Celebrate !

An amber colored drop traced a playful path on his purple tee shirt. He licked his fingers and beamed. Happiness, when his mother tugged him along the road deftly avoiding the traffic and me the onlooker in a rickshaw was left with vivid memories of summer holidays.

Nothing has changed, rather, some things have changed from before. It gets hotter than before. People are indoors longer and there is something screwing the weather, greenhouse effect. More Uv, less ozone, bad yield of mangoes bad climatic cycles, the boy with his amber colored kulfi couldn’t care lesser for all this. We were all boys or girls with ice candies at some point in time unless of course your parents were hygiene freaks and u always thought Ice Cream was a trademark Baskin Robbins brand. All of us forgot the world licking the cool ambrosia between our fingers trying to ignore the sun, the heat and in most cases the guy honking in frustration at our sloth like motion across the road.

He trudged along the traffic jam with his mom pulling him and his bag with the tennis racquet, see, its summer, the time when parents thought that our periodic super powers and mega stamina was supposed to show up, I don’t know if I am speaking for many, but there was a time when I was expected to learn TT, playing the guitar, computers and public speaking in a span of 3 weeks. I did (!). But after I hurt myself at the TT table, “lost” the guitar in the class and successfully imitated a mild electric generator voice at the public speaking class, my parents didn’t mess with me. But it got boring, no friends to talk to or play with in the afternoons. Thanks to power cuts no TV for company. I ended up knowing how the Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy rowed across to the island and blew the cover of a smuggling racket all this washed with a plum cake and lemonade (little wannabe I know!).

Staying opposite the beach on summers with grandparents was fun. Roasted Corn, Bhelpuri (seasoned with sand!), the heavy sea breeze and people enjoying themselves on the sands. Well, I never became that involved with these when there was cricket to be played and runs to be made. We played for hours, broke countless windows, tube lights, windshields, shop windows. In fact, we had broken anything man made out of glass and was breakable.

My rickshaw stopped. Office. Summer. As I walked past 8 sweaty faces red with exertion carrying the mammoth weight of 2 cricket bats and 3 stumps as they inched to the juice shop, I think I felt less guilty taking the day off to roam the city, get sun burnt and come back home to some lemonade and plum cake! Celebrate Summer.