You Scream, I Scream - A Life in Ice Cream

I went back, searched here and there in my memory cell, but couldn't quite recall the first time I tasted ice cream. There are several ice cream memories floating around the same time, in and around 1980. But even before that, I see a flicker of an ice cream memory popping up from a distant past - could be 1978-79, when I was in kindergarten.

Lollies in Gulshan

The first taste of ice cream I remember could be of "lollies." I had it when we all visited our maternal grandmother's home in Gulshan, Dhaka, from Khulna, where Abba (my father) was posted. During my childhood, as a ritual, we usually celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr (Rozaar Eid) at our paternal grandparents' home in Bogra. And Eid-ul-Adha (Korbanir Eid) was at our own home. Our visits to our maternal grandparents' home from Khulna were few and far between before my father was posted to Dhaka in 1982. During one such trip, I faintly remember having lollies with my siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins. My grandparents' home was in Gulshan 1, and there was a departmental store just a few minutes' walk away, by the Gulshan 1 roundabout - I think the store is still there. We bought lollies from that shop. Lollies are much like water-based ice cream in different flavors - in the USA, they have something similar: popsicles.

My elder sister reminded me that there used to be an Igloo ice cream parlor in Khulna's New Market too. They served vanilla ice cream in small glass jars, inside an air-conditioned cabin. That was a monthly treat for us - visiting Khulna New Market was a monthly family day out. We would spend the remaining weeks writing down a list of everything we needed, and Amma would take it to Abba for approval. On that auspicious day, once those things were bought, Abba would take us to the Soviet Russian bookstall in New Market, where we could buy as many books as our hearts desired, because they were sold at very cheap, subsidized prices - Bangladesh had a good relationship with Soviet Russia back then, which had given a lot of post-war aid. After that came ice cream time. In truth, ice cream was Abba's personal favorite, which is probably why he was always so happy to treat us to it. And yet - while I clearly remember Abba taking us on that monthly shopping trip to New Market and the Soviet bookshop, I don't quite remember the ice cream itself. So, oddly, no ice cream memory survives from what should have been a monthly ice cream ritual. I think the timeline could be 1978-79.

Since I am a little confused about the timing of the lollies in Gulshan, and can't really remember the visit to the Igloo shop in Khulna New Market, zeroing in on the correct chronology probably isn't significant here - it's the memories still shining bright in my thoughts that are. So let me dive into a trip down memory lane. Because today, it's about ice cream.

Malai Ice Cream

In 1980, I was admitted to Khulna Government Laboratory School in third grade. The school was a little far from our home, and we had to take a long walk. Going to that school was a real social upliftment, because before that, my kindergarten had been on the Engineering College campus, where my father was the Principal. My kindergarten teachers were mostly the engineers' wives - including my mother, who was also a teacher there. So it felt like moving to a bigger home from my own, with the same faces, the same voices, and the same restrictions I'd known in my personal and social life.

At Laboratory School, I suddenly found my freedom. Ice cream vendors used to sell ice cream in front of the school during break and after school, carrying square, large ice boxes slung around their shoulders on belts. There were two kinds - regular malai (milk ice cream) and narikel malai (milk with coconut). The regular one was 25 paisa, the coconut one 35 paisa (the price gradually went up). They tasted heavenly - especially the coconut one.

And if I really had to pin down my very first vivid ice cream memory, it would be that malai ice cream on a stick. Unwrapped. Laid gently one after another in that square tin ice box. Buying an ice cream was a rare event - and it wasn't the taste that was in question; it was the hygiene. Our parents had a funny way of making us fearful about the ice cream's quality: "They make the ice cream with drain water. You will get sick if you have it." But there were some special days when Amma would give me a few coins to buy something. The school used to give us tiffin during the break, and we also carried homemade lunch from home - there wasn't much of an excuse to get any extra money, but there were very few exceptions. My elder brothers studied in the same school, and sometimes my brother bought me one. Relishing that stick of malai ice cream - made with some "drain water," as Amma cautioned - became one of the most prized ice cream memories I have.

