Summer vacations

I am travelling to Mumbai and Pune in the next week and I am feeling just like a small kid, who goes on a summer vacation to his/her grand mom’s place. Both my grand mom’s are awaiting my arrival and I will be also meeting my in-laws after many days. So I am looking forward to a partially good summer vacation (am working, am not on leave).

Mumbai is a hot and humid and sultry city, but it is also true that it is the liveliest city, I have ever seen.  I spent 23 years of my life in Mumbai, to be precise, in a small central suburb, called Dombivli. But my grandmother stays in central Mumbai and so I have grown up watching the beaches and the queen’s necklace and the hanging gardens.

As soon as the exams were over, I rushed to my aaji’s place and spent the entire summer vacation over there. She stayed in a chawl, where the toilets were outside the house and some 10 families shared it. She had Gujrathi neighbors and I was very close to the Joshi family. There were 3 kids in that family. Rashmi, the eldest, Deepa and Roshan was the youngest and the most mischievous. I was closer to Deepa and Roshan as we were almost of the same age. In the afternoons, we all gathered in my or their kitchen, prepared barf gola (snow ball) with different flavors such as kalakhatta, khus and what not. The month of May was a season of mangoes. So, mango milkshake also came naturally. There was a regular vendor who came to the chawl where my aaji stayed and after spending 2 good hours on the discussion of rates and quality etc., Joshi family and aaji settled for some dozen mangoes from him.  Aaji prepared panha (aam panna), ambyachi daaL (mango dal) from the raw, green mangoes and it tasted awesome. It was good for the summer heat and we enjoyed loads of it and Alphonso mangoes! What taste, what smell, what color, what sweetness those Ratnagiri Alphonso had!!! It was just incomparable with any other variety of mangos anywhere in the world. So after spending afternoons with mangoes and barf golas and lots of talking and gossiping, we went to the beach or garden in the evenings. We also paid a regular visit to the other scenic places in Mumbai as the hanging gardens, museum, zoo etc. But beach was always a favorite destination of one and all.

Having chaat (bhelpuri, sev puri, pani puri) on the beach was mandatory or else one couldn’t enjoy being on the beach. Building castles in the sand with lots of focus and joy and then destroying the same with our own hands and legs was our favorite past time too! The waters were just good to look at. I never went deep inside and also it was very dirty, not clean like in Alibaug or Konkan. The garden was just opposite to the beach and had a library and swings and other stuff to play with. So, sometimes we visited the library and most of the times, the beach. After coming home from the beach, tired and salty and sand all over us, after a nice bath, we all recited Ramraksha and Maruti stotra (hymns in Sanskrit depicting Lord Rama and his Hanuman) together. It felt so nice in the evening reciting those prayers amidst the fragrance of the incense sticks. Dinner was again replete with mangoes with a few other dishes which were obviously considered as side dish! No lunch or dinner was complete without having mangoes in the summer vacations. We never wondered about the calories and the weight problem. All we did was enjoy to the core, eating and playing was the agenda of the day, making merry, pulling each other’s legs made us laugh and that is the reason, those days are forever etched on my mind. The doors of the houses were always open just as their hearts and minds, we were always with the neighbors, watching movies, playing cards, shouting and laughing all the time. Oh, how much I miss those days!!

When I look today’s kids and their summer vacations, I feel pity for them. So many activity classes, skating, painting, karate, dancing keep them busy throughout the day. But where is the warmth and joy of being with the grandparents and listening to the stories and going to the garden by catching their hands? All that is lost, in fact there is no aajoL (grand mom’s place) left now to which the kids look forward to and get love and affection and also learn to share and care in the process. Flats and individualism has crept in so much nowadays, that we hardly know our neighbors now, leave alone our old and withered grandparents (if at all), who stay in some remote, inaccessible remote villages. The same place where we stayed once upon a time looks dirty now and sub-standard. How humans change!!

Just as the chawl system broke down, so has the joint family system and the kids are spending more time playing computer games and watching television instead of going to play and enjoy with other kids of their age. I am fortunate that I spent my childhood days with other children and my grandparents, who have had such a great influence on me and my attitude towards grandparents that I will always bank on those memories and try to keep them as fresh as possible by revisiting them time and again!