| Sports |
Having a ‘cake’ and eating it too
JACK METTA
discovers that soap is not only made for washing
A SIGHT at the local pharmacy jogged
the old memories tucked away in the corner of your mind where
you file the “not-so-important-in-life” stories and activities,
revisited only on occasions such as this or when the subject is
brought to the fore in idle conversations among friends and
relatives.
Your first thought of the sight you beheld at the pharmacy shelf
was ‘rats’ — not as the expression in airing one’s frustrations,
but rather the direct reference to the frisky rodents.
There was a pang of disgust as you silently berated the
pharmacy, which is generally assumed as the place where ‘they’d
be putting their products where their mouth is”. They do
afterall, sell items from cosmetics to pest control and if there
were rats in the shop, it should be the last place to let them
roam free.
But a closer inspection of the item on the shelf triggered a
sudden realization — the object of your curiosity was not the
making of rodents.
It was teeth marks — human teeth marks. The comparison was
glaring and there was only one conclusion, it was indeed the
makings of a human being.
You had wondered in during lunch hour to buy soap and while
inspecting the wide range of products in the pharmacy shelves,
you could not help but notice that some of the items had been
tampered with and whoever tampered with them, obviously left
their calling cards in the form of teeth marks here and there.
There was a catch, however. Some of the teeth marks looked like
scratches indicating that the potential customer only took a
nibble or two of the product and for two products on the
shelves, sizable chunks have been taken off the corners of the
product indicating that the person who had left the marks had
obviously relished the product and would have consumed all of it
to his or her heart’s content if that was allowed.
You had picked up the soap and took a long whiff. And there was
the answer to your curiosity. It smelled so good, like the
freshness of heaven. And if it smelled good, it was good enough
to eat.
Then you had this sudden thought. You look at the teeth marks
again and deduce in your mind that they were obviously the
markings of adult teeth. It had to be. They had to discretely
indulge their habit otherwise, they’d be buying all the soap
products on the shelf with ‘a little egging’ from the security
guards and alert shop staff.
Old habits die hard, it said and no doubt, the person who was
indulging in this compulsion had been doing it for some time.
And that’s when the memories unfolded of thrashings your
siblings received on account of soap going missing in the shower
room and laundry all those long years ago. And they were quite
innocent really.
You chuckled at the innocent face you pulled over your face when
mum inquired about the cake of soap she was absolutely sure she
had left in the regular soap container by the laundry, or big
sis emerging from the showering wrapped in a towel and fuming
because she could not find her favourite Lux brand in her secret
spot on the ledge in the shower room. She had selected the spot
in her belief that her siblings did not have the height to reach
it. She was proved wrong a couple to times and got wiser after
that.
The thing was they never had any inkling where the missing soap
ended up. Perhaps, they jumped to conclusion that the kids may
have taken them to the river to wash or they had slipped off
their lodgings and fallen though the gaps in the shower wall and
floorings. Those that did were irretrievable.
You still wonder today whether they ever suspected anyone of
eating soap.
There was a time when mum was in hospital after giving birth and
dad tried living up to his responsibilities of looking after the
kids.
One of his first chores, soon after mum was admitted to the
Labour ward, was to cook breakfast the next morning. He found
the flour and the baking powder, mixed it and eventually cooked
up a tempting breakfast, except the home-made bread tasted
strongly of soap — Rinso to be exact.
The ensuing hospital visit that evening revealed the truth. Mum
had placed the Rinso in the baking powder container because the
bottom was falling out of the sodden Rinson pack.
Dad kept the good cheer up for the sake of mum by joking: “Aha,
now I know where those mysterious bubbles came from from when I
burped.”
Thinking about that incident conjures up images of all your
favourite cartoons characters and the great big bubbles that
came bubbling out of their mouths after accidentally swallowing
soap.
Yes, those were the days of discoveries. Perhaps, children then,
followed their noses. If it smelled good, it was good enough to
eat. And everybody knows that soap smelled good.
You learnt at school that soap was made from copra and if you
had ever been near a copra shed, you’d be insane if you did not
salivate at the rich aroma of the drying coconut meat. In fact,
everybody who had been to Rabaul will never forget the
experience of driving past CPL — that coconut products company
near Malaguna. That pleasant assault on your nostrils is almost
like munching on your favourite coconut lolly during primary
school days.
But while old habits die hard, soap products have changed in
composition. We are told the products are a combination of
foodstuff including honey and milk, lard, chemicals and various
herbs and spices thrown in to enrich the texture and aroma. The
wide range of the soap products today attest to the employment
of different ingredients and chemicals to either improve
existing products or create one that is user-friendly,
pocket-friendly and above all, nose-friendly.
And for our soap eaters, perhaps, palate friendly, especially
when they continue to succumb to their benign weakness and
gobbles them down like some of the food stuff they are made
from.
You guess, ‘if it smells good, it’s good enough to eat’.
The only question perhaps is: “Is it fattening…?” And you
wonder, why a bar of soap is referred to as a ‘cake’ of soap.
In the final analysis, there would always be little secrets we
want to keep to ourselves.
And it might reflect the Wise Counsellor’s adage: “The hardest
territory to hand over to God is the heartland of your dreams…”
 
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