Cup, Freezer, and Cart

The next memory of ice cream I have is of a cup of ice cream. There was an orientation program for the freshman-year students admitted to the engineering college, and I happened to sing a song for them while playing my harmonium. I was eight years old. There were other cultural activities too. At the end of the program, we were given a cup of ice cream. Ice cream in a cup! That was so extraordinary! I remember eating half of it and saving the rest in the freezer when I got home.

Khulna was not like Dhaka, the capital city. It wasn't developed the way Dhaka was, in every aspect, naturally. Fancy foods like ice cream, sandwiches, and Chinese food were found only in a few select places. When something is scarce, when it takes pursuing, saving, or a rare bit of luck to get it, one ordinary scoop turns into something you carry with you for decades. That's why a cup of ice cream at eight years old, or a stick of malai, stayed with me the way an everyday treat never could.

Another interesting memory from that time is of us making ice cream at home with whatever we had. In 1981, we used to make homemade ice cream in our Kelvinator refrigerator. It was a simple trick - milk, vanilla powder, and sugar warmed together on the stove, cooled down, then frozen in small bowls. It clearly didn't come anywhere near a store-bought ice cream. Still, the long, impatient wait for it to freeze, repeatedly taking it out to check if it had set, and finally having that hard, sweet milk formation, was no less exciting - the pride and pleasure of creation was unparalleled.

That same year, 1981, ice cream carts with their enchanting bells started, for the first time, to occasionally roam the engineering college campus in the afternoon. What an exciting moment it was! I forget the exact price now, but it was probably 50 paisa each, and we could buy some, sometimes, after convincing my mother.

Ice cream carts became a way of life after our family moved to Dhaka. There were different flavors now, and enjoying ice cream from a cart became a little more frequent than before - but it was still occasional.

Novelty Ice Cream

In 1982, we moved to Dhaka - a new beginning of life, and a new ice cream chapter. I remember Abba treating us at Novelty Ice Parlour, an exclusive ice cream shop in Dhaka's New Market. It was a two-storey shop with wooden floors and a wooden staircase to the second floor, with small separate cabins. They offered three flavors, as far as I can recall - vanilla, orange, pistachio. The shop carried sophistication and elegance, a calming ambience — the occasional tinkering of spoon against bowl, a low whisper of people talking and enjoying their ice cream. Staff in proper formal attire took our orders and served us. What customer service! It was an amazing experience altogether, and I went back to enjoy ice cream there quite a few times after that, all the way till the early 1990s - a time when the large, multi-storeyed shopping complexes hadn't yet entered our city life; New Market, along with a few others, was still the only shopping and recreation area we had. The shop served scoop ice cream in a silver, goblet-shaped bowl, with a silver spoon of a particular shape. That spoon's shape stayed so etched in my memory that years later, before I moved to the USA, I went looking for that exact shape of spoon in Dhaka and bought it for my home here. Some memories are made to stay in our active memory cell; some sleep in the back of it. Novelty is one that stayed alive.

Novelty was Abba's favourite ice cream spot, long before it was ours. He had taken his newly married bride, my Amma, there for a cosy ice cream evening in 1958, and several times after. Sadly, there are hardly any pictures or information about the shop available online - it is disappointing how, as a nation, we so often fail to document our famous old establishments and the memories tied to them, memories that could otherwise be shared across generations. I ran into the same problem some time back, writing about a cinema hall called Jyoti, in Gulshan, in the early '80s - I found almost nothing about it online. There is, however, a piece on the history of Dhaka New Market, published in The Business Standard in 2022, which touches on the ice cream parlours that once stood there. As the article recalls it, the market's western side, near where the old lawn used to be, once had three ice cream shops standing side by side - Igloo, Baby Ice Cream, and Novelty. Families would sit out on that lawn with their ice cream, and - as architect Taimur Islam is quoted saying in the piece - the market still holds the memory of those "little moments of happiness" that middle-class families carried with them for life.

Cone Ice Cream and the Gulshan Shops

1983 brought a different kind of experience. My elder sister was a Dhaka University student back then. She once told me she would take me out to have "cone ice cream." I asked her what a cone ice cream even was. She just smiled mysteriously and said, "We will see." I still remember the rickshaw ride with my sister along Dhaka's Green Road - that was a beautiful time in Dhaka: few cars, a host of rickshaws, less traffic, more green, more air. The whole trip felt like one big exciting journey, and I waited eagerly to have a cone ice cream. We finally reached the place - a new ice cream parlour named "Bushra," along the Green Road that led to Dhanmondi. My sister ordered two for us. The ice cream looked huge, and it was immensely tasty - my first taste of a cone ice cream. Bushra Ice Cream Shop closed its doors after a few years.

