The very first memory I have of an Indian summer in the Doctors’ Colony of Nalanda Medical College and Hospital, Patna, was that of load shedding- there was plenty of it during the day, and especially for two to three hours after dark. Most of the apartments then didn’t have a generator or an inverter, so it was an open invitation for the kids to come out and play hide-and-seek. The youngest child was 2-3 years old (my brother), and the oldest was around 20 years old. Needless to say, once someone became a thief, he remained so throughout the game since someone or the other would attack him before he could spy on all of us.
Slightly earlier, the evenings were dominated by games like pithoo, kabaddi, hopscotch or cricket, or simply bicycle- name an outdoor game and you could find a kid doing exactly that. After all, it was the era of those historic dial phones with high tariffs and a lock system so they could be used only for urgent phone calls. We had no option but to play.
We would have early morning school, so getting up at the crack of dawn was a given. I guess we gave a rooster a run for his money in this department. While going to school in a non-AC bus hardly made a difference, coming back, jostling in the same bus in the afternoon created a strange and heady concoction of smell, sweat, stale stench of the leftover tiffin, samosas, chips, and the heady honking of the bus in the traffic, shouting to each other to be heard above the traffic sound, and the jolts we got each time the bus applied the brakes.
At the mention of food, how can we forget the summer essentials like Golden lollipops (since we didn’t have enough pocket money to buy the more expensive ice creams), kulfi, baraf kagola, Rasna, watermelons, muskmelon, cucumber, golgappe and so on. Each had a special aroma and distinct flavour, melting in the mouth and keeping dehydration at bay.
When it comes to food, how can I forget the king of fruits, the mango? That yellow, pulpy, juicy fruit brought almost instant gratification to the taste buds. Our parents never bought mangoes by the kilo but by the ton, and they would be gone by the next day. The raw, tangier ones were used by Grandma to make pickles.
We gorged on different varieties of mangoes, including Alphonso, Dasheri, Langra, Kesar, and Banganapalli. Since we have touched on mangoes, we may note that, as one of the largest producers of mangoes globally, India exports them to countries in the Middle East, Europe, and the US, earning valuable foreign exchange.
Returning to the summer season, no portrayal is complete without a mention of summer vacations – those two-month-long holidays when we disconnected from school in the absence of computers or smartphones. There was no concept of online classes, of course, only phone calls, if extremely necessary. The vacations until class 8 were not loaded with homework. They were made for fun and frolic – for circuses, Disneyland, and book fairs. They were meant for travel, mainly by trains, and destinations were usually to some relative’s place, even in that sultry heat without an AC coach. I recall getting completely dark from the coal soot by the time we did make it to our terminal. We would gobble anything that the vendors brought into the coaches and carried a Milton 5-litre bottle to hold cold water.
I must admit that, besides travelling, scouring the local library was my favourite pastime during the vacations. There was one for comics when I was in classes 2-4 at NMCH, and then a shop called ‘Books n Amee’ that rented out Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books when I was in classes 6-8. I was not very interested in the Hardy Boys, but I finished the entire Nancy Drew collection during one vacation.
Another treasured activity was playing video games at the local flour shop. Yes, you read that right. There were no game parlours or home video games back then. So, the kids would hang around these flour shops that kept video cassettes. It was fun to clear all the stages in Mario, my cherished game.
How can I forget to mention the only summer festival that the kids thoroughly enjoyed? Holi! The entire paternal extended family met in our ancestral village home for this festival of colours. And of course, by the end of the day, none of us could be distinguished from the others – such were the different hues we were smeared with. All the colours of the rainbow! The colours would stay on for several days. There was a shop outside our home – whenever we bought something from there, the shopkeeper never charged us. We kids naively believed he was very nice – we hardly knew he would settle the accounts with our grandfather after we went back to our respective places.
That was my summer of childhood, uninhibited by the incursion of smartphones and WhatsApp groups from schools or online classes, unburdened by excessive homework, with time to enjoy oneself and relish each small experience without rushing through life.
By Richa Verma
Richa is an online English teacher, independent blogger, voracious reader, movie buff who is smitten with wanderlust, and a homemaker. She can be contacted through her email address richavermamh@gmail.com
