Our sugary celebrations

By the time September swings by, you know it’s all over. The year is turning, slowly creaking until it comes to a grinding halt. You can feel the shift of light and dark. Soon, the streets will fill with water, the air will smell of gunpowder. And we will celebrate by eating more sugar than we thought possible.

These two things, sugar and celebration, are impossible to separate. They have melted into each other completely. It is unclear where one begins and the other ends. Sticky sweetness has become the glue that holds together so many parts of our fractured, fragile existence.

Sugar fuses together engagements between strangers who don’t know what the other person looks like when they get up in the morning. It makes family get-togethers tolerable and awkward office birthday parties easier to smile through.

People all over the world choose this time, when the days are shortening and the air becomes cooler, to celebrate things. The birth of a king, the sighting of a star, the end of a year. Facing the same fading sun, it becomes important to do something, anything, together.

Celebrations are living things that shape-shift over time. People fall into and out of our lives. Our motivations are suspect, our enthusiasm wanes. Through a haze of overeating, we rewrite stories of demons and vengeful gods. As the years go by, the tales get even more twisted in our heads. Only one thing remains constant, the sweets. There is something beautiful about the uselessness of sweet things. We don’t need to eat any of them. Though we may convince ourselves that they are loved by gods, and thus eating a giant laddu is an act of faith and faith alone.

Sugar is a pure, simple pleasure. Like music or art. Not necessary for life, but imagine life without it? This sugar is literally in our blood. It was here in India that sugar was first synthesised into a crystal form. And possibly because of that, today India has more type 2 diabetes than any other country in the world. Once sugar was crystallised, everything changed. These tiny granules of happiness could now travel and reach the taste-buds of all kinds of people. No longer just the kings and royalty but even ordinary people, who would pour it into tea and sprinkle it on stale bread. It made a hard life a little easier.

The need for sugar was a monster and it would eventually change the world. Sugar was sprinkled and an evil empire grew. An empire that took poor brown people across the world and had them hack at sugarcane, hardening their hands and leaving them with nothing but memories of homes they could never return to. The desire for sugar fuelled all this.

But like any good cook will tell you, the secret to a good sweet is to add a pinch of salt. So let it be, let us remember and swallow this uncomfortable past. Let us learn to carry contradiction. Let us learn to live with ambiguity. Over time, we learn that nothing stays clear for long. Warmed sugar, constantly stirred, turns into golden caramel. We learn to make peace with our imperfections.

And this is why our sugary celebrations are so important. We are not celebrating the perfect. We are celebrating the messiness, the colours that run, the desires that bleed. This living, breathing, unwieldy tangle of life.

If you cannot believe in anything, then celebrate the sugar. It is an imperfect hero for these imperfect times. It has a complicated past and an uncertain future. Just like all of us.

When something tastes sweet, it can wash over all the difficult parts. Stirring this sugar constantly, we grow mellow, forgive our parents, rewrite our own histories.

Sugar makes children out of all of us. Makes us warm and happy inside for reasons we don’t understand.

These days people don’t eat as many sweet things as they used to. It’s hard to drown out voices that tell you that you are only as good as you look. Festive gifts are becoming all sorts of inedible things like lanterns and candles and glass bowls full of plants.

My advice is to step away from the succulents. Make something sweet and time-consuming with hard-to-find ingredients and tricky, elusive stages of sugar syrup consistency. Something that you have to stir constantly. That will fill your home with a warm, delicious aroma that can only be called happiness. Add sugar.

Don’t think about calories but think about joy and laughter and sinking your teeth into something that reminds you of what it felt like to be a child.

Eat well. The days are fleeting and who knows what tomorrow will bring. If we have nothing else to celebrate then let us be happy that we are here.

I am alive and so are you. And somehow we will get through all of this. We will find quiet and wonder, beauty and contentment. Life will be sweet.

Snigdha Manickavelis a Chennai-based writer

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