BIG FUN wasn’t much fun… Or was it??
I don’t know how many of you know/heard of BIG FUN. People of my age or slightly older ones might know. It is a brand of chewing gum that I am talking about. This is the first chewing gum that I knew of, years before other brands like Boomer, Big Babool or Orbit occupied the glass jars in the bakery or stationery stores. I might have been 3 or 4 years old at that time.
There is a bitter-sweet story associated to my memories of BIG FUN. The sweetness, of course, is associated to the sweet taste of it, the very fact that you get to chew on a chewing gum and occasionally with a lot of effort succeed in blowing up a tiny bubble out of it. The bitterness came from the occasion on which the Big Fun days came. These were monthly treats approved by my mother. Well, the treat was for my elder sister and I too got to have one each time for the mere fact that I happened “to exist” as the younger one.
I still have not told you what the treat was for. This was my mother’s incentive for my sister as part of the negotiation to take her to the hospital for her monthly injection for her tonsillitis problem. This sounds so normal. However, it was a far cry from normal; because her cry could be heard really far away and that was hardly normal.
As a child, my sister dreaded medicines and injection. According to a joke that runs in the family, she needed a bucket of water to swallow a tiny tablet. My observation, although, is that many buckets of water and many bouts of puking later the tablet would be still there in her mouth having not yet achieved salvation of going down the "moksha-path" of her digestive tract.
If this was the case with tablets, you can imagine her reaction to injections. No, you cannot! It is beyond imagination‼ I have never seen such hysteric cries ever before or after that in my life. Her monthly injection day was a day of ordeal for the doctors and nurses in that hospital. Even before she set out from home she would be wailing. Although our mother would be trying her might to calm the crying child, she would be entering the hospital every time with silent sobs that would melt even my heart. The moment the nurse takes the syringe she would start screaming at the top of her voice and at the moment the shot was administered there would be 3 or 4 people around her to hold her on to the bed, for she would be violently shaking and waggling all her limbs and appendages, tears rolling down her cheeks in throes of terror.
And I, as a 3-year old would be seeing all this. I now wonder why my mother took me along to witness this horrifying scene. But yes, I know why. I was such a mumma’s girl that I wouldn’t stay home with my grandma when my mom took my sister out. I would be yelling at the top of my voice and then she would have to handle two screaming off springs of hers. “Let me carry my luggage along” was always her policy.
After the injection, the walk back home was peaceful. The quiet after the storm; with the brief pause at the kiosk to buy the chewing gums- BIG FUN. What an irony! By the time we are back home all is well and normal and my sister would be calmly chewing on the gum or chatting with our grandma and I would be making the 127th attempt to make a tiny gum bubble in my mouth.
At the end of all this, I used to sympathise with my sister. I used to feel bad for her thinking that she got the shorter end of the stick in this deal. Just for a chewing gum she has to go through all this when I get an unfair advantage of getting the gum without enduring any of that, which was again a reason for a tiny prick on my conscience. I always wondered why she had to agree to this torture for a BIG FUN when there are many other ways for that.
Now you see that the 3-year old kept thinking that the 6-year old was going through all that just for a BIG FUN. That it was a medicine for her affliction was not something I knew about. The karma and phal in my eyes was the pain of the injection and the BIG FUN respectively. The cure for tonsillitis was not even a spin-off in the deal according to me. This grave injustice towards my sister kept bugging me for a large part of my childhood(at least when I saw chewing gums) so much that I even thought how could this chewing gum be called BIG FUN when things were farthest from fun.
It was years later when I was 10 or so, when this whole thing came up conversationally and I told my mom that chechi was so stupid to agree to her deal of BIG FUN for that injection when she could just ask any of our aunts or uncles for that chewing gum. It was then that my mother laughed and explained to me that it was I who was stupid in making that idiotic assumption all the while and told me about the tonsillitis treatment. Although she had called me stupid, at that moment, I felt relieved. For me, it was a “justice served, finally”-moment. Things seemed fair enough now, although the magnitude of her screams seemed still too much even in retrospect.
All these memories came up when a cousin recently posted a nostalgic pic of the soft drink “Gold Spot” on the family group. That brought in the memories of another familiar brand name of old times-BIG FUN and these not-all- so –funny moments. Last week, when I spoke to my sister, we reminisced over all this and she said “ I wonder now, why I cried so much then….Really it was too much na..”
“So you agree now‼” I said….My heart is much lighter now, I realized. That she agrees that she was being over-hysteric puts my mind to ease. She just was terrified without reason and she knows it now. It wasn’t all that bad, after all. Now I can accept the name BIG FUN without a prick in my heart and think of all those times as some big fun time.
Image Courtesy: https://theprint.in/features/brandma/big-fun-the-bubble-gum-whose-claim-to-fame-was-its-freebie-cricket-cards/206831/
