by Chandramohan Nair
With a few exceptions, Chandramohan Nair’s summer experiences have been stressful. He recounts some of them in this piece.
Trivandrum, June 1970
It was my first summer in Kerala after six years abroad.
The initial four months after returning had been stressful, as I got to grips with a completely different school curriculum, new classmates and a new city. I was relieved to get a two-month summer break before entering the tenth standard and knuckling down for the board examinations.
Trivandrum is all hills and dales. Our red-tiled house was located at the bottom of a steep slope and at one end of a large estate in which the only other habitation was that of our owner. The estate was full of typical Kerala trees – coconut, plantain, jackfruit, mango and papaya. At the other end of the estate one could see an expanse of paddy fields.
It was picture-postcard perfect.
Except that in summer you would be much better off admiring the postcard rather than actually being there. It was not so much the temperature as the humidity that sapped your energy. By noon the mugginess and the stillness in the air made for a suffocating combination. So every day, especially for someone like me with a poor tolerance to hot weather, it was a tussle between the vacation cheer and the mood of the mercury.
Our spacious veranda was the centre of our activities for the entire day. It had a red-oxide flooring which was cool to the touch. We would drag our large pedestal fan to one corner and operate it at full speed. After a lazy breakfast, my sisters, brother and I would pick our favourite spots and settle down with our reading for the day, largely made of comics and the perennial favourites – Agatha Christie, Alistair Maclean, Earl Stanley Gardner and P.G. Wodehouse. Sweet and salty lemonade and juicy watermelon slices were at hand to perk up flagging energy levels when the heat became unbearable.
Occasionally, we took a break from our fictional worlds and played a game of Monopoly. The feel of the paper money and the ownership of properties made one feel like a tycoon and created a virtual world of their own. After lunch it was either back to reading or taking a nap, sleeping on the inviting thazhapayas or pine mats.
There was some respite from the heat after dusk but the nights were uncomfortable and sleep came after much tossing and turning.
Trivandrum, May 1973
I had just completed my first-year engineering examinations and I had done abysmally.
It had been a depressing year. My inclination had been to pursue a course in Humanities but a tough employment environment made me opt for an engineering program. I realized very soon that I had made an injudicious choice when confronted by the uninspiring pedagogy and the soulless exactitude of my engineering subjects. It left me dispirited and vexed with my surroundings, with the summer weather becoming the prime target of my annoyance.
Our college was a dozen kilometres from town and the circuitous college bus route meant that the journey would take at least an hour. Classes would get over by 4 pm and the return journey in the cloying humidity would leave me drained and with a headache for the rest of the day. By the time of my examinations, I was in poor shape, mentally and physically, to write them with any confidence. While my theory papers were bad enough, my Surveying practical was a downright disaster.
My assignment was to measure the area of a plot using the traditional chain surveying method. This entailed demarcating the plot into triangles and taking measurements with the help of a sixty-foot chain and a few other accessories. What should have been a straightforward exercise acquired daunting proportions under the scorching May sun. After jotting down some initial values, I became disoriented and could not proceed further. The kind invigilator tried her best to get me back on track. But my mind remained blank and after some aimless pottering around, with chain in hand, I gave up on the exam.
I could expect, at best, marks in the single digits but there was no minimum cut-off for the practical and I remember praying that my aggregate score would see me through.
Vijayawada, June 1980
If a city ever deserved its sobriquet, it is Vijayawada. I had come to “Blazewada” mentally prepared for a scorcher but the extreme and unrelenting heat I experienced that summer was beyond anything I imagined. It was man and all living beings at the mercy of nature. My only thought each day was about survival.
Daytimes were just about manageable. At my bank branch, khus khus thatties— mats made of dried grass— were hung over all the windows in the banking hall and an attendant would periodically sprinkle water on them. The cool air that filtered through the mats exuded an earthy fragrance that had a soporific effect on the staff.
Evenings and nights were a challenge. Vijayawada is surrounded by hillocks which absorb the heat during daytime and radiate it back till late at night. I stayed in a one-room portion in a single-storey concrete house which seemed designed to replicate a furnace. I wondered how my owner’s family, especially his little children and aged father, endured being indoors all the time.
