The First Hot Summer

It was the warm summer of 1988.

It was a hot June. A swelteringly hot June. Cool breezes were rare. The rains had a month to go before they could come tap-tapping on the windows.

The red dust from the iron ore mines settled around us all like a burning gaze. The crackling red haze sucked the chlorophyll from leaves and turned them into rust. White was a forbidden colour: it took hard labour to wash the blood illusion from hardy clothes and hardier knees.

The heat drove all souls inside. Heatstrokes were the new gossip of the day. People conversed everywhere about carrying onions to work, of beginning work at 6am and being home long before noon to escape the punishing sun. Housewives cribbed about losing precious space to their early-home husbands.

And us?

For four inquisitive curious 10-year-olds, unscheduled weather meant unscheduled playing times. Oh yes, we could go for a trek into the neighbouring hills inhabited by the origines, lie hidden in foliage while being stalked by a curioser hungry cow, chased out by wild scared people using primitive wooden bows, wash the grime off at the broken water pipe and come home and blithely say “I was at Lija’s house…Aunty didn’t want us to leave in the heat.”

Oh yes, it was a summer of tasted adventures. And you know how it is – adventures are addictive. Get into one and you come out wanting to get into another as soon.

We did too. Our little foray into the abandoned mine at the edge of town was a slightly scarier affair than the mountain trek. Actually, calling it a mine is kind. It looked more like a miniature cave cut into the side of the chapped and chipped hillside. The mouth was taller than Roy’s uncle (he was rumoured to be 6 feet 3, though Shahid’s brother says he is just 6) and wide enough for 8 kids to walk in a line (we tested that, you know).

On a hot day, the cave was a salivating find. We had a cricket bat and a ball, a little scrabble box, a set of English comics about little known Indian superheroes clothed in snakeskin, cool-dude-leather pants and geeky bell-botts. So we behaved like good little children and spent two hours playing 5-over cricket matches, a five-minute crawling game of scrabble which soon spiralled into a raging fight about cheaters and then slumped down in the cool earth to read the comics. So now, what were we to do? Go into the cave, of course. We walked into the cave – past 20 feet, the light from the mouth gave out and our heartbeats spiked with the thrill of darkness. We kept up a pretence of the lingering scrabble fight and elbowed, jostled and pulled at each other to bite down on the rising fear of getting lost.

We had no light with us. The cave got progressively darker. We could feel the air getting mustier and the cave walls growing mossier as we went deeper. The ground was an odd mixture of mulch, pebbles, shallow holes and small crests. We held hands - Liza and Shahid, Roy and I – with Shahid spooking us with tales of lost children and mothers going insane and fathers turning into drunks interrupted only by Roy whining about being home late and being beaten to a pulp by his older brother. We were at the verge of a nervous breakdown with all this talk when Liza decided to play our principal Sister Olive and read out the riot act with me nodding and seconding her every word (This didn’t help much initially as the boys couldn’t see me so I had to say ‘Yes’ after every sentence from Liza and I realised then what a ‘yes man’ was).

We set out again with calmer hearts and minds resigned to having made a foolish mistake. All four of us linked hands and took shorter and shorter turns to walk on the left side. This person’s job was to navigate the cave by keeping in touch, literally, with the scraggly mossy rotting walls. After a lifetime of stumbling, falling followed each time with screams and rambled prayers, we seemed to have turned some corner and saw a distant light. That was the breaking point. We stood still. Someone screamed. Someone said something about holding hands and going slow. Then four pairs of feet were running towards the light.
There was some sliding, some panting, some jostling as we tried to maintain our balance in this headlong rush to reach the light first. Then someone fell, there was the pervading sound of screams - one moment I was flying on my legs and the other I was flying on my back. My mouth fell open and I could not breathe. My legs were hurting, my knees and elbows were wet and I closed my eyes. Some moments later, I saw the light rushing towards me and I shot out into its blinding arms. I slid and skidded to a stop on my side and I looked up to see bushes all around me. I heard the sound of a plop as if a rock had been thrown into water. I tried to right myself and the movement of my left foot dislodged a little rock and I was sliding again only to fall into water. Shallow water, thankfully.

I heard laughter. Blinking, I pushed my wet hair off my face and stared into the face of Roy. Roy was looking up and laughing as Liza followed us into the water. Shahid had managed to hold on to a bush and he managed to right himself up. All of us looked at each other and the relief of having come out of the cave was too much for us to take. We began laughing and taunting each other about how scared the other person was in the cave. Getting out of the water, we took stock of our injuries – there were numerous scratches all over our bodies and while it would be difficult to escape punishment altogether, we thought we could hide some of the major ones with the help of Liza’s older sister, who has often shown a softness towards our group.

Later, we realised that this shallow water body was the town river and we were lucky that it was summer or we could very well have been drowned that year.

I could tell you what we learned from this experience, except we didn’t. The next summer, we began the ritual of morning walks and came across an old elegant car with chipped paint standing alone in the nearby forest with blood splotches around its trunk and an empty sack lying nearby. I could also tell you about the fair stranger we met one powerless evening on our way back from our tuitions, who wanted us to show him the way to a part of town and then insisted that we walk him down this street and the next. Needless to say, we ran away on both occasions.