In my head, summer isn’t a season. It’s another word for holiday. A word that triggers thoughts of eating mangoes and lychees, of ice apples (targola) and love apples (jaam), and journeys and cousins. It’s funny which childhood memories fade and which ones eventually stick with you. We were in Igatpuri one summer and my recollection of that time is of eating lots of mangoes. My cousin Shiraz and I would take our share of post-lunch mangoes into the compound of the bungalow, where we ensured there wasn’t a drop of mango juice or pulp wasted. The skin would be scraped clean with our teeth, the seed sucked dry. Every day we secretly buried these seeds in a corner of the garden, and religiously watered the spot in the fervent hope that a tree would spring forth before the summer was up. We talked of how, once we had our own tree, we would eat mangoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and if the adults wanted any, they would have to ask for our permission.

Every evening we walked to the market where a parent would buy us goti-soda, precursor to today’s bottled drinks. Goti soda came in the most interesting bottles, sealed with a glass marble. I don’t recall enjoying raspberry-red soda much, but my cousin and I shared one every summer day, because we loved the way the Parsi owner at the counter popped the marble to break the seal, before pouring the drink.

I probably spent two weeks of two summers in Bangalore, but I recall them as some of my favourite breaks. I have fond memories of cycling around the city with my cousin Jayshree. We would roam from Malleswaram to Sankey Tank, Brigade Road, Commercial Street, M.G. Road, occasionally stopping at the bookstore Gangaram’s, though we rarely had money to spend. When I visited Bangalore a few years ago, there were other entities with the same street names, all completely unrecognisable and definitely impossible to cycle on. In my mind’s eye that Bangalore will always be a different place from the city that exists today.

I have another summertime memory that’s a bit strange. I think I was seven, it was the summer holidays, and my family had house guests from overseas. Which meant that during their visit, us kids would give up our room. I don’t remember ever minding that, but this time I felt the reward was especially worth being displaced for. The visitors who were from the U.S. had brought sliced American cheese (the orange variety) and Silly Putty as gifts. This was the late 1970s; I tasted sliced cheese for the first time. I was in heaven. And the Silly Putty, neither solid nor liquid, was a gooey, bouncy, sticky dough-like substance, a shade of dirty grey-pink. We spent hours with it. It could be pressed on newspaper to lift the ink and maybe I loved it even more because it irritated the adults. When the guests left, the cheese ran out, and the Silly Putty disappeared in the way kids’ toys seem to vanish into thin air. I recall spending the rest of the summer dreaming of going to America—the land where I would not have to ration my cheese slices and where my Silly Putty could be replaced with a new one. ♦

This piece was written as an editorial in National Geographic Traveller India and appeared in the March 2013 print edition of the magazine. 

Top Photo by Niloufer Venkatraman.