Summer Afternoons

Hot Indian summers.......probably many of us don't like these and especially if you are staying or have stayed in places like vijayawada(a place that was called 'blazewada' by the British cause of its very high summer temperatures), I am sure you will definetely hate the season! But no matter where I am I think I can never get myself to not like the hottest season.Yeah I definetely get irritated with the heat, the constant sweating that makes me bathe several times a day, but this season offers me some treats which make me ignore all the non likeable parts.

The first thing it brings is holidays. Like most of the school students, I used to crave for holidays.Now being in the last sem of my undergrad almost everyday is a holiday but it wasn't the case when I was in school.Holidays meant great fun. Holidays meant going to Adoni(where my paternal grandparents and my aunt & uncle lived) or staying in the same place(Nandyal, where my maternal grandparents also lived). Either ways it was great fun cause I used to get to meet my cousins......maternal cousins usually if we stayed in Nandyal and paternal cousins if we go to Adoni. Usually it used to be both, I mean we used to visit Adoni such that we do not miss meeting any of them! Once with the cousins we had hell lot of things that we used to do.

With my bro being the eldest of our generation on my mother's side he used to kinda control us. I mean he was like a leader and we the rest - I,my uncle's two daughters, my older aunt's kids (a girl and a boy) and my younger aunt's kid (a boy), used to follow his lead. Our small gang was usually joined by the neigbour's kids who used to stay in the same compound.Our grandparents' house in Nandyal had lot of open space giving us the chance to play all sort of games. A typical summer day used to comprise of playing all day long with breaks for water and food in between. The kind of games we used to play depended on the time of the day....outdoor games in the morning and evening, indoor games if its damn hot in the afternoons or when its late night. The major outdoor games were tag and hide and seek, while the indoor ones consisted of lot of card games(not the deck of cards...by cards I mean simple pieces of paper with a word written on it) and traditional version of ludo. We used to use shells or tamarind seeds for the dice and the board was usually a wooden plank on which the squares for the game have been drawn. I will describe one simple card game that we often used to play. The game is played with five people. There are chits/cards with each one containing any one of the words king,queen, minister, police and thief written on them(and these weren't actually written in english, we used to write their equivalents in telugu). The cards are to be folded such that the words written on them aren't visible and each player has to take one card. The one who gets the king has to guess who the queen is. If he/she does it right the player gets a 1000 points and if he/she doesn't guess it correctly then the cards are exchanged without revealing the other card. Once exchanged the new king has to guess who the queen is. This continues until the king discovers the queen, the queen discovers the minister and so on until the thief is found. The queen gets 800 points, the minister 600, the police 400 for their respective correct guesses.The thief gets no points. After several rounds of the game, the one with the highest score is declared the winner.Silly as it may sound but I think I still like the game! Anyways besides all this playing summers also meant awesome mangoes.My favourite, was and is this type of mangoes called benishah(more popular as banginpalli). Not to forget the awesome mango dal with hot rice, the ice and milk candies that we used to buy from the local icecream vendors with the money that our grandparents used to give to us children. We used to take turns in asking the money for these little delicacies.God those days were fun!

Now the other side of the story....I mean the things we used to do when we used to go to Adoni. My bro used to loose his authority as there was this cousin...my aunt's elder daughter being the eldest of all the paternal cousins. But he used to still retain the leadership among us, the boys (my bro, my aunt's son and me).Like in Nandyal besides our small gang we used to have lots of neighbour's kids with whom we used to play. The typical schedule for a day is the same as that in Nandyal but the major difference was the kind of games we used to play. My aunt's daughters being quite older than us, played lot of sports and so we used to have all kinda things there...I mean we used to have the stuff like shuttle racquets, football, hockey sticks, tennis balls etc. So we used to play proper sports like badminton, cricket etc. We also used to make up our own games using the football. The indoor games consisted of chinese checkers, carroms etc.We used to make up teams and play carroms for money(ofcourse the bets never exceeded 5 rupees as far as I remember and usually used to be two rupees). Hide and seek was one major game which we used to play both in Nandyal and Adoni. Usually we sometimes played our own indoor version of hide and seek.Other indoor games were using proper cards(plastic deck of cards) but obviously not the well-known games. We used to build buildings using those cards, the biggest one had 7 storeys as far as I can remember! Coming to the food....we often used to have ice creams both the local ones and the branded ones(JOY's raspberry, chocobar and cones) and sugarcane juice!

The best thing about summer is the silent afternoons. I love them.Its usually very calm in the afternoons and in the silence you can hear each and every sound clearly. The sound made by dry leaves when some one walks over them, the chirping of birds and what not.We used to have a big swing.....something as big as a single bed in our verandah in my grandparents house at Adoni. I clearly remember this afternoon. I was lying on the swing....the swing swinging very slowly and it was completely calm. There was this cuckoo singing its sweet song. I imitated it and said 'koo' and it replied with 'koo'.This contined for sometime and I fell asleep. That was an awesome experience.How I wish I could relive those moments!

All this was until my 7th standard. After my seventh standard things changed a lot...we moved from Nandyal to some other placed called Pamarru which is very far away from both Nandyal and Adoni and then to lot of other places.We also got busy with our studies later....I mean the 10th, the Intermediate, Undergrad. Probably it was that I grew out of my childhood,I never had such fun after my 7th standard. Even after all the changes one thing remained unchanged and that is my liking for the calm summer afternoons. I still enjoy and cherish them with the same fervour that I used to have when I was a kid. I just enjoyed one such afternoon today! :D