Summer Vacations

Finally people have got it right. Tisca Chopra was on TV the other day, promoting a program targeted for children. The first thing she said was “I miss my school days”. Before I could counter with my usual objection, she added “Not the school days, but the vacations actually.” That’s right. That is what we miss the most. The summer vacations that seemed to stretch for years, and yet always felt inadequate when they ended, and the winter vacations, which though short, provided the invaluable freedom of venturing outside at any time of the day. The vacations after the first term exams were a big disappointment, except for cousins from the East, who benefited from the fortnight long Durga Puja holidays.

If the idea of summer vacations was applicable throughout life, then at this time, I would have been resting in my home, sipping a chilled glass of ‘Panna’. I still do find children coming out of their homes in droves by five in the evening (by when it is still quite hot by adult standards), and proceeding to play in the sports area. Sadly, the quaint games of ‘Oonch neech’ and ‘Thallam thalli’ seem to be dead now (the latter being my favourite). But when I think of it, these were our last resort, when we ran short of the quorum required for a cricket or football match, with the girls coming to our rescue. The girls were masters in these fabricated-at-home games, and usually came up with lesser known rules when they ended up on the losing side. We had our revenge when we promptly abandoned them as soon as we had enough numbers to start a cricket match. The other threat to cricket came from boys who owned the cricket bat, and they generally ended up batting twice or thrice, depending on how hard they could push the bargain. The threat was even greater when these blue-eyed boys ended up in the team of a habitual ‘cheater-cock’, and assumed gigantic proportions when such a team ended up batting first. In the latter case, the match rested on a heap of gunpowder, and served as an early lesson in Gandhian thought for us – to withstand the harshest of behaviour with a smile. What surprises me is that we never had enough money to own more than one bat among the ten-odd boys who were regular contenders for cricket. As a result, the lone bat used to be treated something like a much-awaited male child in a family of landowners.

The other thing that surprises me is that we used to venture out into the sun when the mercury was well over forty, and there was never a case of dehydration reported from our fraternity, as far as I can recall. What is more surprising is that despite filling ourselves up from the ramshackle water tank, nobody ever fell ill. On another thought, I do not think contaminated water can put people down who have been bred on ‘chuski’ topped with bright-coloured syrup that looks like radioactive waste. The most dreaded disease was malaria, and if you caught it at the beginning of the vacations, you could bid the rest of the period goodbye. By the time you were healthy enough to run in a field, you found yourselves strapped with the school bag. Luckily, the north Indian summer roasted most of the mosquitoes by June.

Fortunately, during our childhood, the DD people were sufficiently lazy and Rupert Murdoch was busy in other corners of the world. The only afternoon TV show that I remember was Spiderman, and probably “Hum Chaar” on Saturday. I will write more about it some other day.