Little hands and a little salt.

I sit in the library right now. Outside the window, the golden dazzle of the evening sun smiles, dry trees barely move, dragonflies dart jerkily, trying to appear busy, yellow flowers fall to the ground...the lightest of breezes nudges my tightly plaited curls, and the wall fan in front of me appears to have stuck. But this post isn't about today, or the hot summer, or even about the virtues of curly hair....it brings back a summer, many years ago, when I was a wee goody-two-shoed lass, and a little building in the middle of the middle of my city.

Every so often, there used to be a lunch at church. Maybe there still are lunches there, but I would never know, as I no longer frequent that little building in the middle of the middle of my city. To come back to my story, ever so often there used to be a lunch. While the adults engaged in their segregated important conversations downstairs, the rag-tag bunch of little ones, this wee lass included, used to run up the stairs, and between the pews, and behind the pulpit, and everywhere we possibly could without reprimands raining down on us.

It was while we were energetically engaged in one such run (ah, the days when I was young and slim and could run!) when we came upon the salt.

Now, salt, for the uninformed, provides an important metaphor in the Bible...as Christians, we are to be like salt...a little of us spreading a lot of God in the unflavoured food. But, then, metaphorical salt isn't the topic of this post either.

So, to get back (again!!! How my mind wanders!) to my tale, we came upon the salt. There it lay, on a piece of dry paper, on the railing of the balcony of the first floor, glistening pure and white in the hot summer sun. Being valiant young adventurers, debate was the first thing called for:

"Oooh!! What is this??"

"Who kept it here???"

"Why doesn't it blow away?" (Retrospectively, this was probably the most important philosophical question.)

"Can I touch it?"

"Can I taste it??"

It didn't smell of anything in particular. It didn't feel like anything in particular. So six little hands stuck numerous fingers onto the paper, and transferred the tiny crystals onto six little tongues.

"Oh! It's SALT!!!"

But mind you, this was not any salt. And no, it wasn't pure religious sacramental salt or anything of the sort, but it did taste different. It tasted more exciting. Somehow.

So, we ate it all up.

It's effect on us proved to be very similar to yet another white powder I learnt about many years later in college. Every Sunday, we would run up to the balcony after the service. If the railing was bare, six little hearts would descend to the depths of depression for the next sixty seconds. And if the salt was there..?...Well, then we would eat it up, every last granule of it. Eyes bright with happiness, cheeks flushed with excitement. We would even lick our fingers at the end! After all, what were manners when confronted with THE SPECIAL SALT?

Looking back, I can never figure out what was so special about that non-descript white powder lying in its white paper. We never thought we were stealing, so the Augustine pears effect (go listen to the lyrics of St. Augustine's pears by Petra for the context) wasn't what drove us ("forbidden fruit has a strange siren song")....in our innocence, we always imagined that the salt was left there especially for us! I can never understand why the person who kept the salt out never learnt his lesson and continued keeping it out right upto the time the monsoons started. And most importantly, I simply cannot fathom why that paper was never blown away!!!