Summer this year is almost upon us as I
write this. And of course it only seems hotter and hotter each year. When one
lives in Chennai, one has to concede that the choice in weather is not varied. We
get three, perhaps four months of pleasant weather when the Gods are kind. At
other times its burning hot or blazing hot or fiery hot or sometimes a
combination of the three. But the seasoned veterans, having survived many a
Chennai summer would agree that it’s not nearly half as bad as these Bangaloreans
claim it is.
I often
wistfully wonder what it would be like if the big bosses at my workplace
decided to give the month of May off for everyone. Just like back in school. They would surely see a rise in productivity
from this employee. But I don't think
that's likely to happen even if one day the planet Mars crashes directly on to
Chennai.
Quite a lot of things have changed now besides the lack of summer vacations. When I
was a school kid , I remember spending hours on the roof terrace at home. I would sometimes simply be walking round and round in circles occasionally doing a quick jig ,sometimes
lying down and gazing away at the sky
,sometimes reading a Harry Potter book for the hundredth time and all of
a sudden it would be time for dinner and my mother would be calling out to me
to come downstairs. Going back to the
living room would feel like leaving one universe to go into another.
My older brother would sometimes join
me too. If he did not have anyone else to play with or if he got temporarily
bored of his video game. One summer, he
suggested that we should build a tent in
our terrace. So that the hot sun won't
keep us away from it in the mornings. I was of course thrilled with the
prospect of a tent. We got down to business straight away. We enlisted the help of our neighbor and my
childhood Idol, a girl who went by the
name of Dhaya. She was in her final
years of school and I suppose I must have been like an annoying little sister
to her, wanting to imitate every thing
she did and trying to impress her all the time.
She seemed to have some experience with building tents and so she became our chief consultant.
Our mother, the director of operations
helped with the most important part, the procurement of raw
materials. Three tall sticks were soon
found and tied together with a rope.
They were stretched away from each other like a tripod and voila! The
skeleton of the tent was ready.
One of the characteristic features of
our house is the presence of sundry items of construction at whatever available
space. These are reluctantly preserved in the hope that they
might prove to be useful in the unforeseeable future. And that day had finally come that
summer, when we used heavy bricks as
place holders for the sticks. I should add that all the construction activity
took place in the hot sun as my brother and I were too excited to wait till sun
down. Blankets were quickly snatched from the adjoining bedroom and suspended
on the sticks in a tent like fashion.
A small problem arose when we used
the bricks to hold the blankets in their position too. We tried propping them up with clips from the
clothesline but they wouldn't do the job. The bricks had to be balanced on top of
the edges of the blankets which were placed on the parapet wall. As is the case with many houses in our
neighborhood we shared a wall with our
neighbor. Now if the bricks were to fall down by some misfortune they would
land straight on the heads of the people walking in our neighbor's passage way
two storeys below. And one doesn't
really need to watch the Home Alone movies in order to guess what happens to
humans hit by bricks.
Our mother cautioned us to be
extremely careful inside the tent so that we wouldn't set the bricks in motion.
And with that, the summer project was
completed. That evening we sat in the tent for hours and made it more
comfortable with pillows and floor mats. It was all quite luxurious. The next
morning I invited a few friends from across the street to show it off. We decided to play a memory game with a card
deck . The cards were spread out and the first person's chance had come. It went on for two rounds till it started to feel like a hundred degrees in there . In
retrospect I'm thinking that perhaps it was not the best idea to use winter season blankets as the roof of our tent. But we had little choice
then. My friends suggested we continue
the game in a more human friendly
habitat. But I would have none of that!
Leaving aside the fact that it was indeed boiling hot, our tent was
really cool ! I tried to reason with
them, with my sensible argument that it was only a minor inconvenience compared
to the novelty of hanging out in a tent,
which was like a whole house in itself, while all the other kids only
had dreary rooms to play in. It did not go down very well with them and they
chose to leave me to roast in there by myself.
My brother found other things to occupy himself with and didn't bother
with the tent much.
Eventually it got far too hot for me
as well and I quit the tent. And that's all I can remember about that
particular incident. My brother tells me
he faintly recalls the structure being blown away by winds of only average
strength and the bricks and sticks lay about while the blankets were safely
restored to the bed room.
At least a decade has passed since
that tent was pitched and It feels like the days don't have as many hours as
they used to anymore. The terrace seems
much smaller than I used to think it was when I was little and I go up there now, only rarely. Perhaps I
should go and try to make another one right now . Yes I think I'll do
that.
<<This first appeared on a community Newsletter called 'Sabha News'>>
Oh! And i know its not hot in Chennai now , this was written a while back .
Comments
Post a Comment