Mangoes, Thums Up, Ludo, Train journeys, Video cassettes, Wimbledon -- a love letter to the summers that raised us.
The summer holiday months of May and June were delicious.
The days were long and the holiday seemed to stretch out endlessly, brimming with possibility at every turn and corner.
There was a ritual to them -- a rhythm we knew so well, having done it year upon year -- throughout school and college.
For almost 15 years, those summers gave us unbeatable joys. The memories having endured into middle age, their quiet pull so strong that it will carry us through life.
Garmi ki chutti -- like we called it -- was a grand landmark. It was a time for family -- long pending domestic chores like painting and repairs were taken up, relatives and cousins would come over or vice versa, memorable train journeys with ice filled Milton water kegs or surahis took us across states -- and there were a whole lot of other summer wonders that made the vacation unforgettable.
The sun and heat would be merciless. The hot Loo winds would drive us indoors post noon into water cooler cooled rooms where the task of putting buckets of water into the trough was entrusted to the children.
Then bed sheets would be spread on the floor to accommodate the children, who would lie down in a row, poking, squealing before dozing off for an afternoon nap.
In those simpler pre-economic liberalisation times, our demands as children were simpler. Frooti, Thums Up, Rasna [which had a long list of flavours orange to pineapple to kala khatta -- and whose model was the popular Rasna girl who ended the ad with the 'I love you Rasna' signoff].
Aam ka panna, Bel ka sharbat, nimbu paani would be the afternoon drinks -- and mangoes and litchis immersed in buckets of water were a routine repast after every meal.
There was no count; you ate them, till you couldn't. We sat around the water tap platform, peeled and ate the homegrown mangoes, the juice running down from face to the ends of our elbows.
No joy could surpass it -- if there are some moments that are perfect and cannot be replicated. This would be one.
Mangoes were a summer event in themselves. In the Book of Summer, they would be the lead chapter.
Every afternoon, Papa -- who had grown up climbing trees, swimming in the river and spinning the lattoo -- would climb up the thick branches, balancing a mosquito net stick with a cloth bag tied to it. A nudge at the fruits would land them into the bag.
Once the bag was full, he would throw the plucked mangoes into a waiting bed cloth that would be held by two of us on either side under the tree.
The raw mangoes would then be stored in wooden boxes in a bed of straw or neatly laid under high-legged beds, covered with straw and newspaper. Every morning, mangoes that had ripened would be taken out and immersed in water -- and placed on the dining table at every meal.
Every evening Mummy would make mango shake in a Bajaj mixer with a glass jar. Like the Godrej refrigerator, the mixie outlasted many a seasons and was part of every summer.
The thick mango shake would sometimes be poured into the ice tray and we would eat it as ice cream.
Then in the evenings, water would be sprinkled in the courtyard with a gardening tube to cool down the earth as bed cots were laid out to sleep in. Mosquito nets would be strung up, table fans placed beside each sets of beds, with a ghada or surahi and steel glass on the verandah.
Electricity was kabhi ha kabhi na, so sleeping under the stars in the cool evening breeze was a done deal. In the afternoons, a charpoy was put under the shady neem tree as we played game after game of carrom, ludo and cards, listening to songs on battery operated cassette players.
The 'play' and 'rewind' buttons, were dented, their paint peeling off because we heard and re-heard film songs or to Wham! Boney M and Michael Jackson.
We read -- comic books, magazines, mystery books.
We watched -- Doordarshan on television and later movies on video cassette players.
My brother would cycle to the video library and rent video cassettes every day -- and we watched every film imaginable, from bad to terrible, on scratchy tapes, often in rather poor quality.
At the tail end of the two month vacations came Wimbledon, the perfect finale to the summer. We soared with Boom Boom Becker's sensational entry, yet felt the heartbreak of the Great Ivan Lendl falling short of the one title he wanted most, and watched Steffi's Graf's brilliant class across the grass with awe.
It was a time like none other -- magical in its simplicity, filled with little joys that turned out to be life's most lasting memories. Looking back, those were golden days. Truly, there was nothing quite like an Indian Summer.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff