The summer season taught us to slow down

But potol was the bane of summer while growing up. Two dinners out of four a week included aloo-potol jhol, cubed potol and potatoes swimming in runny brown gravy. On special nights that was upgraded to a dalna, a richer preparation with some garam masala. There were hardly any other vegetables around in the wilting summer market. The few like watery bottle gourd and slimy okra were uninspiring. So people had to become as inventive as possible with potol. The vegetable was hollowed out and stuffed with fish and turned into dolmas. Sometimes potol was ground into paste with a hint of shrimp. They were diced and smothered in poppy seed paste or simply fried whole and served alongside dal. Potol meant summer.

 

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In her book Bengali Cooking: Seasons and Festivals, food writer Chitrita Banerjee calls potol “essential summer eating", and says it is Ayurvedically certified as “light and digestive, a curative for worms, fevers, cough, wind and bile, as well as pleasing to the mind." The eyes of beautiful women were compared to halved potol. But we would quickly be sick of them. When we mutinied against potol, we got lauki or bottle gourd. “It’s summer," my mother admonished us. “You need to have cooling vegetables." After a few more rounds of protest a handful of tiny shrimp were added to the bottle gourd for some lau chingri.

Rabindranath Tagore had songs welcoming the advent of Baisakh, the first month of summer, but even he composed only about 16 songs for summer compared to over a hundred for the monsoons. The Bengali new year in April was celebrated with song and dance at Santiniketan but I had little nostalgia for summer.

If I were to make an A-Z of summer, the bright spots would be few and far between certainly not enough to fill all 26 letters of the alphabet. And most of them would be at best mixed blessings.

Air-conditioning: a luxury, strictly rationed and much coveted till every mall had it.

Banians: A summer wardrobe must, always sopping wet by the time you got home.

Cold water: Every refrigerator was stocked with old bottles of Kisan squash turned into cold-water bottles.

Sure, there would be a few perks.

Ice apples (or taalshansh), which were a pain to peel but coolly delicious.

Jamuns, purple black, astringent yet oddly enticing when smeared with kasundi mustard paste and sugar.

K for Kalboisakhi norwester storms that suddenly turned the sky ominously dark and filled the air with the smell of fat drops of rain on parched earth

Litchis and mangoes of course, the undisputed plump kings of the season.

But the joys of summer would be elbowed out by the alphabet of summer horrors, a litany of woes.

Chief among them would be load shedding: power cuts were de rigueur come summer, often for hours. There was the hated prickly heat powder that mothers liberally doused their fidgety children with it after baths.

But nothing really summed up both the pleasures and perils of summer like H for holidays. Summer holidays was what I looked forward to. But summer holidays also turned into sweaty purgatory soon enough. Within one week I was bored. There was the tedium of holiday homework but once that was done, there was nothing to do.

 

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The biggest complaint of the summer holiday was “What will I do today?" My aunt from London sent me a DIY craft book with a title like What Can I Make Today? There were step-by-step instructions to build all kinds of intriguing things: moon monsters on a lunar landscape or dogs made out of ice-cream lolly sticks and matchboxes. I loved the book but ran into cultural roadblocks. Many of the projects used items like pipe cleaners and the empty cylinders that had once held toilet paper rolls. Much to my frustration, our Bengali home in Kolkata had neither. And my parents were not interested in procuring them. “But my moon landing vehicle needs two toilet paper roll cylinders," I complained in vain.

One year my sister and I built a doll house out of cardboard. We spent days making tiny pieces of furniture for each room. For a while that dollhouse took up pride of place on our window sill. With time it moved to the top of the cupboard where it gathered dust until it was eventually thrown away. Another year I drew scenes from nursery rhymes and fairy tales on curtains and my sister embroidered them into reality.

Those projects were essentially timepass in an age where we didn’t have smartphones. While the grown-ups napped under sluggish fans, and the entire city seemed to doze in the heat, I would read a storybook and wait for the clock to inch towards tea time. B for boredom might very well have been high up in my summer dictionary.

The stories about summers are usually stories about summer heat. The early colonial settlers chafed at the tropical summers of Calcutta. In 1833, a Boston businessman Frederic Tudor sent a ship with 180 tonnes of ice to Calcutta from New England. That caused a sensation. An 1836 issue of Mechanics’ Magazine detailed all the techniques needed to transport the ice such great distances—ice holds made with planks, insulated with dry refuse bark from tanners’ pits and covered in hay. Until then all that was here was the dirty slush called Hooghly ice which could not be used in the memsahib’s gin and tonic at the Bengal Club.

Soon ice houses sprang up in cities like Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, built by public subscription on land granted by the government. In 1849, after drinking water cooled by ice, Colesworthy Grant, an English artist in India wrote to his mother in England, “I will not talk of nectar or elysium but I will say that if there be a luxury here, it is this—it is this!"

By the time my summers came around, that allure had faded. We took ice for granted. Summer was just something to be suffered. But looking back I realise that boredom was a gift. We had no choice but to slow down. That’s when I whiled away hot lazy afternoons building dolls’ houses, Asterix village models, making up stories and writing them down. None of them were worth much but in the end they taught me to dream. Our neighbour corralled all the homebound bored children together and made us put on a play. She wrote the parts and we acted the roles dressed in costumes patched together from our parents closets. We staged it on the landing of the house next door, the audience sat gallery style on the stairs, my aunt’s bedroom served as the greenroom.

It was all very makeshift but the real delight was in creating something from scratch for the sheer pleasure of creation. We were not trying to be entrepreneurs or to go viral. We were just trying to fill summer time. I realise now my summer dictionary would include time—summer’s unexpected gift. I thought it hung heavy. But it hung heavy like the mangoes on the tree outside and as filled with promise.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.

 

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