Cone ice cream also takes me back to two shops in Gulshan 1. Around 1986-87, there was a shop there that sold different flavors of cone ice cream and fresh fruit juices - I've forgotten its name now, but the taste and quality were superb. Around the same time, in the same area, Candy Floss started its journey. They offered tasty fast food, candy floss, and cone ice cream. It was a small shop, but almost always overcrowded with the younger crowd. Gradually, other posh ice cream parlours came up in the Gulshan-Banani area too - Dolce Vita and Movenpick among them. These shops brought in several flavors and types of soft-serve ice cream, in both cone and cup, expanding beyond the traditional vanilla, chocolate, and orange into less familiar, European-style flavors - butterscotch, caramel, Swiss chocolate, hazelnut, and so many combinations.

Polar Breaks the Monopoly

1987 was another landmark year in my ice cream memory cell. Igloo had held a monopoly until then. One day, I noticed an unusual advertisement in the daily newspaper, Ittefaq - what they'd probably call a teaser campaign now, but it was a new way of advertising in Bangladesh at the time. In a large corner of the front page was an image of a polar bear. That image ran for a few days, and it roused readers' speculation and curiosity. Then came the final curtain-raiser - Polar Ice Cream.

There's an interesting anecdote tied to this kind of promotion, one that had actually been tried a year before Polar's campaign. The same widely circulated Ittefaq had once started with just an image of a black cat, for a few days - no information, nothing written, only the cat. Then came a countdown: three more days, two more days, and so on. Curiosity peaked among readers. At home, we were all curious too, and discussed it over dinner, in front of our parents, guessing at what commodity or service it might be for. On the day of the reveal, it turned out to be an advertisement for a new condom brand. There was an awkward silence between Abba and me, as we'd both been looking at the newspaper that morning with real excitement, only to discover that the black cat was actually "Panther" - a new condom brand. Abba just said "Oh," and left the room. I was in high school then, and in Bangladesh, we weren't exactly free to discuss birth control with our parents - there was always a hush-hush around such things. So a year later, when the polar bear showed up, I kept my curiosity and my reactions carefully low-key!

Polar broke Igloo's monopoly with new types and tastes - choc bar, shell 'n' core, and several other variations. Their promotion was so successful that people waited eagerly on launch day just to taste the new ice cream. I remember my cousin telling me that many shops ran out of Polar ice cream within a few hours of launch. Polar also began offering ice cream in plastic containers - half-litre and one-litre boxes - and it became very attractive. Igloo, I think, had mostly sold its large-quantity ice cream in hardboard paper boxes, but Polar's plastic containers became a staple in almost every household - the empty boxes turned into everyday food storage containers, a small prized possession for the average housewife. Sadly, in my opinion, Polar couldn't maintain its quality for long, and Igloo came back strong afterward.

Ice Cream Around the World

Time passed since then. I stepped out of my home country on different occasions, to different places - India, Bangkok, Malaysia, Nepal, the Netherlands, South Africa. Almost all of these places had their own famous ice cream, and they were all good - my evolving taste buds appreciated each of these treats to varying degrees. In the USA, it's heaven for ice cream lovers - a spread of numerous flavors and mixes, and the ice cream trucks that visit the streets still carry a very nostalgic echo of those old ice cream bells. With the abundance of food and the availability of every kind of fast food and dessert, ice cream still holds a place of its own.

Looking back at all these scoops and sticks and cones, gathered across so many cities and so many years, I realize none of them ever really competed with each other. Each one belonged to its own moment and memory.

However, that first taste of narikel malai ice cream remains unbeatable.

This piece is written entirely from memory. The timelines and a few other details here could be a little off.

Reference

Naher, Kamrun. "Dhaka New Market: A walk down memory lane of a 70-year-old shopping mall." The Business Standard, 11 November 2022. https://www.tbsnews.net/features/panorama/dhaka-new-market-walk-down-memory-lane-70-year-old-shopping-mall-529610