I have a confession to make. Ice cream. The ultimate luxury of slurping this silky, sweet frozen delight in the cool interior of a cinema hall in India. Before you know it, you are 25, and rushing to reach somewhere, anywhere. For a brief moment, you are distracted by the opposite sex, but soon the sweet tooth reasserts itself and you reach for the scoops out of impulse. By 45, the excesses of life have to be paid for. You learn to wake up early, rediscover swimming, and sweat at the local gym, but you put all the calories right back with a heap of Mango-Tango. Holding an ice cream cone, you close your eyes, trying to remember your teenage fire. Hit 50, and ice cream becomes a fantasy, an object of desire.

When the temptation gets too strong, you steal a lick now and then, rejoicing over the forbidden fruit or agonising over your lack of self-control. Past 65, you prefer ice creams served in crystal bowls with long stems. Rather than a single flavour, you want an amalgamation of vanilla white, strawberry pink, mango yellow, chocolate brown-all forming a rainbow of seduction. Now it's the eyes that stimulate the brain, and not the tongue-or tooth. After 75, you don't care a hang and you enjoy slurping up cones once more in the company of grandchildren.

When I was a child, we used to swarm the ice-candy man. He announced himself with a rattle of his damaru. Clutching a five paisa copper coin that had a picture of a cow, we would rush to buy an ice-block with a stick. We had to start licking immediately because the hot tarai sun would melt the stuff. It cost a mohar-all of fifty paisa. In Kathmandu you could get it at Ranjana Galli on New Road, where they also sold soda water bottles with glass-marbles for corks that made a whoosh sound when opened.

Then Nepal Dairy Corporation (NDC) opened an outlet in Basantpur that sold ice cream in tiny cups. But being a government-run outfit they were always out of stock. Even today, what NDC ice creams lack in variety they make up for in value for money. Restaurants made and served ice cream to order, but the mass market of the middle class didn't really reach here till the eighties. That's when New Delhi's Nirula's joined hands with the Hotel de l'Annapurna, and Annarula of Darbar Marg took the city by storm. The well-heeled made a beeline for ice cream with a dash of saffron. Boys and girls would would save to splurge and slurp. Take-away thermocole packs were introduced for those who didn't want to socialise with the hoi polloi. When the Amatya Group brought in Kwality, a favourite and deliberately mis-spelled Indian brand, they opened a factory at Sina Mangal later, and fresh ice cream was suddenly in all the general stores in town.

The next brand to hit was Vadilal's, from Bombay, and the Lords of Poverty could be seen chilling out at its outlet in Patan. But the cr?me-de-la-cr?me of ice cream today are Baskin Robbins and M?venpick. In the beginning, you had to go to Darbar Marg for Baskin Robbins, now even Bakery Cafes stock it. Like jeans, gym and gin there are people who consider ice cream symbols of westoxication and decadence. But this is one form of decadence I don't mind.