Mid Summer

          “Thank goodness with don’t have the north Indian loo here,” I said to Shri Husband commenting on the afternoon heat.

          “The dry dusty breeze or the toilet?” he asked.

          I dislike getting tricked into silliness. I said: “You know it’s the breeze I’m talking about.” Then added: “We’ve forgotten what the summers were like there.”

          Shri Husband agreed by moving head up and down.

          We both remembered the cart-pushing-vendor with curly-wurly, long, slender cucumbers so different from the ones we see in Goa, singing: “Naram mulayam kakdeee”.

          Goan markets now see cauliflowers, carrots and even the ‘arbi’. Until a few years ago, they, like peas and tomatoes, were exotic and expensive here. But still, we don’t get to see the humble ‘tinda’, a round, cheap, seasonal vegetable with a taste that doesn’t match anything here. Slit into four incomplete quarters, it can be stuffed with ‘aamchoor’, dry masala powders, coated with oil and sautéed. Just as you don’t get decent ‘moonga-shaak’ in Goan hotels, you have to visit a local common-man’s home in north India to eat the ‘real stuff’.

          The memory of fans whirring into ‘khus’ curtains sprayed with water came to mind.

          “Do you remember air-coolers?” I asked.

          “Why this nostalgia?” came the no-nonsense back-question. “Let me remind you, they worked only when there was electricity. They were noisy, rusting monstrous devices that cluttered terraces and staircases the rest of the year.”

          “There,” I said, “in the north, plastic bags were ‘lifafas’. “

          “What’s the connection between air-coolers and plastic bags?” Shri Husband asked.

          Nothing, I said, just remembered. “In Goan Hindi, we say ‘potee’ for plastic bag.”

          “And, at exactly which latitude does the switch in vocabulary happen?” he asked. Under his breath I heard him mumble: “the heat… makes the brains soft.”   

          I took no offence. Instead, offered him a drink made from “our ‘bhirinda-solan’” (=‘Kokum’ to non-Goans). ‘Our’ because it’s from a tree in our compound. This tree is our summer indicator, like the call of the ‘koel’. The green fruits that lurked amongst its leaves suddenly turned deep crimson end of April; the blush lasted a day, then it looked like a conical Christmas tree, decorated with baubles.

Around the time that the ‘mankurad’ prices dropped (slightly) and air-conditioners began to whirr to life in homes where they otherwise stood like mute sentinels above windows, our ‘bhirinda-solan’ began to drop to the ground. What we collected after village thieves were done amounted to a big bucketful. I think some of the miscreants even thrashed the poor tree with long sticks to get more bounty.

The ‘jal-jeera’ and ‘shikanjee’ of the north haven’t made inroads into Goa, but ‘lassi’ has, in packets made and marketed by our government-run dairy. Nice, though extra-sweet. And it has competition from the ‘oos-juice’ sold in wheeled-carts every other kilometre on all major roads. These sugarcane laden carts have identical ‘lotas’, diesel-run machines that squeeze the juice. Standardized quantities, uniform prices and quality. All drinks bow in respect to the king of quenchers: the chilled bottled water.

Our colony now has a bell-ringing ice-creamwala who attracts the labourers working on construction sites and their children. After a short nap post lunch, I find they work reluctantly.

Once, an old Connaught Place (Delhi) shop-keeper told me that the during the Raj, summer shopping was done 5-11 am and then 7 pm-midnight. Then, in Rajasthan, I saw that all the hard outside work (like tarring roads) was done at night. The days were meant for lighter work. I told Shri Husband this. “Good sense it made, no?” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed, suggesting that I could cook, clean, mop, sweep, dust through the night and do less tiring work like writing during the day.

“But now there are air-conditioners to tackle the discomfort,” I said.

“For road-building?” he asked. “Make up your mind what you’re talking about.”

I changed the topic slightly. “Nowadays, we don’t hear of people getting heat-boils or prickly heat. ‘Ushnnata’ seems to be less,” I said.

“How’d you know that?” was Shri Husband’s counter. “Only a public health professional will be able to tell for sure. Or a family physician association.”

“No one I know has the boils or the rashes, that’s why,” I submitted meekly.

“You don’t know any Eskimo either, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

I don’t know where/how he comes up with such far-fetched examples nor how we stray from our topics of discussion.

I changed the topic some more: “All this heat, that’s what has shaken the earth so badly. Poor Nepal is bearing the brunt.”

“Where did you learn geography? Did you pay attention when it was being taught in school?” Shri Husband asked.

“Wherever,” I said. “But I did pay attention and now I’m worried.”

“What about?”

“The mountains have been shaking, the earth has swallowed up some parts of them…”

“…so?” interruption inevitable.

“…which means Everest might no longer be the tallest mountain in the world any more.”

Silence. This time a serious one.

“Right?” I asked, loud (not very) and confident (a bit).

“Right?” I repeated, presuming he hadn’t heard since he hadn’t said anything.

“You just may be,” he finally admitted. “We won’t know until the survey people re-measure and give out the details. Will take time.“

More silence. Then: “Whatever our discomforts here, we need to spare a thought for our Nepali neighbours. This has been a horrible summer for them. May they never have another such.”

Amen, I thought. Sometimes, Shri Husband lets slip that he has a kind side.