Scary dreams are no strangers to kids.I too had my share. One particulary scary one was where I hated chocolates and banished all those sweet nothings from my sight. Then I'd wake up and be relieved to find that I still liked Dairy Milk and Five Star. It was beyond my comprehension how our parents could forego chocolates and let us kids gorge the brown goo to our hearts' content. But somewhere during the journey from the brimming cup of childhood to the thin restrained lip of adulthood, the dream became true. There are atleast two tins of molding chocolates in the pantry that I know of (and I don't know much when it comes to my own pantry) so there is probably more.

Two decades ago we were almost at the threshold of inhouse chocolate manufacture. Maybe it was in the seventies or in the eighties, a golden plant purported to give whopping economic returns was unveiled to the small farmer in Kerala. The plant was cocoa, our target was to become the Switzerland of Asia. We had the mountains, the valleys and the cheaper knock(ed)-off watches, the cocoa would take care of the rest and make us all Swiss Misses(and men could become watchmakers if they wanted.)

We didn't hesitate, despite being city dwellers we nursed grand green ambitions of farming in our backyard - the size of a handkerchief. Six or seven cocoa plants accepted our invitation and decided to call our modular(read space constrained) yard their home. They had good growing seasons, were low maintanence and produced fruits which bore no resemblance to chocolate. Althought we didn't know it then, it was a time when the world was in dire need of Our patron saint of searches- Google, whose coming was still more than a decade into the future. Otherwise we could've found this site and learnt the art of turning raw cocoa beans into chocolate slabs from someone living in a desert in Southern California and put an end to all our tribulations.

Elsewhere the real farmers who ventured out in to cocoa farming sacrificing their coconut plantations and tapioca plots were also hit a similar desperation, but on a larger scale. The cocoa fruit had no takers and the market was flooded with supply. For most of the cocoa-convert farmers it took years for a full recovery. Our backyard was enriched with ripened but purposeless cocoa fruits for ages before the plants became trees and succumbed to death due to natural causes, dust to dust.

Today, a day when for a few moments world trades in chocolates and roses, a dedication to one of the plants which makes it all possible(the other one is featured in a songs by Poison, Seal, Bette Midler etc etc - thereby quite famous and has thorns, not wasting my time there.)


cocoa tree


cocoa fruits

(p.s-These are not photos I took, the images might be copyrighted by someone else, if it's yours let me know.)