Before You Open the Box

There is a particular kind of silence that exists in an Indian house on a summer afternoon.

It arrives somewhere after lunch, when the plates have been cleared, the ceiling fans have settled into their monotonous rotations, and every adult in the house has surrendered to the post lunch hibernation. The television is off. The doors are half-closed.

And this is when you go downstairs.

Not because you have anywhere to be, quite frankly it’s the opposite.

You walk carefully, unnecessarily carefully, towards the empty kitchen.

Sunlight pours through the window above the sink, blazing, white and merciless, illuminating everything there. You stand for a moment in the middle of it, doing absolutely nothing, almost forgetting why you came in the first place.

Then you open the refrigerator.

You don’t expect much.

The bottom drawer, full of vegetables, is of no concern to you. You are not a farmer. You have never been a farmer. You are not going to start now. There are last night’s leftovers; a bowl of sabzi you ate against your will but didn’t dare complain. A steel container of milk with a steel plate acting as a roof over it. Plastic and steel bottles filled with cold water. A box of sweets, still untouched, because it was a gift from someone and will be a gift we give to someone.

You stare. Nothing. You close the refrigerator. You were not disappointed, exactly. You had not really expected anything else.

Then you open the freezer.

There are ice trays, patiently constructing cubes. Plastic bags of dal. Something wrapped in foil whose identity is no longer apparent.

And then, there it is.

A white ice-cream container.

Your expectations, which moments ago had been lying peacefully at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, ascend with the speed and conviction of a rocket launch. Your mood changes immediately. Ice cream after dinner, you think. What will you watch while eating it? Something funny, probably. Maybe you'll take the tub upstairs. Maybe you won't even bother with a bowl.

You can already imagine the first spoonful, cold, sweet and rewarding. Your brain has moved several hours into the future in the amount of time it takes your hand to reach for a plastic container.

You open the lid.

Matar.

Peas. Green, round, entirely indifferent, definitely not ice cream, peas.

You stare at them with the kind of betrayal and frustration you feel when you don’t really have anyone to blame, when it’s not really anyone’s fault, and technically nothing wrong has been done.

This is, perhaps, one of the earliest, among several, lessons we receive about appearances.

Why are we so easily influenced by surfaces and looks? Why do appearances make us assume in mere seconds? It’s simple and yet it’s not. Evidently, appearances are persuasive.

We spend our lives making assumptions from what we can see. It is, afterall, how we navigate

the world. We see dark clouds and assume rain; we see someone smiling ergo they must be happy; someone in a uniform indicates authority; with confidence we presume competence. We see a beautifully decorated house and, without being invited to do so, we begin constructing a beautifully decorated life inside it. We judge situations by first impressions. We judge people by their faces. We judge books by covers despite being told explicitly not to. It’s strange how much faith we place in face value (keyword: face).

Appearances aren’t lies.

They’re incomplete truths.

The ice-cream container had not lied to us. It had, in fact, contained ice cream once. Its appearance was evidence. It simply wasn't the whole story.

That distinction matters.

Because we like to popularly believe that maturity means being less trusting and more suspicious. But there’s a difference between suspicion and skepticism. Maturity, perhaps, is something quieter. It is learning that the first thing you see is not necessarily the last thing there is to know; your first interpretation is not, perforce, the final truth.

The quiet person isn't necessarily shy. The loud person isn't necessarily confident. The person who gets perfect marks isn't necessarily wise. The person who looks angry might simply be concentrating. Someone can love you and still hurt you. Someone can disappoint you without intending to. Someone can surprise you in the most wonderful way. We are constantly interpreting the world from incomplete information. And yet we have to. There is no alternative. You cannot walk through life demanding to open every box before forming the slightest impression of its contents. At some point, you have to make an educated guess. You have to trust your instincts. You have to read the room. You have to decide whether to cross the road, whether to take an umbrella, whether the milk has gone bad.

The problem is not assuming. The problem is forgetting that you assumed.

Somewhere in the history of human thought, Erwin Schrödinger placed a cat inside a box and used it to make generations of students deeply uncomfortable about observation, probability, and the limits of knowledge. The cat, depending on whom you ask and how much physics they remember from school, was both alive and dead until someone opened the box. We, several years later, encountered the considerably less consequential but emotionally devastating domestic version of the same problem. Ice cream or matar?

Until the lid was opened, both possibilities existed only in theory. In practice, however, we’d already eaten the ice cream, selected the spoon, planned the programmes, arranged the evening around it, allowing a white plastic container to become evidence of a future that had not yet occurred. The peas did not disappoint us by being peas; they were disappointing because they didn’t fit in the imagination we had constructed based on an assumption.

And that was the mistake.

Not hoping. Not being excited. Not trusting.

Assuming.

There is a difference between expectation and knowledge, although the human brain, with its endless appetite for patterns and its comical impatience with uncertainty, prefers to collapse the two. We take the visible fragments and, with the confidence of Sherlock Holmes, construct an entire hidden world around it.

Perhaps growing up is simply the slow accumulation of moments in which the world opens the lid for you.

Sometimes there is matar where you expected ice cream.

Sometimes there is ice cream where you expected nothing.

Sometimes there is something so entirely outside the range of your expectations that you realise how small the box of imagination had been.

You learn to leave room for surprise. You learn to look twice, ask, and wait. You learn that uncertainty is not always an emergency. Sometimes it is simply the honest condition of being alive.

Most importantly you learn to open the box.

So the next time you see an ice-cream container in the freezer, don’t start planning dessert, or deciding how much to save before you have even touched the lid.

Reach for it— open it. There may be ice cream, there may be peas. There may be something else completely, forcing you to confront the ancient, humiliating fact that you do not know everything.

And that’s the point.

The world has never promised us ice cream. We saw the box, remembered what it used to contain, and decided there would be some.

That is how assumptions begin: not with stupidity, but with memory; not with malice, but with pattern; not with a lie, but with an incomplete truth.

The wiser response is not to stop believing in ice cream. It is to open the box before you start planning your life around it.