I don’t remember feeling the seasons passing when I was a child. There was a clear monsoon, and I might even have loved it were it not the herald of another year at school. I didn’t care much for school and I don’t think it cared much for me either. We lived in a state of mutual suspicion and this poisoned the rains. They came down with a low pH value. For the rest of it, we simply didn’t acknowledge the seasons. They did not matter.
My city is beginning to burn up again. We have had a good winter, one that actually meant snuggling rather than sweating. But it is now time for us to return to our normal condition: the endless breathlessness of summer. It is therefore time for the consolations of mangoes — although I have largely given up on the idea of the perfect mango. Perhaps these only existed in my childhood. Perhaps they only existed because I was a child. Perhaps they only existed because I remember them as perfect. Right now, every mango I eat is sour at the seed, however golden and beautiful it is to look at.
This is also the time of the jackfruit and the jamun. The jackfruit being profligate with its produce has remained pretty much the same price each year. The jamun however has become more expensive than chicken. In my youth, it was the fruit of childhood, things we bought at the school gate and ate with salt. In Goa, the pigs got them because there were just too many and no one could be bothered.
I think it has something to do with the diabetes epidemic we are facing and the belief that jamun can do something about your blood sugar which has made them so expensive now.
A feast of colours
There are also the flowers. The city is awash in colour. Outside a bookshop, I am arrested by a wash of mauve flowers, of such a faded romantic hue that each one carried the charge of what-might-have-been. The trees of Shivaji Park, around which I walk, spatter the ground with gold coins, and even when they are ground underfoot, there is something about their yellow which suggests unvanquished optimism. When I lift up my eyes to Malabar Hill from which flows much political strength in this city, it is flaming with red. I take this as a happy augury and then I laugh at myself.
It is also election time in the city and once again, I marvel at how much effort it takes to get the machinery up and going. Thousands of polling officers have to be trained on new machines. On the morning of the election, they rose betimes because they had to get to the booths at 5 a.m., well before voting started at 7, in order to conduct a mock poll and make sure everything was ready for us to make our wishes known to the political parties of the country.
Gulmohar flowers in bloom near the Rajabai Clock Tower in Mumbai at the height of summer.
Another country
Walking through the early morning, there’s another city and almost another country at work. There’s the young man who seems to have fallen where he stood, so complete is his fatigue and so complete his surrender to the cure of sleep.
There’s the old couple making garlands near a temple, talking at four in the morning in a low mumble, their voices curiously alike because his pitch has climbed the scale as his testosterone production dipped and hers has deepened over the years. What could they be talking about, after dozens of years of garland-making in the cool of the morning? Is summer for them a kinder time than rising when it is wet and their roof has been leaking, or rising into the cold of the morning? (Yes, yes, the subtropical city is never cold in the way temperate cities can be but when you are old and the blood is thinner, cold is a matter of what you can bear.)
There’s a young man, cross-legged, who is folding supplements into newspapers, bringing you your daily updates. Soon it will be time for tea.
Eternal cycle
The seasons change, we would once say, and what we meant was that political regimes and voting patterns were volatile but there was something about the way that the earth turned its face to and away from the sun which was eternal. The earth is still doing that, turning and turning upon its gyre, but there seems to be something different now. Something that suggests we might need another metaphor. Or could it be that I’ve been binging on David Attenborough’s Our Planet on Netflix?
The thing about the past is that you were once part of it. Your responses to it are therefore the responses of a younger person. I look at old diaries now and am surprised at the amount of emotional energy I could expend on people I barely remember now. The thing about emotion is that it is in the now. It is difficult to port yourself into the future and say, ‘This will be the mango of memory, this will be the time which I will remember with nostalgia.’
The thing about our now is that it is too powerful, too immediate, too relentless. The future is too far away for us to know if it will work or not.
The author tries to think and write and translate in the cacophony of Mumbai.
