When I was small, there was a family friend who sent us a box of special biscuits every year. The biscuits were called pigeon biscuits. Huge and shaped like a pigeon, they came in a bright yellow tin box. As soon as a delivery person brought the box to the door of our tiny half-dilapidated apartment, my mother would make an announcement,
“Pigeon biscuits! She sent us a box of pigeon biscuits again!”
And I would jump with delight because it meant that from that day on, for some time, my daily snack of McVitie’s chocolate biscuits would be replaced by the pigeon biscuits. Instead of two small chocolate biscuits, I would now have one huge pigeon biscuit.
In the afternoon, my mother brewed tea and we sat at the kitchen table, each having one pigeon biscuit in front of us. I always spent a good amount of time taking in every detail of my pigeon biscuit. Its face, wings, and tail. The thickness of the biscuit. Its buttery fragrance. After getting well acquainted with my biscuit, I picked it up from my plate to take the first bite.
“I’m gonna start from the tail!” I declared to my mother. “Do you know why? Because I don’t want to spoil its face. I love my pigeon biscuit!”
Then I started eating my biscuit. Starting from the tail, I slowly took bites from its wings, and then finally, I came to the face.
“I feel so sad that I have to eat it,” I sighed. “It’s so cute!”
“Well, it’s just a biscuit,” my mother said. Her pigeon biscuit was already headless. She had been eating it from the head part, and now she was about to eat the tail part. “You have to eat it!”
After my mother took the last bite, I also threw the last piece of my pigeon biscuit into my mouth.
“Bye, pigeon biscuit!”
That became our daily ritual for a while until the last pigeon biscuit was gone and the tin box was empty.
The tin box then turned into my toy box where I kept all my dolls. Every day, as I played with my dolls sitting next to the yellow tin box, I would think about the next time I would eat pigeon biscuits again.