Summertime

JUNE 2001 - The old Gershwin standard goes, ‘Summertime and the living is easy,’ but, stubbornly, I haven’t had the first mango which means that one has refused to accept the arrival of the long, hot summer, although anybody other than the government would admit that summer is indeed here – and they would not admit it since most of their time is spent denying.

The mangoes are arriving in the city – what they taste like this year is anybody’s guess so far. Apparently, there are any number of pesticide-drunk production-motivated farmers out there in the boonies who are spraying anything that moves - or doesn’t move. One cryptic fruit seller advised against purchasing the melons last week, saying while they looked like melons, there had been so much insecticide pumped into them that they had lost their traditional flavour. Wonder if he was another disgruntled commoner or the genuine article, because the tasteless melon syndrome was present even in the days when we had not even heard of pesticides. It was quite customary for my mother to stand up for the melons that didn’t even have a hint of sweetness about them, exhorting us to eat them because it was after all, fruit. This was stretching the imagination to a giddy height but then those were not the times when you could make a face, run your hand through a week old shaggy growth on your chin, scratch yourself and tell your mother to ‘chill out’ or ‘take a hike’ or ‘hey give me a break.’ You flexed yourself for the bland experience and ploughed through the ‘fruit’ or whatever it was supposed to be without making faces.

In fact the arrival of summers was something to look forward to or perhaps at that age all experiences tended to be enjoyable other than studying which for most people was and is never quite a thrilling experience. Unlike now, with the country having virtually no more winters left and a spring that is over almost as soon as it has begun, summer was a distinct arrival because it was such a departure from spring. There were power failures then too but they didn’t shatter you into pieces because you were not hooked into air conditioners. Power failures meant no fans and that was not a tragedy although it was hard to breathe in the still summer nights. Most power failures were linked to the dust storms that ravaged the country and there were the special ones too, those that turned bright and harsh summer days into darkness in minutes. A silence and a lull and then the tornadoes would rip through. When it was over, the banging shutters, the rush to pick up the sparse cotton bedding and lunge for the airless indoors, there was the inevitable drop in the temperature and the arrival of rain would let loose the fragrance of the moist earth, a scent one cannot quite describe but known to all of us who have experienced it at one time or another.

Now we have so much corruption that even our summers are corrupted and as we, the city folk (the rest of the country doesn’t matter in case the equation has not arrived in your head so far), rush from air conditioned bedrooms to air conditioned cars to air conditioned offices to air conditioned restaurants to air conditioned gyms and back to air conditioned homes. Those summers were distinct and clear. The heat was harsh and the intensity, pure. It wasn’t an iffy type of heat. It was unmistakable and it was so searing that it took your breath away. It hit you like a slap from a very angry teacher and it left you stunned for a few seconds. When the heat was over and the monsoons arrived, it was altogether different, but while the summer was there and cucumbers sprinkled with salt helped make things bearable, there was nothing to fight the summer but meld with the season.

Hardly anyone slept indoors in those days. It was inconceivable. Most families used the gardens or upper storeys or even covered verandas, but the term widely used was ‘sehan’ and the evening when it would finally arrive with a drop in the temperature, was the prelude to dinner which more often than not, was taken outside, with hot 'chappatis' flying in from the kitchen, where no one really wanted to go. Dinner was very much an outside affair with a large plate of cool, delicious cucumbers waiting to be demolished, while their poor cousins, the ‘tarrs’ were always considered second favourites. Beds, with a thin cotton sheet or ‘darri’ were laid out in single row and usually one pedestal fan sufficed. If you were last in the pecking order and therefore placed far away from the fan, well that was life and there was little chance of changing the way of things. You simply accepted your position. And when, well fed and satiated, you hit the pillow, there was the heavy aroma of jasmine flowers – ‘chambalee’ that floated on the evening air. The beds were cool and on days when it had been particularly hot, a light sprinkling of water, did wonders as did the washing of the ‘sehan’ prior to dinnertime. Perhaps memory clouds the experience but the summer days and summer nights retain their flavour years later.

It was romancing about summer days a few years ago with Zia Sahib – or Zia Moheyddin as you know him, and exchanging memories, when he admitted that years and years of braving England’s chilly winters had literally resulted in the chill having worked its way into his very bones. Zia Sahib shuddered at the memory and said that having built a house in Lahore, he was looking forward to his first real summer and at last, the great thaw that he has been yearning for. He was ecstatic that first summer and as it grew hotter, he reveled in the soaring temperatures. Of course some years later – and we can’t even say, with more water having flown down the Ravi bridge –there being no such thing, he is not quite as cheerful about the long summer. Power breakdowns have done him in and while he is prepared to escape to his balcony, it is the squadrons of deadly mosquitoes that drive him back inside, where airless and melting, he waits for restoration of power, which often is just as hopeless as restoration of democracy. But I guess he is not melting this summer, having made a beeline for England, cricket and strawberries with cream.

Me? Well in a manner of speaking, not having had the first mango means that summer has officially not been recognized, an attitude that has something to do with ostriches and sand though quite what, I cannot recall at the moment.