by Srinivas S
In this essay, Srinivas explores his relationship with summer. Though the relationship has been a long one, going back to his childhood, it has changed as he has grown older, and it has become strained, as he has accumulated experiences of summers close to and far away from home.
Summer and I have had a long, varied and not-always-straightforward relationship. For starters, it has always been incredibly sunny in most places where my life has pitched its tent – Madras, Bombay, Hyderabad, Hong Kong and Kumbakkonam – while I am the brooding poet with an eternal winter at heart. If you are thinking of opposites attracting already, now might be the time to think again, for it is not that simple.
I love the spirit of summer, the hopes it stands for and the dreams it filters into daylight, but not so much – not anymore anyway – the everyday sunshine of it. For a long time, I loved both, at least in principle. If I saw the cloudless cerulean of summer afternoons as the colour of optimism that my life needed, the colour-melting humidity on the ground made me believe that I was taking on forces stronger than myself – and coming out their equal more often than not.
Throughout my childhood, the simple opulence of the blue sky and the sweat that dampened many of my light-coloured shirts came together in cricket matches, which I played in early years with cousins, then with boys in my neighbourhood, and then with friends from school. As my playing companions changed and the summers became hotter, the games became more competitive and life more complicated. Sport, which was an integral part of my summers, had changed from being a breezy pastime and an opportunity for making friends to a way to get even for perceived slights from elsewhere; an avenue through which obscure, summer-festered angers that had long remained yoked to ‘good manners’ could be unleashed on all-comers.
When life flowed into college from school, cricket took a backseat, while summer and sunshine continued to remain at the forefront. Almost every day, after five light hours at college, I enjoyed – or told myself to enjoy – long walks in the 2 p.m. Chennai sun, from the Saidapet station to the bus stand. The attritional enjoyment of those walks was complemented by new friendships and the badinage they entailed at college, and by the edification provided by English literature. The thrill of the impending twenties also made the scorching sunshine seem like a boldface announcement of how good life was!
Over to Hyderabad, and the summers became shorter and drier. Without the humidity of Chennai, without the cricket of my childhood years, without the friends from college, and without the simple comforts of home, though, I lost something of my essential connect with the season. The thought that the Marina Beach was now a twelve-hour, rather than a one-hour, journey away made summer even worse. Hyderabad would become one of my favourite cities soon, but not before it had killed my appetite to fence with sunshine for good. After all, it was there that I met, for the first time in life, a winter which was longer than a week and which whispered to me lazily through temperatures below fifteen degrees. I also fell in love with the city’s misty November nine o’ clocks, for I could feel in their embrace something of the comfortable pessimism that had taken root in my own heart.
One summer in Mumbai briefly brought the Chennai humidity back, but without the attendant fun of cricket matches, or the attendant illusion of working hard. Four summers in Hong Kong brought back eight months of Chennai-like sunshine, but weakened by the frosted windows of air-conditioned buses and offices, through which I breathed it, almost absent-mindedly. I tried to find something of my former resilience in the former, and something of my former contentment in the latter – but in vain. The tide had turned, slowly but surely, and summer and I couldn’t go back to being how we had been, however we had been.
Kumbakkonam, that quintessentially busy small town, helped repair the relationship somewhat. Often on orange evenings, while walking its anachronistic streets, I heard in the breeze from the Kaveri tales of despair that became stories of reconciliation, as I tried to square the blessings that life’s summers had given me with the memories of all that they had taken away. Three fine gentlemen whom I met in Kumbakkonam, who are among my best friends today, and who embody the best aspects of sunshine – constancy and hope – in my view, have helped me evaluate my relationship with summer with an open mind: like everything else, it has changed, and it will continue to change.
Back in Chennai now after more than a decade elsewhere, my mind is teaching itself to read optimism (again) in the clear skies of summer, even as my body and heart fight against the middle-aged exhaustion elicited by the Chennai sunshine that sears through the shut, half-shut and open windows of my college bus, early in the morning and late in the evening. The searing invasion reminds me in no uncertain terms that I am back home after a long hiatus, while the concrete-laden, humid silence that gathers around my house on starlit nights suggests that it and I should spend more time with each other, after all the summers apart.
A theoretical linguist by training and an English teacher by accident, Srinivas S lives in Chennai, India, where he divides his free time between sleeping, watching films and scribbling grey verses. Although he reads or writes essays rarely, he likes the genre because he feels it allows language to be relatively free, while holding it accountable for the freedom.
