It is customary for my wife to shop on Sundays for grocery, bread and plum cake on our way back from church.

Plum cake features on the shopping list as it is my favorite. Probably, the taste of plum cakes, straight out of the oven, and covered in butter paper sold by the door-to-door salesman who used to arrive on a bicycle from Crown Bakery in kollam( the erstwhile Quilon) , where I grew up still tickle my taste buds nostalgically.   

I down a piece of Plum Cake every morning with tea. I abhor modern version of ‘cakes’ termed ‘pastry’ in these times of the new-gen. I consider pastry as cakes which failed to complete evolution. As pastries lack characteristics to qualify as fully evolved cakes.

They are nothing but a morass of greasy nothingness. Leaving nothing to chew. But sticks to fingers and lips adamantly, that washing away the mess would require a significant portion of a cake of soap! Plum cakes qualify for ‘cake’ in real terms. Consuming them is less cumbersome, requiring not much formal training and equipment. Involving negligible technique. One can drop a piece of the plum cake into a widely opened mouth without much spillage, and sticky mess. They are more user-friendly to person and cleaner to surroundings.    

Bread of course is omnipresent component on a typical Sunday breakfast table, set hastily by the lady of the house, dazed from a long-winding church service. Especially the sermon.

Groceries have significant role to play in kitchens from the day that follows a Sunday, until next Sunday.

That completes my wife’s Sunday shopping list.

Last Sunday waiting in the car for my wife to return from shopping, a scooter that was parked beside my car caught my attention. Emblems representing three major religions in Kerala-Islam, Christianity and Hinduism were stuck on the hood of the scooter’s headlight.

The sight pleasantly surprised me. The scooter’s owner, a stranger seemed to be flaunting the noble concept of secularism. Which at a time, despite being enshrined in Indian Constitution’s Preamble seemed to be forced into oblivion. And increasingly driven to deliberate extinction at the hands of politicians ruling the country to best suit their ulterior motives, selfishly unmindful of consequences.

To my mind, the intention of the man riding that scooter might have been to enliven the relevance of secularism, though the powers-that-be wants it otherwise these days. It also could be the intention of the person to tell the world that he respected all three religions in equal measure- which is what secularism is all about.  There was also a possibility that his children or grandchildren stuck the symbols of distinctly different patterns and color on their elder’s scooter, as part of childish playfulness.

Even if that was the case, the person chose to ride his scooter, flaunting the symbols as if to prove a point.

I couldn’t resist the temptation of capturing the scooter on my phone. Sitting inside the car, it was beyond me to focus the symbols perfectly by getting closer to them. Physical restrictions following my stroke left me with the option of taking the photograph from within my car. Almost simultaneous with clicking the picture, the scooter’s owner returned to it. I did not want him to notice a stranger’s activity and doubt his intentions. Innocuous though, they might have been. 

The unexpected arrival of the scooter’s owner had me hurry through taking the picture, resulting in a picture that certainly deserved more pixels. For, such sights, I bet could be beholden only in Kerala, and glaringly absent in other Indian states, especially those north of the Vindhyas, thanks to you-know-who, and why!