A Ring on the Door > IDEAS & IDEALS

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  IDEAS & IDEALS

A Ring on the Door

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I am sitting at my desk in my apartment room all by myself. It is quiet and I feel melancholic and lonely. I want to write something. It has been a long time since I wrote my last essay, and I miss it. Writing is a place where I feel comfortable and happy. But I have not started yet. I am just thinking of it. I need a proper topic to write about. I try to hit upon it but I keep drawing a blank. No subject presents itself. Then, suddenly, there is a ring on the door.

     I open the door to answer the doorbell and confront a delivery man with a small package in his hand. I receive it from him. It is from an old friend of mine who is living in the country. Once in a while he has been sending me a bag of rice, potatoes, or nuts that he himself has grown or gathered. I put the package on the kitchen table and tear off the wrappings to discover a small plastic box full of live snails.

     A hand-written note is enclosed in it which reads : Dear friend, I send, as you see, some of the snails I have collected from the river that runs through our hometown. I thought of the days we collected them together when we were school boys. There were plenty of them at that time. Now they don't abound in the river as they used to do. I hear that people grow them in the farm as they do vegetables and chickens. These are the naturals direct from the river. I hope you will enjoy eating them as you did when we were all poor and there was nothing much to eat.

     I got immensely amused before this unexpected present, and momentarily fell into a reverie. Yes, there was a river and plenty of snails in it. It was so easy for everybody to collect them from the river bed. Especially when the river rose by the heavy rain, they crept out to the river side in order not to be washed away, probably, by the flood tide. Then we didn't even have to gather them one by one. We literally scooped them out of the water into a large vessel with both of our hands.

     Then we carried them home and put them in a large earthen ware full of clean water, and let them stay in it for several days before we cooked and ate them. In the vessel they discharged all the dirts they had absorbed for their nourishments in the river bed. And, these tiny and spiral creatures the size of a small thimble in the little finger crept out of the black shells with their two feeble horns moving about and feeling out. It was a sight. They withdrew immediately into their shells when disturbed and played dead for a while until they were sure there was no danger for them. They were quite sensitive and smart in their own way.

     Cooking them was mother's work. She usually put them into the soybean soup with vegetables, especially with mallows. I cannot still forget the special taste and flavor of the mallow soup concocted with the river snails. And the joy and fun of eating the boiled snails! Either I made a hole by crashing the end tip of the hard shell with my molar teeth and sucked the contents out of the shell making a peculiar sound. Or, I picked out the flesh of the snail by using a needle. The flesh of the boiled snails was tender and easy to break in the middle before it came out whole and intact from the spiral shell. I knew how to eat it whole with a needle. I moved the shell round slowly with my two fingers as it came out at the end of the needle.
  
     When I showed this somewhat exotic present to my wife later, she was not much interested. Understandable. She has grown up in a place where there was no river nearby. She said she has not seen the live river snails in her life before. She refused to touch them. She even hinted that I had better throw them away. Impossible! How could I throw away these treasures! I got angry but I suppressed my anger. I decided to cook them myself. I can simply boil and eat them. 
 
     I put them all in a large aluminium bowl and filled it with the tap water, and decided to wait for several days to purify them of all the dirts. During this period of reprieve I had time to watch them very closely. In the container they were moving silently and constantly in search of food. They seemed to be aware of their changed condition by instinct, but ignorant of the imminent danger and the ultimate destiny. They looked like prisoners of war trying desperately but quietly to escape from the captivity. I felt sorry for them.

     Anyway, the day has come. I put a large pan half-full of water on the gas heater in the kitchen and began to heat it. Soon it bean to boil. I put some salt into it. The snails were ready to be cooked. For the day I was going to cook only a handful of them as a sample, not all. But I could not proceed my original plan. It seemed there has grown some kind of affinity or kindness during the time between these mute creatures and I. I found I have lost my appetite  before the naked cruelty of boiling them alive to death.

     I put them all into a plastic bag and left my apartment carrying it in my hand. There is a stream not far from my apartment, along which I take a walk everyday. I arrived at a point where I thought suitable for the snails to live. I poured out all of them again into the stream. I wished they would live well and multiply bountifully in their new habitat. I felt good and happy. Walking back home I called my friend in the country on the cell-phone and told him that I ate the snails, all of them, with great relish and appreciation.
     (June 25, 2012) 

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