Cookie Monsters

Santosh enjoying a 'Christmas special' cookie. "Verrry excellent!" he said.

A bit of Christmas came to JM Higher Secondary this week in the form of peanut butter and chocolate cookies, date-filled Pinwheels, Southern Lassies, and stocking-shaped sugar cookies. On the day after Thanksgiving, my mother and grandmother had baked enough Christmas cookies to feed the state of Bihar. My mom then mailed me two sizeable boxes full of the treats, which arrived in Kerala late last week.

Jenna and I took two platefuls of the cookies to school on Monday, wrapped in tinfoil. I took one plate to the upper campus, where I teach on Mondays and Tuesdays. Jenna took her plate to the lower campus. As I walked in, the silvery foil caught the light and garnered the staff’s attention.

“What is this?” a few teachers asked.

“Treats,” I said simply. I waited until morning tea was served after second period to peel off the foil and reveal the platter of goodies. The Southern Lassies stood in the middle, guarded by a circle of the other cookies, leaning against each other. The staff ooohhed and awwwed. They leaned forward to get a better look. They squinted and furrowed their brows. One teacher even poked the cookies with a tentative finger, as if she was testing to see whether the cookies were alive and would jump off the plate if provoked.

The staff at the upper campus has a bit better English, in general, than the one at the lower campus, where

Jenna was at this moment, yet not good enough to intimate to me their first impressions of the cookies with any real clarity. They spoke to each other in Malayalam and then they all sat around at the table, drinking tea. The plate of cookies sat untouched in the center of the table.

I began to worry. Was something wrong? Did the cookies not look appetizing to them? I waited a few awkward moments, the growing silence of the staff room weighing down on me. Then, a woman—who must have seen my growing anxiety plainly written on my face—motioned to me with a wave of her hand.

“Waiting for knife,” she said. She made a motion as if to cut the cookies.

“Oh,” I said. “But you can just eat them whole.”

Vinod, who had the best English of the teachers at JM, interjected: “But we want to cut them up so that everyone can sample each kind of cookie.”

Now it dawned on me. I was used to the fend-for-yourself snack breaks at Hogg Middle School. On Friday mornings at Hogg, teachers would pitch in and bring breakfast treats—donuts, coffee cake, kolaches, homemade egg-and-sausage casserole. At those morning events, staff would filter in whenever there was a free moment and take however much could fit on a small wobbly paper plate. If you waited too long, you ran the danger of not getting anything.

At JM, on this morning, two of the women teachers watchfully guarded the plate of Christmas cookies and shooed

away any male teachers who came along and tried to snatch one. Eventually, a knife did appeared and the women took to slicing up each cookie into halves or even quarters. Another staff member ripped up squares of newspaper, and the women arranged a sampling of each type of cookie on to each square. By the end, a dozen or so squares of newspaper filled the table, each topped with a handful of crumbling, colorful Christmas cookies.

Each staff member dutifully took a square of newspaper and began to eat.

“Mmmmm. Delicious.”

“Superb!”

“Tasty!”

Their limited English vocabulary was accented by the sounds they made as they stuffed the cookies hurriedly into their mouths before the next period began.