For the nights I had to resort to some desperate remedies. I would pour a few buckets of water, which would leave the room a couple of inches deep in water and then hang a wet bed sheet over my bed like a shamiana. A damp towel placed on my pillow completed the arrangement. As the air got sultry but cooler I would slowly slip into a stupor.
We also had a Sunday survival routine. In the morning, some of my colleagues and I would go to one of the few air-conditioned restaurants in the city appropriately named Eskimo. We would stretch our breakfast till it was time for the matinee show at any one of the air-conditioned theatres around. Which movie was running was immaterial; more precious were the few hours we could relax for or catch up on our sleep inside the air-conditioned hall.
The newspapers regularly reported casualties from heat strokes; it struck closer-by, sadly claiming the life of my owner’s father. They kept the body overnight, surrounded by huge blocks of ice, in the small common veranda, awaiting the arrival of the elder son. I thought it would be both insensitive and uncomfortable for me to remain in my room that night. But I was too exhausted to go around looking for a lodge and stayed back, sleeping through the night only dimly registering the wailing outside.
Trichy, July 2016
When my wife, Vidya, got a transfer to Kerala, I felt I had got a fresh lease of life.
We had moved to Trichy from Chennai four years back. I was told that Trichy had a dry and congenial climate which, along with its compact size, made it ideal for a retired life. Staying at home in sticky Chennai had not been a pleasant proposition for me and I looked forward to the move.
But Trichy turned out to be an unpleasant revelation. Instead of the steamy pressure cooker environment of Chennai, what I got was the dry heat of an oven – a case of going from the frying pan into the fire. Remarkably, I found that this weather persisted throughout the year, barring the few months between Deepavali and Pongal. Clearly my well-wishers had supplied me with information that was grievously out of date.
I had been struggling with a chronic health problem for some years and was in a poor condition to withstand any additional stress. I surrendered abjectly and spent most of my time indoors, indulging in desultory reading.
All the windows of our apartment were blocked by neighbouring buildings. Through the narrow gap between two such buildings, I could spot some shrubs and a piece of the sky. This was the rationed consumption of nature I made do with during most of my stay in Trichy, barring the winter months and the two summers, when I fled to the cooler climes of Kerala.
The lack of exposure to sun saw me developing a severe Vitamin D deficiency and symptoms of photosensitivity. The weather became an obsession. I bought a room thermometer and constantly monitored the temperature. My psychological threshold was 40 degrees Celsius. The moment this was breached—and there plenty of days when this happened—I would get demoralized. The only way to pick myself up was to resort to schadenfreude by scanning the newspaper charts or the AccuWeather website for cities experiencing similar or higher temperatures. In Tamil Nadu, I would draw succour from Madurai and Vellore, and of course there were plenty of places in Andhra Pradesh which made me feel better.
Thankfully, the transfer came when I sensed that my self-imposed house arrest was beginning to affect my mental health.
Kochi, March 2019
I write these memories on a stifling afternoon in Kochi with a heat-wave warning out for the state. I am lucky to be sitting in the comfort of an air-conditioned room – something no longer considered a luxury in Kerala.
Over the past fifty years, depending upon location, my constitution and disposition, I have seen summers that varied from being uncomfortable but tolerable to downright insufferable. My stay in Bangalore during the nineties, when the city still retained its soothing green cover along with an agreeable climate all year round, was the notable exception.
Summers in India are inherently an ordeal. Any fleeting nostalgia I have about past summers is really about the things that gave me relief, in small or large measure, from this ordeal – an unplanned excursion to Yercaud, summer days in Adilabad without power cuts, an unexpected spell of thundershowers in Nagpur, buying an air-cooler in Hyderabad to get some spray-soaked sleep or having a bath during a sweltering 46-hour sleeper-class journey from Mumbai to Trivandrum.
As I grow older and the summers become harsher, I know my woes will only increase. I hope to endure them with my usual stoic acceptance of adversity along with the hope of unexpected relief.
Moreover, here in God’s Own Country, there is the solace that when summers come, the rains are never far behind.
Chandramohan Nair has taken up writing after a career in the banking and technology sectors. He lives in Kochi, Kerala.
