Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Lounge Sandip Roy 6 min Read 20 Apr 2025, 08:30 am IT The stories about summers are usually stories about summer heat. (Getty) Summary The bright spots were few and far between the summer months, but the unexpected gift of the hot season was the past week time that I was looking for fresh peas in my market in Kolkata. “Peas now?” The Vegetable Seller asked me with a surprise. ‘Peas are gone. It is now time for Potol (Parwal). This is the summer. ‘ I was disappointed. My recipe will have to do with frozen peas, which is not half as sweet as the fresh. But I wasn’t unhappy either. In a time when flowers and peppers and Potol or pointed Calebas are available all year, it’s good to feel that one season makes room for another. But Potol was the summer of summer while grew up. Two meals out of four a week swam Aloo-Potol Jhol, cubes in the pot and potatoes in walking brown sauce. On special evenings upgraded to a Dalna, a richer preparation with a little Garam Masala. There were hardly any other vegetables in the wilted summer market. The pair like a watery bottle cale bark and slimy okra were uninspiring. So people had to become as inventive as possible with Potol. The vegetables were hollowed out and filled with fish and turned into dolmas. Sometimes Potol was ground with a tip of shrimp in pasta. They were cut in poppy seed paste and suffocated or simply fried and served with Dal. Potol meant summer. Also read: Kolkata’s iconic trams role in combating climate change in her book Bengali Cooking: Seasons and festivals, food writer Chitrita Banerjee calls Potol ‘essential summer -eating’, saying that it is Ayurvedical certified as’ light and digestion, a healing for worms, fevers, fevers. The eyes of beautiful women were compared to halved Potol. But we would be sick of them quickly. When we went against Potol, we found Lauki or bottle boss. “It’s summer,” my mother admonishes us. “You must have cool vegetables.” After a few more rounds of protest, a handful of small shrimp for a few Lau Chingri were added to the bottle bark. Rabindranath Tagore had songs that welcomed the arrival of Baisakh, the first month of summer, but even he composed only about 16 songs for the summer compared to more than a hundred for the Monsons. The Bengali new year in April was celebrated with singing and dancing in Santiniketan, but I had little nostalgia for the summer. If I were to make an AZ of the summer, the bright spots would be little and far between definitely not enough to fill all 26 letters of the alphabet. And most of them would be mixed blessings at best. Air Condition: A luxurious, strictly rationed and very sought after to every mall it. Banians: A summer closet should always be wet by the time you get home. Cold water: Each fridge was filled with old bottles of Kisan pumpkin that turned into cold water bottles. Of course, there would be some benefits. Ice apples (or language hansh), which were painful to peel, but cool deliciously. Jamuns, purple black, lingering, but still strangely tempting when smeared with Kasundi musherd paste and sugar. K for Calboisakhi Norwestern storms that suddenly made the sky ominously dark and filled the air with the smell of fat drops of rain on the earthly litchis and mangoes, of course, the undisputed, mulmy kings of the season. But the joys of the summer would be eradicated by the alphabet of Summer Horrors, a litany of misery. The most important among them would be the load shed: power outages were the summer, often for hours. There was the hated prickly heat powder that mothers weakened their fidgety children liberally after baths. But nothing summarized the pleasure and dangers of summer like H for holidays. The summer vacation was what I was looking forward to. But summer holidays also became a sweat purgatory soon enough. Within one week I was bored. There was the tedium of holiday homework, but once it was done, there was nothing to do. Also read: The loss of sound in our noisy life The biggest complaint of the summer holidays was: “What will I do today?” My aunt from London sent me a DIY craft book with a title like what can I make today? There were step-by-step instructions to build all kinds of interesting things: Moon samples on a lunar landscape or dogs made from ice cream sticks and matches. I loved the book, but had cultural roadblocks. Many of the projects used objects such as pipe cleaners and the empty cylinders that once held toilet paper rolls. To my frustration, we did not have Bengali house in Kolkata. And my parents were not interested in buying them. “But my lunar landing vehicle needs two toilet paper cylinders,” I complained in vain. One year my sister and I built a dollhouse out of cardboard. We spent days making small pieces of furniture for each room. The dollhouse had proud of our window sill for a while. Over time, it moved to the top of the cupboard where it collected dust until it was finally discarded. Another year I pulled scenes out of the rhymes and fairy tales on curtains and my sister actually embroidered it. Those projects were essentially at a time when we did not have smartphones. While the grown -ups were beating among sluggish fans, and it seems the whole city is slumbering in the heat, I would read a storybook and wait for the bell to be in the direction of tea time. B for boredom was perhaps very good in my summer dictionary. The stories about summers are usually stories about summer heat. The early colonial settlers struggled to the tropical summers of Calcutta. In 1833, a Boston Frederic Tudor businessman sent a ship with 180 tonnes of ice to Calcutta from New England. This caused a sensation. An issue of 1836 of Mechanics magazine set out all the techniques needed to transport the ice so large distances – ice cream was made with boards, isolated with dry garbage bum from the pits of tanners and covered with hay. Until then, everything that was here was the dirty mucus called Hooghly Ice that could not be used in the Memsahib’s gin and tonic at the Bengal club. Soon, ice houses in cities such as Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, built by public subscription on land granted by the government. In 1849, after cooling off with ice, Colesworthy Grant, an English artist in India in England, wrote to his mother: ‘I will not speak of Nectar or Elysium, but I will say that if there is a luxury, that’s it – that’s it!’ When my summers arrived, the allure faded. We took ice for granted. Summer was just something to suffer. But when I look back, I realize that boredom was a gift. We had no choice but to delay. That’s when I left hot lazy afternoons to build dolls’ homes, Asterix Village models, make up stories and write down. None of them were worth a lot, but in the end they taught me to dream. Our neighbor has teamed up all the home -bound bored children and let us play. She wrote the parts and we acted the roles dressed in costumes that were picked from our parents’ closets. We performed it on the landing of the house next door, the audience Sat Gallery style on the stairs, my aunt’s bedroom served as the green room. It was all very seemingly, but the true joy was to create something from scratch for the pleasure of creation. We did not try to be entrepreneurs or to become viral. We just tried to fill the summer time. I realize now that my summer dictionary would include time – the unexpected gift of the summer. I thought it was heavy. But it hung heavily like the mangoes on the tree outside and so filled with promise. Cultural friction is a bi -weekly column on issues that we keep rubbing. Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio maser. He posts @sandipr. Also read: Good movies are meant to be seen on the big screen, catch all the business news, market news, news articles and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Features Mint Specials
The summer season has taught us to delay
