a bar of soap

Little nuggets of happiness are stored in the most unexpected places. Yesterday, after an evening walk at the beach with my parents, Mom and I decided to stop at a road-side bead shop on the way back home, and stumbled into another store that had eluded us for many days. The store, (appropriately) named EcoNut, was supposed to house all kinds of natural, minimally packaged, organic goodies of the kind that is rare to find these days with the explosion of retail multiplexes in the city. As overjoyed as we were to have found the place at long last, I was even more thrilled to find that they stocked NEEV soaps!

A couple of years ago, a friend had brought me a soap handcrafted by a community of rural women in a village in Jharkhand; the enterprise itself had been set up to employ rural people while creating a more eco-friendly alternative to the most commonly marketed soaps. I was sold. But it was many months before I actually tried it out. When the most favorable conditions of discovering I was down to the last few drops of my body wash and no time to make a dash to the store coincided, I went hurriedly looking for that most curiously packaged bar of goodness. At the risk of sounding like a self-appointed brand manager for NEEV, I will proclaim that it was and is still, the most wonderfully moisturizing and refreshing piece of toiletry ever to have been made. Its fragrance (of that earthy first-raindrops-on-parched-mud kind) was so redolent that it lingered for hours afterward filling my senses at every corner of my apartment. Panic instantly gave way to the most luxurious bath I ever remember having. Alas, like all things material, that bar of soap vanished into edible oil. And with it went my morning thrill of being surrounded by its exquisite aroma.

Now, nearly two years thence, I have been reunited with this wondrous creation of man (& woman- please check out their website, they do some awesome work!). :)