Summer

I have in my room one of those thingummies. A digital clock that, in a fit of existential doubt, mutates into one that is also a calendar, and just to cover things off, insists on telling you the temperature as well.

I'm staring at that clock now, and the ghastly contraption cheerily informs me that were I step out into the sun, it would roast me at an ambient temperature of around 34 degrees.

I know, I know – compared to your native place, where temperatures reach 75 degrees every day of the year, Bangalore is as cool as it can get, and I'm a city slicker to complain, but now what to do? It's hot as hell.

It's hot, it's sweltering. Your eyes hurt when you're on the road with the glare, and you have unhappy armpits. There's a trickle of sweat down your back, and you have the dreaded itches. The fan alleviates without curing, and the afternoons are endured rather than experienced. The nights are stuffy and you have no appetite. A bath is effective only as long as it lasts. Step back outside into the world and you're back to square one.

You know the feeling, no?

But this post is not a rant about summer. It is about the nicer aspects of that least wanted of seasons.

You remember the summer holidays? Ah, those long, unending days of blessed nothingness. When you'd get up at nine, watch TV and have breakfast, traipse down to play cricket, do so until a late lunch and then snooze. Wake up to cards or Scrabble or Monopoly or – and this was my favourite – carom. Cricket again, or maybe hide and seek or any of the other million games that children can play for hours. Dinner and some more TV. A movie that ends at midnight, and good night.

Visits to the park, and sessions on the swings and the slides. Plate after plate of pani puri. Helium filled balloons and hot and spicy bhel. Gully cricket and gulli danda. Matinee movies and cartoons and popcorn. Visits from relatives and going out for dinner. Frolicking in the swimming pool and long tall glasses of nimbu paani.

Memories. Now what to do. Overwhelming types they can turn out to be.

But two things I remember more than most.

One, long sessions of cards in the afternoons. Games of Penalty, Not-At-Home, Ghulam-Chor, Badaam Saat and Rummy and so many others. But really, what I looked forward to more than anything else was the bowl of long strips of raw mango, lightly garnished with salt and red chilli powder, interspersed with green chilli split lengthwise. It sounds spicy, I know, but believe me, the tanginess of the raw mango and the spiciness of the chilli, with just a hint of salt. Sigh.

And second, lunch in the summer was inevitably accompanied by bowl after bowl of aam-ras. Now, if you don't know what aam-ras is (and I can tell you right now that Microsoft Word certainly doesn't), then go out and ask an Indian. That Indian will inform you, in wistful tones and with a lingering look in the eye that aam-ras is, really speaking, the nectar of the Gods.

Thick and juicy, richly orange in colour, with little delicious lumps of mango islanded in pure mango pulp, chilled lightly but not frozen – aam-ras is a dessert fit for kings. Households all over India make this dish with any of the gazillion varieties of mango that are available, and children in these households have grown up revering this simple yet heavenly dessert. Me, personally, I'd go for the aam-ras made with the Haapus (Alphonso). Sigh. Sigh, sigh, sigh.

And so I may sweat and the heat may be sweltering. Summer may be here, and about that there is no doubt.

But I'll get by with my memories of the summers gone by. And, if you don't mind, another helping of aam-ras, thank you.