Summer isn’t what it used to be. Sitting at my desk, with a list of jobs on the whiteboard before me, I miss the summer holidays of my youth, days when everything slowed to a stillness.
Days when we sprawl on our childhood beds with stacks of Enid Blytons. Above us the slow whir of the overhead ceiling fan. Then there is no fan at all – these are hours of ‘load shedding’ – we are in Jamshedpur where the Damodar Valley Corporation cuts electricity for four hours every day. In these power cuts of summer we fashion little fans from newspapers to cool ourselves down. In the soporific heat, books become even more of a refuge, transporting us to cooler climes, to the Famous Five on a boat to Kiran Island, to Claudine at St. Clairs.
Later in the evening the skies darken and we run outside into the garden to collect raw mangoes that fall off the trees. My mother cooks these – from the kitchen we hear the pressure cooker whistles and the smell of raw mango fills the air – we watch her peel back the raw green skin of the boiled mango – pouring the pale golden pulp into a tall glass jar, mixing in sugar and rock salt and roasted cummin to make aam panna. My mother adds ice cubes and mint leaves and we have a summer drink we gulp so deep, it fills our insides with sweet and tart and a deliciously cool feeling.
Now summer is a truce between duty and desire. The bougainvilleas still explode in riots of fuchsia, the laburnums drip gold. I swap steaming cappuccinos for cold coffee. “Blend it with vanilla ice cream and add a dollop of ice cream on top too,” says the middle child who has packed up her house in Bengaluru, and come to stay with us for the summer months. We all agree this is the only way to drink cold coffee, as we connect in cool, caffeinated bliss.
Living in Mumbai means that summer now tastes of Alphonso mangoes—golden yellow, quartered with whipped cream, with vanilla ice cream or simply by itself.
The rhythm of summer reading has changed.
Summer is sitting in a cool air conditioned room with the middle child – me reading Death of an Author by Nnedi Okorafor where Nigerian sci-fi meets family saga, its otherworldly elements somehow perfectly suited to the steamy heat outside. She reading The Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim’s classic about four women finding themselves during a summer holiday in Italy – the perfect literary escape on a sweltering day.We pause to share snippets, views and reviews.
Death of the Author and The Enchanted April
Summer is when you truly feel the elements – the warm soupy air that surrounds you, the earth as it scorches by degrees- waking up really early to catch the sliver of cool of early morning walks by the beach, heading back as the sun comes up and the hunkering down in wait for the evening.
Like the characters in our books, we seek our moments of reprieve. Summer is waiting for the long day to end, packing our swimming bags with costumes, caps and goggles and then plunging into the cool blue of the swimming pool. The pages of The Swimmers, a novella by Julie Utsoko on the power of a routine like swimming, now comes to life – ‘slowly, slowly, the chatter in our minds begins to subside as stroke after stroke, length after length we swim…The cool clear liquid flowing over every inch of your skin. The temporary reprieve from gravity. The miracle of your own buoyancy as you glide, unhindered across the glossy blue surface of the pool..”
I think back to the many swimming pools of my past. To the first one at the Beldih Club in Jamshedpur, where my sister and I hang onto the swimming rods by the edge, as our mother sits on a chair nearby – her elder brothers flung her into the deep when she was very young and since then she is terrified of the water and maybe this communicates itself to us because neither of us learn to swim.
The Swimmers
It is only years later, when I come to Bombay for my first job, that I meet my next swimming pool. It’s a special summer camp offer, a steal deal to swim in the palm fringed pool set in the gardens of the Centaur hotel on Juhu Beach. It’s here I learn to let gravity go, to twist and turn and twirl, to tread the water, to freestyle and float.
When the summer offer ends and the hotel is shuttered, mired in lawsuits and then razed to the ground, I move to other pools. I take my children with me. The three girls take to water like mermaids, dipping and diving and making goggle eyes underwater. They turn into teenagers and then twenty year olds, floating on their backs watching the evening turn to night as the warm white pool lights turn on and the stars slowly appear.
As I swim the length of the pool, I go over my to-do list for the week – cancel train tickets, send invoices, make an appointment with the dentist, pay the plumber. Then hoisting ourselves up out of the pool, dripping and refreshed, our equilibrium restored, ready to face another day on the land, I realise what summer means to me. Summer is swimming and reading – both acts of immersion, of surrendering to another element that offers escape and clarity.
Summer still means surrendering to stories. I have lots of books saved up – The first six thrillers in Peter May’s murder mysteries set in China, Eileen Chang’s essays and short stories and Shanghai Girls by Lisa See. More on these next week.
What about you dear Reader? Has the meaning of summer changed for you? And what is your summer reading list looking like?
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com
The views expressed are personal)