Cinnamon

| 1.5 MINUTE READ | Making the Connections

I am ten years old, sitting on a couch at my aunt’s home overlooking the bungalow compound of one of the few billionaire families in 1980 India. Having a post-lunch cup of my favourite Javvarisi Payasam (sago pudding) laced with cinnamon. The first spoonful sparks a minor unravelling. A fleeting mix of nausea and trauma, like when a cockroach crawls over your arm or a rat scrambles across your feet. I return the unfinished cup and stop eating cinnamon.

My heart and mind are a labyrinth of innocuous traumas and irrelevant secrets. Long lorded by the scent of cinnamon.

Two decades and some later, I enter a European Bakery and swim in the aroma of Cinnamon Buns. It is poor form to exit a bakery in panic. I stand there, inhaling. Immobilized by inadequacy. Waiting for my wife to finish her purchase so we can leave.

Each time I cross paths with cinnamon, I recoil, recover and reset. It’s been an old and inexplicable story.

On turning fifty, memories recycle more frequently. I recall an intimate farewell lunch hosted by a friend leaving for boarding school in 1979. Four of us eat at one corner of a fifty-seater dining table. Then retire into a room where we chew gum and watch a war film on VCR. There is a scene where two soldiers torture a woman in a remote cabin. She is naked and strapped onto a desk. They pierce pins into her breasts. She writhes and screams. I feel like the world is broken and its shards are raining over me.    

I was chewing cinnamon gum.

For four decades, the taste of cinnamon connected me to my remorse over a movie scene that remained ensconced in my subconscious. The moment I saw it, it was gone. I don’t love cinnamon, but the dramatic fireworks around it disappeared like magic.

This is how life works.

We are creatures of conditioning.

Every connection we understand is an effortless release.

What remains is a lighter sense of who we are.

An unalloyed awareness towards what we experience.

Wish you all a happy 2024. ❤🙏