Chennai Summers: A Refresher Course

There’s a large Corporation playground next door to us, about 200m x 100m. Now this can be a bit of a nuisance, because your elders are bound to muse from time to time that it’s probably there to be used for some exercise. After many little hints (including some rather direct references to my paunch at recent family get-togethers), I decided to give it a go. After all I was playing cricket in the nets not that long ago  (although admittedly that doesn’t involve much locomotion). But I forgot that this was summer in Chennai, a season whose full glory I had escaped for the past several years.

I managed one round around the ground, and there was a hammering in my chest. I walked the second round, and felt I might live after all. I jogged the third, wheezing and staggering home through the gate with my last breath. ‘I felt terribly out of shape,’ I told a friend later (if those IPL chaps can be interviewed after every run, why can’t I?). ‘That’s because you are,’ he replied helpfully. Very well. But I insist that the heat played its part.

It’s the time of year when the temperature crosses forty regularly, and the sun’s beating down in all seriousness by eight and positively hammering down by ten. Air conditioners huff and puff and drip water by the puddleful on the outside. Piles of yellow mangoes on the streets tempt you, but with all those reports you don’t know which of them have been ripened with the help of sulphur fumes, so you’re better off sticking to the green ones that are still on the trees. (There’s one such tree outside our third-floor apartment window. As kids we’d pick up the raw mangoes that fell off it and eat them with salt. By a stroke of genius, the compound wall had been built so that the trunk was wedged right in it, thereby providing us endless entertaining arguments with the neighbours, who insisted the tree was theirs. Mending Wall and all that, but no chance of any Frost in Chennai.)

Then there’s the load-shedding, which isn’t nearly as bad as it seems at first — provided it’s done at scheduled times. So those who are at home sit fanless, AC-less and listless from two to three in the afternoon. Those of us who have the good fortune to work by ourselves can read and write through the night. That way you can experience the coolest part of the day, between around four-thirty and five-thirty, as the sky begins to lighten, the crows begin to caw, and the coconut trees stand in the quiet that precedes the six o’ clock sound of water pumps and half-filled plastic buckets. It also has the added advantage of making you feel too tired and sleepy by dawn to consider going on that jog around the park. So you can stay awake just long enough to hear the start of the hundred and one cricket matches taking place inside it, pick up the newspaper and the milk packets from outside the door (assuming a wandering cat hasn’t torn the latter open), and go to sleep.

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