Sugar Highs & Lows

The teenagers on the subway were giddy as they downed their Starbursts, shrieking and giggling, trading yellows, reds, and oranges. Reeya remembered those days of sugar highs and how they had whispered about who did what or did not do what. And how she and her sister had walked, arms linked, behind their father on the congested Kathmandu street until they saw the candy man who was wiry, dark-skinned, and scraggly-bearded but carried a coveted stick. This upright stick was adorned with sugar treats, cotton puffs, and metallic pinwheels, which drew her in. She begged her father to buy something, anything, just one, please, please. He succumbed, not due to her begging, but because it enabled him to indulge in a packet of paan, addictive and carcinogenic. The candy man handed them their treats, baring his scary, red-stained teeth against his mournful but kind eyes. The brightly colored wrappers later appeared strewn all over the city, a place with no infrastructure, sewage system, or garbage bins, and a poor, downtrodden soul picked up the littered wrappers, one by one manually, an actual living street sweeper whose labor never ended, nor was rewarded. People flung debris in his direction, and mothers warned their kids that they would end up like the street sweeper if they did not study—a further slight on his wretched existence. Reeya downed the entire candy pack on the street in one go, mimicking her father, who downed his cancer-causing paan, and they both got high, grinning at their complicity before they reached home, where her mother would scold them. Her sister, in contrast, savored her packet, selecting one pellet at a time, letting the piece dissolve entirely in her mouth without biting or cheating, and storing the rest for later, allowing for a nighttime indulgence, more forward-thinking and refined than Reeya. This was the era of pre-diabetes, pre-adulthood, and pre-responsibility.

Now, Reeya lived in a different country, older and besieged with responsibility. The subway stopped, and she dashed up the stairs, maintaining pace with the rush-hour equilibrium, but she slowed once she approached street level and found herself inside a chain drugstore, where the candy selection filled two entire aisles, not just a mere stick. She splurged on a pack of Starbursts like the carefree subway kids, tapping her credit card without speaking or making eye contact with the clerk, who was preoccupied with her cell phone—a transaction in the strictest sense. Reeya left the rectangular cement building, walked several blocks, and stood outside her office, checking her watch as she picked out the red squares and peeled the wrappers off in the eight precious minutes before her start time. There was no father to conspire with, nor a sister to compete against, nor a candy man with his fanciful packets of sugar, nor a manual street sweeper to pick up the litter. Reeya threw her torn wrappers into the garbage bin on the corner, and she did not have to see or think about the landfill they would end up in this civilized nation. And with that slight sugar rush, she stepped into her office.