Summers and Warm Fuzzy Feelings

It's close to 35 degrees outside as I sit inside an Air Conditioned Uber on my way back home(at least for now) from work. Drinking the cold water inside air-conditioned rooms, it is easy to forget where we come from, or at least where I come from. I grew up in Rajasthan, one of the hottest parts of the country.

I was talking to my colleague while he was sipping buttermilk, one thing lead to another and the story of our childhoods during summers flashed across my eyes like a glass of Aam Panna that I stole away from by brother ages ago.

Panna, it’s a memory I can’t seem to get over. Panna with all the right flavours of raw mango, sour and sweet, the freshness of mint, and the tangy taste of first harvest of mango, used to greet us at the lunch on a hot day after we came back home from school. That was the day we knew summers had finally arrived. Every day, I would wait all those hours in school to come back home and taste the chilled Panna. The taste would gradually change from sour and tangy to sweet and tangy, and that is when we knew MANGOES ARE FINALLY READY! Oh my god, if I could tell you stories about Mangoes and my brother’s obsession with it. Maa or papa would bring Mangoes home, or Nanaji would send an entire box full of Mangoes all the way from Modinagar. ‘Langda’ variety is still my favourite. The moment mangoes comes in the house, all the senses get activated suddenly! While I take the bag full of Mangoes and empty it in a bucket full of water, my brother would have already eyed and called dibs on the biggest ones. When I would transfer the Mangoes to fridge, I would more often than not, find a few missing. That broke my heart. Mum would carefully assign both of us the mangoes that we could eat. The last Mango left at lunch would go to her, and I would sit

there in anticipation, waiting for her to eat all of it and give me the heart of the Mango, the most prized possession, the Guthli, to me. Guthli was rather tricky to eat, if you weren’t careful enough, you would let it slip through your hands, if you were too fast, you won’t be able to tease your brother, if you were too slow, someone else is going to snatch it away from you. Eating it was a strategy in itself. First, eat and clean all the sides, sip all the juice in, and then slowly, move to the centre to maximise the pleasure Mango gives you, and you can’t eat the Mangoes in your regular clothes! No! You need to take your shirt off so you don’t spill it on your white school uniform. More often than not, you will find yourself savouring a Mango in a your Baniyan. I know I did and I know how many of my white vests rested in peace after that.

I miss those days where taking a nap wasn’t just a requirement, it was a requirement with in bold, italics and an underline under it. Because if you didn’t sleep, you would sneak out and play in 45degrees outside and your mom wouldn’t let you do that. Loos were more harmful than the ghosts under your bed. You will sleep in front of the cooler, as close as you possible could, just to wake up to a glass a Mango Milkshake with small bits and pieces of Mango in it and a layer of Malayi on the top and a lot of ice! How mum kept atleast 2 mangoes for the evening milkshakes still remains a mystery to me. She must be a magician! There were a few sad days though, when we would run out of Mangoes, those days, there would be a glass of cold milk with Roohafza in it. Maa knew all the tricks to make you drink that glass of milk or lassi. After all, you had to drink and eat all you could, your friends would grow taller and stronger than you at the end of the vacations otherwise! The heat kept mounting every day. It was going to be hot as hell outside, the sleeping arrangements in the house will now be changed. The side of the bed right in front of the only desert cooler in the two bed room house would become the bone of contention again. Suddenly, we would want to get to the beds early (not late) only to secure the spot right in front of the cooler. It was amazing how the place of re-union of our family changed from the Living room with a TV with newly launched cartoon shows to the boring room with the Desert Cooler in it. All the sciences I never was interested in and the Mathematics I was terrible at would suddenly kick into it’s most efficient mode to find the sweet spot on the bed where the speed of fan cools my head and the cooler cools my feet. Trust me I could write a book on those calculations.

Desert Cooler, was everything, almost a celebrity in the house. The khas-khas, the magic matt on the side of coolers that would throw the smell of earth after first runs as soon as you switched on the cooler. There was a technique to the cooler as well. You couldn’t just switch it on. First thing you do is fill up the tank every morning and evening by connecting pipes from the most interior bathroom to the cooler outside the house in ways that if engineers studied, would do breakthroughs in water management. How efficiently we would connect pipes to bring it out to the front! Infact, the only reason we had a long rubber pipe in the house in the first place was to supply the lifeline of the Cooler so it could become our lifeline. The work wasn’t done after the water was full, it would then be decorated with just a few drops of beautiful very-indian smells. Gulkand, rose, vanilla and so many more! Now that the tank is full, and smells great, you switch on the pump so the khas-khas is moist and ready to throw Swizz like air in the room. But one last thing was still left, you run to the bathroom, wash your face, wet your banyan and run back to the cooler and then, switch on the fan to the maximum level. As a ritual, if you didn’t shout to the first sounds of the fan to hear the modulations your voice could make , you haven’t lived your life my friend. We would do this every single day!

But late in the night, when the soils of Rajasthan cool down, the room would become too cool, and Mum would get up and shut down the pump to keep us from catching a cold in hot summers! Since the air wasn’t cold enough, you would get up at 4 am, walk like a cat, making no noise and sneakily switch the pump on. You will then wake up to a glass of Guruji Ki Thandai in the morning and light paranthas. There will be a fight in the house because you wouldn’t have filled up the bottles and stacked up the fridge in the night or there weren’t enough ice cubes, the water from the main supply would be running, so you would quickly fill up all the bottles, the Matka, the ice trays and sneakily put a bottle in the freezer and forget about it, only to come back hours later and find a thick ice formed inside the bottle.

Economic conditions since then have become better. Offices and some houses have A/Cs. Permanent water coolers give you water every day, but nothing can replace the taste of earth in water from the Matka, the tangy taste of freshly made Aam Panna, the fragrance of vanilla coming from the cooler, the big fat mangoes you waited all year for, the fights over the side of the bed you slept on or the afternoon naps. I wish I could go back to those times and enjoy each and every piece of memory like the last Aam ki last Guthli.