Column

Kraft Cheese is to buy Cadbury’s Chocolates for £11.9 billion, a sum that could rehabilitate a hundred Haitis. Growing up in Pune I had never heard of Haiti, but I certainly had heard of Kraft cheese and of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolates.

They weren’t in plentiful supply. India was then, under the tutelage of Pandit Nehru, who was building the infrastructural base for capitalismunder the guise of socialist development, austere in its consumption.

Kraft cheese and Cadbury’s chocolates were not in the shops and could only be bought at a price from the ubiquitous smuggler — yes, even Poona had them.

The blue cylindrical tin with its plastic content was our definition of cheese. Of Cheddar, Gorgonzola, Brie or Camembert, we knew nothing.

It always puzzled me that the rationed slices we would be given when the tin was opened and the cheese sliced in sectors, had no large and small holes, like the cheeses that the characters in American comics, Mickey Mice and such like, were in constant pursuit of.

To Poona, Kraft was cheese and a rich and idle Parsi lady of our town, protesting against its banning, set out to manufacture its equivalent in Poona. She sought the help of our impoverished Maths tutor, an after-hours practitioner who would rent out the benches on his veranda and in his front room and his vast library of past exam papers to college students to spend an hour (we went in shifts, like a factory) wrangling with the problems which he was expert at solving when we got stuck.

This gentleman, call him Mr P, was summoned by the rich lady to enter into a partnership and research the making of cheese. Mr P entered the partnership and through diligent research in the town’s libraries discovered that apart from milk, cheese manufacture required characteristic strains of fungus and mixtures of stuff got from animal’s stomach linings.

His research must have made him aware that he was not about to make the smooth confection that came out of Kraft tins. These cheeses were different.

Perhaps he neglected to tell the rich Parsi lady about this deviancy in manufacturing ambitions. After much ado, the right strain of fungus was imported and the cheese factory set up in the glass greenhouse shed of the rich lady’s spacious bungalow.

Soon Mr P, engrossed in his new enterprise, lost interest in his Rs 7-a-month maths pupils to whom his business board promised “cent-per-cent results”. The cheese manufacture which absorbed all his time was, he reported, reaching perfection.

And then one day it was ready. The samples were near perfect but nothing like the Kraft cheese from the blue tins. The rich Parsi lady’s friends, invited to taste the new product, were not at all happy. This wasn’t cheese at all — not in texture, not in taste.

They all, including their hostess, turned on poor Mr P who, having acquired some sophistication in his knowledge of cheeses protested that it was very close to a French Brie.

To no avail. He was, after all his efforts, dismissed as an incompetent craftsman and when he fought back, using the foul language he used on his recalcitrant pupils, was told to get on his bike and go away.

The story of this injustice spread through the town. Mr P’s maths classes had fallen asunder, his pupils having sold out to rival tutors. He was ruined. But Ahura Mazda is just. One night soon after, the Parsi lady’s several large dogs smashed through the glass of the greenhouse in pursuit of the mice who were after the cheese.

These large beasts, likes bulls in a china shop, upset the vats, test tubes and stores of fungus.

The fungus caught on to the hair and skin of the dogs who brought it into the house where it spread to the carpets, curtains and finally to the eyelashes, eyebrows and perhaps other parts of the human inhabitants of the house. I returned to Mr P’s classes and was one of those who got ‘cent-per-cent results’.

The writer is a London-basedscriptwriter