Our summer vacation would be spent in Chennai, where my maternal grandparents stayed. I would enjoy a lot there. Everyday in the afternoons my grandfather would buy me ice cream from a cyclecart vendor who would go from door to door selling ice creams.
When I was about 8 years both my maternal grandparents had passed away and our summer vacations in Chennai came to an end.
The rest of the years, vacations were spent in Mangaluru. We stayed in a sprawling bungalow with a huge compound which had lots of coconut, mango, sapota, gooseberry, jackfruit and jamun trees. Our water requirements were met from a well. We did not have municipal water connection. During summer the water in the well would nearly dry up. So the elders would be busy with water woes.
I being the elder one was expected to look after my younger sister and entertain her. I used to read a lot of Enid Blyton books, so I would make up interesting make believe characters and tell her stories . Even today after so many years she still remembers the stories I used to tell her.
When we were a little older we would hire bicycles by the hour and ride them. Afternoon would be too hot to play outside so along with our friends and neighbors who visited us, we would play board games like ludo, snakes and ladders and cards. We would play hide and seek, blind man's buff and LONDON London inside the house.
At 4pm we would run out with chilli powder and salt and climb mango trees and sitting on the branches eat unripe mangoes. Once when sitting and eating mangoes on a tree, we saw quite a huge ratsnake on a nearby branch. We quickly scrambled down in terror, hurting our knees and arms and ran home. After that incident we were more careful while climbing trees. Ratsnakes were common and even entered our tiled roof houses in search of rat preys.
We would play cricket with plastic bats and balls. There was no Tv in those days and if there was a cricket match in which India was playing, we would be glued to the radio listening to the commentary. Once a week we would go to cinema theatre to watch movies. My mom too was crazy about movies and we tried never to miss an Amitabh Bachchan movie.
Summer holidays meant lazing around, playing games and feasting on tender coconut water, mangoes, jackfruit, sapotas and gooseberries. My mother would make jackfruit patholis and muliks(konkani specialities) which we loved to eat.
The song ‘those lazy hazy crazy days of summer’ by Nat king cole always brings back happy memories of our childhood summer holidays.
