The Hot Spot Cafe

Other than being a steamy 90’s film noir starring "Big Don" Johnson that most people have long forgotten, The Hot Spot is outwardly just an ice cream shop, nestled away in a quiet corner of the otherwise teeming metropolis, Islamabad. However upon closer inspection there are far darker and more sinister happenings than just ice cream at The Hot Spot.

Essentially though we started out as an enormous mess in the kitchen. Two maniacal brothers and one persistent aid - we grappled long and hard with our wooden buckets till the wee hours of the morning, producing dollops of yucky looking and equally yucky tasting mush. One muggy summer night when the terrible twins were scraping the depths of despair in a last gasp attempt at salvation it was agreed to go for broke. Plan 9 was thus put into motion for one last attempt at creation. Then... lightening struck!

We had somehow produced a concoction that we, avid lifetime devourers of ice cream, deemed to be as good as we had experienced anywhere. Elated at what we thought was the magic elixir of life, we began churning out more and fortunately it didn’t taste half bad either. Could it be that this was a signal from the gods?! We had our doubts...

For the next crucial experiment we needed a healthy supply of guinea pigs and luckily they happened to be waiting like sitting ducks in the form of the young and unsuspecting students from the school across the road.

One fine, suitably hot and humid August day, we dragged out a rickety old blackboard with a couple of flavours scratched on to it. This was strung up from the tree that overlooked the road outside, and thus our introduction to the world of high finance and enterprise.

One or two of the more rebellious kind of kids with a particularly devil may care (some might even say death-wish like) attitude were the first to step up to the window to sample the mysterious wares. There were initial whispers and mutterings here and there but gradually, what was a trickle of brave customers became most of the small school.

Soon, the little monsters did what they do best and dragged along their brothers and sisters, as well as Mom and Dad to that notorious "last house on the right" in F 6/3’s Street 60. Soon we made a discovery of our own – we needed more freezers and more ice cream buckets in order not to run out each day! We also needed a larger blackboard on which to write our growing "array" of flavours.
All those nights churning away till the mad hours of dawn now appeared to have been well worth the pain and so the story really began. The ugly, nonsensical dabbling followed soon after.