The wind died outside the building.

The people looked at it sternly and then carried in an urn to bury because it kept rattling in a coffin and that spooked them out. They weren’t in grief because they didn’t know it too well, but they looked solemn because death is usually not a pleasant event.

The women were quiet and kept looking at their shiny feet. The men flocked around the urn bearer. They marched on with purpose.

In the graveyard, they stood next to an open grave. The urn bearer held his breath and opened the lid of the urn. There were no sounds except for a cough or sneeze from the people around. The trees stood in silence, containing their misery in silence. The people started covering the grave with damp mud at the end. The sun glared at them but it was difficult to ascertain the extent of its wrath.

Summer had arrived.

Balmy.

Here’s what you must do on a typical summer day. You must wear a crisp white kurta, so you’re summery but in a stately fashion. You must then tie you hair up in a big bun, so that the curls look nice without reminding one of a bee hive.

I recently found a pair of sunglasses that make my life all sepia and old school. You can wear sunglasses so that no one can really see your eyes. Works best after a late night consisting of alcohol and/or tears. If you haven’t been leading a life as dramatic, you can eliminate the shades.
It’s amazing what kohl can do to your eyes.

One minute you look sleepy and unwell and the next, your eyes are lined with a 6B pencil making them look dreamy and full of carbon charm.

In the end, carry a big picnic basket and eat some egg and cheese sandwiches while watching the world go by. A pitcher of iced lemonade and a blue-and-white umbrella and you could be living THE life.

None of this works if you have a job, but well you know, I can live vicariously through those of you who are blessed with summer holidays.

I must have been 6-7 years old and we were visiting some relatives in Calcutta. They had a big house on the outskirts of the city. After the first few days, when the novelty of the big house had passed, we decided to go to the city. My enthusiastic uncle said that it was time we did some touristy things. He said we must go explore the city. Go take pictures at Howrah bridge and at Victoria Memorial and eat puchkas later.
We piled into the back of his old Fiat and set off on our little journey. There were way too many people to fit in and I had to perch onto my mom’s lap. The ride was very interesting. My uncle kept pointing out buildings that had been built in the British era; their structures subtle yet sturdy. My mother and aunt made a couple of stops to look at saris. I remember that there was a cow there that had very pretty eyes. It’s funny how tiny details always stay with you.
As we began to approach our destination, the excitement grew. Everyone started talking in loud voices. My uncle had to juggle driving and making animated gestures to spice up his anecdotes. In the middle of all this we didn’t see an oncoming car. My uncle hit the brakes at the last minute. The car made a loud screech. Thankfully, the two cars didn’t collide. The other driver shouted at my uncle in rapid Bengali. My uncle apologized and turned to see if we were all okay. We weren’t. At least I wasn’t. Since I was sitting on my mother’s lap, I had hit the front seat with the sudden jerk. My lower lip had a slight cut. But when you are 6, a slight cut is like having a fracture. I started crying and my entire family attempted to pacify me. My uncle apologized a hundred times and made promises of pastries and sweets. My mother told everyone, in a strangely high pitched tone, what a brave girl I was. “Isn’t she brave?” My mother asked the others. I continued crying. To make matters worse, my cousin pointed at my lip and said, “Look Ma, balloon!” what he was trying to say was that my lip was beginning to swell. That scared me more and my howls became too loud for my family to handle. Finally, resorting to being stern, my uncle asked me to stop crying if I wanted to see Victoria Memorial with everyone else. That did the trick, but only just. I switched over to whimpering.
The swelling however had begun to worry my folks. My uncle started driving towards an ice cream man to see if he had some ice. My sister, in an attempt to cheer me up, began to tell me a story to make me a laugh. It was a story about a king who had to stop a battle to go to the bathroom. I remember laughing a lot. The ice cream man didn’t have ice. He also cheerfully informed us of some massive power cut. He told us that finding ice now would be difficult. Then he saw my lip and my tear streaked face. He smiled and pinched my cheeks and said he had a solution. He handed me a cold pack of Frooti. It was semi-frozen. He told me that I could hold it to my lip for a while and then drink it.
Those were strangely simpler times. We saw the Howrah bridge and ate the puchkas, amidst all the other things. But my favourite part of the Calcutta trip was the semi frozen Frooti.

Summers

How many things from your childhood and youth will you remember when you’re 70? Will you remember how you ate cookies when you were specifically asked not to? Will you remember how you got mad at your siblings because they made fun of your handwriting? Will you remember what your first kiss felt like? Will you remember the bad stuff too? The people who failed you and the people you failed?
There is a part of my childhood that I will never forget. We’ll call that segment – Summers.
My parents didn’t really trip over themselves with the ‘let’s-enroll-our-children-in-a-million-summer activities’ and I don’t think I could have been more grateful. While some of my other friends who weren’t as lucky went to learn to stitch, swim and sing all in a day, I would run around the whole place with playful abandon. Exams would end in the first week of April and what followed was 2 months of nothing to worry about. The funny part is when I look back now, I wonder whether there really was anything to worry about back then.
The days in the summers played out in pretty much the same way. I would wake up late, drink tea (that tasted as close to milk as was possible) and then I would put on my shorts and my rubber slippers and go down to a friend’s place. Sometimes we would watch cartoons; sometimes we would run out and get an early start to the day. We played lots and lots of cricket. Building cricket with building rules and a rubber ball. If there was a secret place where all the lost cricket balls could be found, I can assure you that there will be a small hill of cricket balls with our names on it. I have had the good fortune of playing this game with my friends who not only liked playing it but also were surprisingly well read about it for their age. In hindsight, if that part of my life was taken away, I’d enjoy cricket a lot lesser.
By the time lunch came around and it got too hot to be outside, we’d drag ourselves home long enough to have lunch. Soon after, we’d be back to play cards in the stairwell or monopoly in someone’s home. The family members of children my age must have cursed our energy back then, because there were days when I think we played, shouted, fought and spoke non-stop for the whole day.
Evenings were always the same mix of cricket and climbing on walls to hide in a game of hide and seek. A friend of mine who lived on the ground floor had his kitchen window exactly where we played. We would huddle there, out of breath, and knock the window pane until his always-smiling grandmother handed us steel tumblers full of cold water. The feeling of cold water on a parched throat isn’t one I’ll be forgetting for a while to come.
In that brilliant time between dinner and bedtime, I’d read hungrily, taking in as much Enid Blyton or Hardy Boys or whatever else I could before my eyes shut out of sheer exhaustion. I would fight with my mother if she forgot to bring back new books from the library.
When we went back to school in June, in our sparkling new raincoats, our faces a few shades darker thanks to the playing in the sun, it was a strange feeling. A mix of excitement of a new school year and the inexplicable sadness that summer had ended.
There is this song I like a lot by Joni Mitchell. It’s called Urge for going. The lines that get me every time are “I had me a man in summer time/ He had summer coloured skin” That’s where I get the blog name, because that is just such a lovely description of colour. It has multiple layers in meaning. Every time I hear it, I feel a different feeling.
But, had I heard it as a kid, when I probably didn’t know better, my mind would go back to June 15 th , when we took with us our summer coloured skin to school, year after year. Where each time, we were a summer older, a summer wiser and had under our belt one extra summer worth of memories.
When I am 70, I’ll probably remember this feeling. The feeling when you run out of the summer, as the inky skies pour down on you, and you go to school with a bag full of freshly covered books and there is the excitement and the comfort that your whole life is ahead of you.