Summer Memories

The loud whirring changes to an ominous rattle, almost as if the ceiling fan will come crashing down anytime. The air is hot, but I am not uncomfortable. I feel peaceful. It is summer, and summer with its cornucopia of smells and sounds almost always brings back happy childhood memories. Of warm afternoons reading Enid Blytons in the cool, darkened living room of our campus home in Bangalore, and cycling in the cooler evenings to the library in the happy anticipation of new borrowings – more books of Blyton’s, and in later years, racy Westerns by Louis L'Amour and the romantic novels of Denise Robins.

Summers back then meant lemon juice, and chilled musk melon cubes mixed with powdered jaggery. Cuckoos singing before taking flight in the late afternoons, and the raucous cries of crows arriving at dusk to roost in the tall trees in the garden. Splashes of scarlet and lavender as Flame-of-the-forest and Jacaranda spilled their bounty, carpeting the ground in our compound and alongside all the campus roads.

I loved summer.

There was only one summer – when I was an adult now living in Chennai - when my world crumbled and never was the same again. The summer when the heat was so intense that we placed wet rags on the floor and sprayed the curtains with water, and I spread a damp towel over my mattress to cool my bed before I slept. The summer when my father’s computer crashed and the air conditioner in his room failed, and both had to be replaced with new ones. When his easy chair gave way as if to say, “Nobody but he shall sit on me again”.

That summer my insides twisted as if trying to wring out a few more tears when my eyes had all but spent their reservoir. Overnight, I became the head of my small family.

But now, a decade later, I am at peace with summer. It is very hot, and my son refuses to set foot outside my father’s room, the only air-conditioned one in the little apartment, and my mother softly steps into it for her afternoon naps and night’s repose, like a cat padding in to rest in the shade. I am allergic to the chill of air conditioning and so I reluctantly remain outside, working in the sweltering heat of the kitchen and the glare from the verandah. Hydrate, I tell myself, and hope that bathing twice a day will keep the prickly heat away. What will we do if the city experiences a water outage? I wonder, and the thought makes me quickly close the tap.

Yet, I am comfortable in the little oven that is home, getting mildly toasted but not burnt, like a dish set to warm. It is a warmth that envelops me like a loving paternal embrace. It is my father's house, after all.

* Originally posted on the Facebook page LIBA - HR Club and the Instagram account the.hrclub.liba with minor variations.