Chocolate Passion

Do you like chocolates? I love chocolates, though I try to control myself because once I start eating them, I find it very hard to stop!

Our city Bologna has an annual chocolate fair. It is not for those who produce chocolate at industrial levels but it is for small businesses and shops who are passionate about chocolate and make special varieties of chocolate.

Every year, for the chocolate fair, each chocolatier tries to come up with something novel. A couple of years ago, a chocolatier had created sensation by presenting chocolates in the shape of penis and adolescent boys and girls had loved getting themselves clicked doing all kind of things to those chocolates. In the end the lady owner of the shop was asked to remove those chocolates from her stall as they were considered unsuitable for children visiting the fair.

This year the chocolate fair started on Thursday and will be on till tomorrow. Today morning I went to the fair. Here are some of the strange chocolate creations from the fair for you.

I really liked the chocolates made like instruments used by mechannics and carpenters - nails, hammers, screw-drivers, scissors, etc. They looked so real.

Making cups and saucers of chocolate is nothing new but still I liked the special care that had gone into making the cup with white chocolate.

Chocolate sandals, shoes and purses were nice. They gave a completely new meaning to the phrase "joota khaoge?"

Making animals and birds out of chocolate is also common. Still I liked the chocolate owls and tapirs of this stall. Also their chocolate moca (used in Italy for making filter coffee at home) was nice, it looked real with a metallic sheen.

I thought that this chocolate guy was cute with his nice big red tongue and blue eyes.

The chocolate buggy is accompanied by a chocolate parchment saying "Once upon a time there was ..", so you can guess for whom they have made it.

This was another chocolate moca, used for the Italian coffee making, that I liked because of its wonderful rusted, broken and old look.

There were persons selling all kind of fruit jams and honeys mixed with chocolate.

This shop had chocolate shirts, belts, shoes, etc. apart from the more "normal" varieties of chocolates mixed with nuts and fruits.

And finally, the chocolates that I liked most. The chocolate Nikon cameras were fantastic, they looked so real with leathery texture and the opaque glass kind of lenses.

I didn't buy lot of chocolate, just a few things. I have bought some extra bitter chocolate, that I like very much. However, I tasted a lot of different varieties and by the time I reached home, I was feeling full and happy.

So which of these chocolates do you like most?

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The old pictures

It was an old black and white photograph. There was nothing particular about it. Yet, it caught my attention. And I must have glanced at it only for a moment. With my sister, we were going through old papers of my mother, trying to think of things to keep and those that could be given away or may be thrown away.

There were too many things to be looked at, so we were just trying to look for really important things, and to keep them separately. At the rest, we could take a look later.

"Margo", I told my sister, showing her the picture. The name of the person in the picture had come to me in a flash. There were two of her pictures there and a postcard. I had put them in the bag of things that I wanted to look first.

My mother's diary was the most important thing among those papers, and it was the first thing I did - transcribed it on computer. Day after tomorrow, it will be three months since she died. Going through her papers, her diaries, her pictures, is perhaps my way of trying to hold on to her memories.

So yesterday, while going through some of my mother's papers, I again saw that black and white picture of Margo. It has her signature on it, with her full name, Margaret Louise Skinner. But she liked being called Margo, I remembered it.

I had met her in Hyderabad in June 1960, when I and my other sister, had gone there to spend the summer holidays with our father, who was working in that city at the office of Socialist party. I have a vague memory of going some where with Margo and my mother on a rickshaw. At that time, I had no idea of who she was and what she was doing in Hyderabad. She was obviously angrez, a foreigner and a friend of my father. I also thought that she was somehow related to Socialist party, perhaps someone admiring Dr Lohia, the socialist leader - I don't think that anyone had said it to me, I must have assumed it.

Some months or may be a year later, when we were back in Delhi, I remember her parcel from the USA. There were two animal figures like soft and furry gloves in the parcel, where you can put your hand inside the glove, put fingers in the eyes or mouth of those animals and move your fingers to make them move like puppets. It also had some make-up things like lipsticks and eyeliners for my mother. I remember looking at those gloves once, but I never found them them again and slowly I forgot about them. May be my mother had put them away as they must have been very precious because you couldn't have found something similar in India in those days. Or perhaps, she gave them to some body?

Those childhood memories, sharp and vivid once, slowly faded as I don't remember hearing her name again. Some of those things came back, as I looked at her pictures.

The postcard is from Florence, it has a postal stamp of 19 January 1961. The card is addressed to my father and she has signed it as "M". In the card, in small and neat handwriting she talks about her stay in Florence and the things she has seen in the city ("staying in a pension, for 5 dollars a day, including three wonderful meals and wine"). She also wrote that was getting ready to leave for Paris and then to take the boat back to New York.

The second picture gives a little more information. It is the "afternoon tea" offered in the faculty to "the Fullbright professors Miss Skinner and Miss Smith" in 1953. From the faces of the persons in this picture, I think that it must have been taken somewhere in Philippines. So this means, Margo was a university professor and had been a Fullbright professor outside USA! May be she had also come to India as a Fullbright professor in 1960?

I did an internet search and discovered somethings more.

One Margaret Louise Skinner was born in San Francisco on 10 April 1921, and she had died in 1992. In 1990, together with a person called Fritz Leiber, she had published a book of poems under the name of "Margo Skinner" titled, "As green as emeraude" (Dawn Heron Press, USA).

There was another Margaret Louise Skinner, born in 1921 in Kentucky, who had also died in 1992. She was married but didn't have children.

I couldn't find any of their images on internet, so I was not sure if poet Margaret was the Margo I had met in Hyderabad or was it the Kentucky one?

I tried to look for more information on the poetry book and found my answer. Among the titles of her poems there are - At an Indian wedding, At Mahabalypuram, Vishnu and ... To Deepak.

Families

October has been so hectic, full of travels. Coming from somewhere, unpacking the bags, only to pack them again with clean clothes, and going some where else. Five cities in three countries in last three weeks. The travel to India, just ten days ago, seems like it was last year.

In all this running around, there is big family new, Marco's marriage is fixed. He will get married in Delhi on 2 January.

It seems he was born only yesterday. To think of him as married makes me feel relaxed, as if an important milestone has been reached. Perhaps that is why, I found the photo exhibition of Uwe Ommer in Geneva (Switzerland) on 60th anniversary of United Nations so moving. Uwe lives in France and she had travelled to large number of countries around the world to take pictures of families. The exhibition is along the left bank of Leman lake in Geneva.

India is represented by two families. The family of Phoolwati in a village near Udaipur. She is a widow and lives with her brother's family. And Lucky's family from Delhi, a sikh businessman. Lucky's son proudly holds a bat with name of Sachin Tendulkar in their picture.

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