anything taken from a child’s plate is an act of parental responsibility, even if the child is now thirty-two. He has also ruled that the last piece in any box does not count, since somebody had to finish it.
Prasad is particularly easy to account for, since it would take an ungrateful man to question the nutritional content of a blessing. When his wife, the resident dissenter, points out that he has already had four, he finds it rather presumptuous of her to impose a limit on divine generosity.
He takes care not to leave a paper trail. Boxes are flattened, wrappers vanish, and crumbs are removed with a thoroughness rarely extended to his own dishes.
Eventually, someone notices that a box which was full yesterday is now half empty. But the sugar daddy advises against jumping to conclusions. Guests may have visited, children may have helped themselves, and he has noticed that a kilo isn’t what it used to be. He finds it sad that a festival of generosity has come down to counting laddoos.
The dissenter remains unconvinced, having spent years watching him deny eating things while still chewing them. Unfortunately, it is difficult to accuse a man of stealing sweets he paid for, especially when his proposed solution is to buy two more kilos.
As the festivities draw to a close, so does the racket. The sugar daddy can now return to ordinary life, where he is once again a firm believer in living within one’s means. His Diwali accounts remain unaudited, though the gains are becoming difficult to button up.
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