The true holidays

Those were the days when true happiness could be found. And those days were the summer holidays. Yes, those were truly the lovely and carefree days, when you could do whatever you wanted without being seriously reprimanded by your elders.

I remember how the sun would beat on our verandah floor, while we sweated uncomfortably in our rooms in the intense heat, wishing that somehow the day end early and the night come bringing with it cool winds from the sea. Hours would elapse as we would wait for the summer afternoons to wane and the sweltering heat to loose itself in the endless and cloudless sky.

Very seldom we would borrow a cooler from someone and shut all the doors and windows of our house and switch the old and rusty thing on. It was surprising how that aged machine was able to cool our rooms so efficiently.

Ah, those summer holidays, those idle days spent loitering across the house, doing nothing, staring at the empty walls and walking barefoot on the cool stone floor. What would I not give to have them back…what would I not give to have just one day of those blissful summer holidays…

I remember how I would make a great fuss about doing homework and would only finish it till the last hour of the holidays. And would wake up next morning to go to school, all sleepy and puffed up from lack of sleep

One of the best memories of the summer includes eating mangoes during those hot afternoons after lunch.

We would all sit around a tablecloth spread on the floor, armed with a knife and spoon and ready to assault any mango that would come in our hands.

And they were delicious those mangos, so juicy and filled to the brim with a sweet richness that has no equal. They had a taste so intense and pure that it could dazzle you for hours. And one mango would just not be enough.

These mangoes would come in all shapes and sizes. Some would be very large and conspicuously yellow, their skin so soft and stainless that they looked almost perfect. Others would be small, green and tinted with orange and often yellow patches. They were like children mangoes, but tasted just as good.

It’s just not eating the mangoes that make them so special; it’s the way one eats them. For you see, one cannot simply pick up mango and start peeling off the skin with a knife, one has to let the mango juice drip from one’s hands and lick the palm, to let the sticky, juicy and sweet ‘rus’ (juice, as it is called in the native tongue) cream the fingers and the smear the mouth fully. And best of all, no one can eat just one fruit; the number of the mangoes consumed, must exceed the single figure. And this is one of the most crucial mango rules.

Mangoes, in southeastern Asia, are not just a fruit. They are an indication that summer has come; that the monsoons are not far off and best of all that the holidays have arrived.

And so…after the mango eating would finish, my sisters and I would sit in one corner and crack jokes at each other till out stomachs would begin to ache and we could no longer sit up right. While our brother would idly wander across the house, clad in just a torn blouse and sweaty pajamas. He had a persisting habit of doing that. No matter what we would say, he could not be persuaded to sit down in one place or in fact sit at all, which often gave him the impression of becoming wild with the endless heat. I remember making fun of his baggy and worn out clothes along with my sisters and sometimes with such zest and mirth that many a times he too would be compelled to join us.

Many lazy summers have passed since and the past has now irreversibly gone.

We can never see those days again, and never experience the joy of being blessed with such pure felicity and innocence.

I often think about the reality of time. It had previously never occurred to me that ‘time’ is the invention of man and not of God. It is a measure of the days we have spent, days that can never actually come back. Once gone, they can never return and have dissolved in something we term as the irretrievable “past”.


The irrevocable past, the indestructible past, the forever gone past… my past…


Just to let you know a small secret, it’s not the mangoes or the holidays that I truly miss, it’s the laughter I miss, the laughter of the sisters and brother who could never have enough of it.