A Prohibited Affair

Archie, a young girl from a strictly vegetarian family - who is forbidden to eat eggs at home, bakes a cake with eggs. The story is about her adventure with the eggs.

Ah, the title seems interesting and if you are looking for a juicy story, let me tell you the prohibition that I am talking about is “An Egg”, and I know non vegetarians won’t understand" why it is a big deal, it’s like explaining to my Irish colleague that I don’t drink" he was surprised and said “Then how do you have fun”. Now - can I explain to an Irish that we can have fun without drinks." Nah, don’t bother.

  In my household, egg was strictly prohibited. We were strict vegetarians with no onion and garlic rule in the kitchen and no we are not Jains, we could eat all the other root vegetables, these two were not allowed as they could not make it to “Bhog ki thali”(Offerings to God). But eating onion and garlic was allowed outside and it was not in the “Paap”(sin) category. Egg was however different, it was sinful. So when we were really young, we were taught that when you attend a birthday party, we should first ask if the birthday cake has egg in it, and if it was an eggy cake, we were supposed to skip it. But for me, birthday party was incomplete without a cake and cake was the star of all the party dishes. As they say then “where there is a will there is a way”, I once heard my grandmother say that if you eat it by mistake in a biscuit or a cake then it is not sinful and there you go , I found a way " i.e. “not to ask”, this way I didn’t know if there was or wasn’t an egg in it, and I was exempted from the sin. That’s how I became a vegetarian who would eat eggs if they were disguised in cakes.

  After presenting you with the background of the prohibition, I must jump directly to the incident. It was one of those SUPW classes on Saturday where the teacher would teach us all sorts of crafts and interesting things which did not involve books, Mrs Dogra our teacher gave us a recipe of baking a chocolate cake and asked us to bake at home and bring it to class next Saturday. The problem was recipe had two eggs in it. Now I was in this huge dilemma -" Acharya devo bhav (Teacher is equivalent to God) or Pitru devo bhav (Parents are equivalent to god)" as both were in contradiction. We took school projects very seriously (not the physics ones which I did not understand at all). I was thinking over and over again on what to do during recess and realized that I was not alone in this predicament, my two friends - Parul and Madhuri were in the same boat. We discussed it at length and came up with a plan to do this together. We couldn’t do it at my place or Parul’s as we didn’t have an oven (we didn’t bake anything back then …nor do I now ….I just use my microwave oven for reheating). So it was to be done at Madhuri’s place, although she lived 5 km away. She had a chat with her mother and Aunty agreed to turn a blind eye on whatever we were doing but she would not be  party to our crime. She told us that we had to do everything when her grandparents took their afternoon siesta, they should not come to know otherwise it would cause a huge uproar in her house. We just told my parents that we have to go to her house for a group project, I just spared them the details. I was not a rebel child and never lied ….no …but sometimes half truths were told…Yudishthir used the same strategy in Mahabharat ….so it should be fine.

We directly went to her place after school …we had lunch and then chatted with her for some time in her room, she told us that she had arranged all the ingredients and the secret ingredient was kept hidden in her room. Even her younger sister didn’t know." younger sisters otherwise can play a spoilsport or blackmail her for god knows what. After some time Aunty came and told us that her grandparents had retired for the siesta and asked Megha her yournger sister to join her in her room to take rest. This was our cue, servants were also dismissed to their quarters as we didn’t want to risk any eye witnesses. Once it was safe she brought out the oven and other utensils in the Aangan. We measured everything -" Maida, chocolate powder , sugar , baking soda and the last thing remaining was two eggs. Now, none of us knew how to break an egg, there was no you tube then, so we could just view the steps, nor did our teacher demonstrate anything, she just made us write down the recipe. we tried to recollect some movie scenes where eggs were broken, it was to be done with the edge of the bowl. Madhuri gave it a go and it was like that movie scene - it turned into a disaster , half of it was in the bowl and rest of it spluttered on the floor and the smell…oh …it was so overbearing I just flew away like a fly to the other end of the Aangan. She didn’t want to waste another egg so she asked us to try the other one. I was not up to the task , it was one thing to eat it disguised in chocolate or vanilla flavor and quite another to break it raw with your own hand. But the deed had to be done, Parul came forward and got it right in the first go. So now we had 1 and ½ eggs only. We never thought of having some back up .This was probably our first project management lesson -" Always have some buffer and back up- things are not going to go as per our plan. Anyway, the time window was too small to get another egg so we had to give it a go with what we had. The batter was ready in minutes and put up in the oven. While it was getting baked we had to get rid of the evidence. The smell was to be masked by agarbatti(incense sticks) and the carcass was to be cleaned up carefully and packed up in the bag. It just could not go directly in the dustbin. I had told them the story of one of our tenants, who was chucked out when egg shells were found in her waste bin by the matriarch of our family. I don’t know why she was looking at other people’s garbage. Anyway, the floor was then duly cleaned with soap and water. Everything went well till now ." no eye witnesses and the remains were disposed well. After a good 40 mins we checked the cake, the aroma was amazing and it also passed the toothpick test, it came out without sticking. It was time to take it out, it looked good and tasted well, but something was missing - it wasn’t as fluffy as we expected, I guess the half egg on the floor had its role. We could not secure an A+ it was B kind of cake.

Nevertheless, it was a day well spent and we were ready to break some eggs in real life.