Summer in Hyderabad was synonymous with mangoes. Mango featured in our every meal. The thought of raw mango dal mixed with piping hot rice and generous portion of home-made ghee sends me to the edge of heaven as I type. If it wasn't the dal, there always was the mango pickle, freshly made at home that season. Regardless of what the main course was, there always were the sweet mangoes for dessert. I personally always preferred the banginpally kind that can be sliced and eaten, never liked dealing with the dripping cheraku rasaalu (the kind we squeeze juice out of). I confess I was a very small minority with my mango preferences.
Summer evenings invariably involved plucking jasmines. We had the extremely fragrant, double-layered, Arabian Jasmine bush in our front yard, and it yielded a fair number of flowers each day. But they were never enough for me, especially when the neighbor's single-layered version crept over the fence and into our territory, enticing me. The thrill of leaning over our fence wall and plucking all of their jasmines, even beyond the ones that were technically on our side, was just too much for me to resist. I was an expert at stringing the jasmines together- I took pride in weaving them as close to each other as possible, which is an art in itself if you ask me. We would keep the strands covered in wet cloth overnight and wake up to the smell of the beautiful blooms the next morning.
Summer in Hyderabad also meant an extreme water shortage. Our home had no running water at the time. We'd get municipal water supply every other day from a tap, a dozen stairs down from our front door, for about two hours at best. During those precious hours, our first order of business was to fill the three large stainless steel pots that we'd park in the kitchen- those served all drinking and cooking needs for two days. Any water we got beyond that was hand carried in buckets, up the stairs, into a large outdoor tank. This was the water we used for dishes, laundry,and restroom. My parents' summer mood was heavily dependent on the water levels in the kitchen pots and the outdoor tank.
On days we had good water supply, the maid would work as normal, the clothes got washed and dried, and we would even have enough water to fill the air cooler. We'd all shower and shampoo our hair when we felt like, even making the shampooing process elaborate with boiled soapnut juice. We would make Rasna (Cool-aid type mixture) in the afternoons. We would try our luck for some ice cubes from our next door neighbor's fridge if we felt especially adventurous. Mom would occasionally let me go to the store and buy ice cold Thums Up or Maaza (sodas), on days when I helped her with dishes, which was very often, or when I worked extra hard on my math for next grade, which I liked doing anyway- so it wasn't that hard to impress mom, :).
On the other hand, one of the first things we did on bad water days was to ditch the maid. Mom always felt that the maid used up too much water for the dishes and clothes. The drained water from the clothes went towards watering the window coverings made of fragrant, highly water-absorbing tree roots, that cooled the air a bit. Whole family had to shower on a budget- one large bucket full of water for all four of us. In especially dire situations, we had to take the kitchen pots, go down the hill to some friends' homes with better water supply, and fetch drinking water up the hill. The local municipal corporation would order water tankers on days when the water supply does not happen as promised. The utter chaos and the drama that ensued at the water tanker will have to wait for its own blog post- but getting out of the packed tanker crowds with a bucket full of water was akin to winning a lottery.
Those probably sound like difficult times now that I penned them, but they oddly weren't. Water or no water, days went on. We survived, somehow. Life was simple. Those experiences made me resilient. Those memories are the reason for my huge grin, as I sit in my air-conditioned house here, with 3x the SFT and 3x the number of restrooms than we had growing up, all with running water. Nostalgia is in the jasmines I smell, and the sweet mangoes I taste, when I close my eyes and melt into hot Hyderabad summers.
Nostalgia: https://youtu.be/vUwCJdz9ae0
This song, though only a couple of years old, somehow tugs my heart and takes me back to my childhood.
No comments:
Post a Comment