Indian summer

I love the time between two and four on a summer afternoon…the time between school and homework. Even the skies over India seem to share your joy. They appear deep blue...the color of daisy bells in the valley. Everything is hot and pleasant. Pleasant because of the occasional wind that brushes my hair onto my face. Looking up from my mat I realize that it’s the perfect time for a nap. Nature too seems to have succumbed to the lullaby of the soporific Indian summer. But how can someone let go of such a beautiful day..??? So many hours and days pass by…in sleep…lost to time… lost for eternity. As the wind weaves in and out of my hair I am driven back in time….


There were other afternoons spent just like this. When the heat tranquilizes you can be but thankful for the little plot of land you scrap off after working nights at a hotel. Nights spent scrubbing floors and washing plates.

I turn on my side. The plastic had heated up and was now slowly becoming a burning itch in my spine. Back then the straw mat had always kept the heat away. Water trickled from a near by tap going ‘TUP…TUP… TUP…’ echoing loud and clear, against the silence that prevailed in the big colony.. Perhaps everyone was asleep trying to make the most of a free afternoon. Even the mother next door had stopped screaming over her four year old…Maybe she too was savoring the quiet after her kid had dozed off. How could kids be a bother…I wonder.

Sitting on a straw mat under a mango tree by the kitchen balcony it was always amma and me. Even a little movement would rake up dust from the dry and hard Deccan earth. She diligently put out sums for me to practice. How persistent she was!! Perhaps…the fear of failure had haunted her too. But she did well in training me. Afternoons were spent reading paragraph after paragraph..lessons taught that day in school. Systematic she was too. She would sit by me surrounded by books. Those which she herself had stacked into neat piles… starting from those which would be read first…to those that had to be done last. Sometimes I wish I had been more like her..silent, observant and meticulous. Or perhaps it had been just love. Whatever the reason… she was relentless…sometimes admonishing me lovingly for my childish chagrin and tantrums for an afternoon off.

I look on at amma lying on the cot near the veranda.  Illness had won. Age had taken away her strength. It had taken over her quiet routine in life. It had become a part of her. She no longer seemed to have the resilience that once emulated from her as she went about her work in the vegetable patch listening to me recite the tables. “Ji………” and I would quickly snap out of my chain of thoughts… that revolved around the rhythm of the leaking tap…or my speculations about the wind velocities that drove the white clouds that drifted above my head. I would resume my recitation…”four ones is four..four twos are eight… four….amma ..please don’t leave me…four fives are … please….amma.. . …. hold on…..four eights are… You are all I want amma.. four…pls amma…..”.Again….Helpless I watch on….as another afternoon rolls by….weaving into years .