Summer Heat

The air is still – so very still. I can feel its weight on my bare shoulders as I sit to write. My wayward tresses are tied into a knot and set atop my head so that they don’t bother me in this heat. My arms are bare as well in deference to the rising temperature. I sip water from my glass every few minutes to stave off the dryness in my throat. The blades of the fan can barely pierce the thick miasma of heat that envelops the room. I look out the full length windows at the wayward pumpkin creeper sprawled on the grass. I look at the tiny and all too scarce mangoes on my mango tree. I look at the grape vine which tries to grow year after year but manages only a few spurts before losing all ambition. I see the ginger cat and the striped gray one and the mottled black one in various poses of relaxation on my cane chairs and even on the tiles of the porch. They are not my cats. But they do seem to like my house.

The plants and my tree look fresh in their green attire. Even the cats who should technically feel worse than I do, look quite comfortable in this stifling heat. They simply stretch out a bit more, open their mouths and drowse off in endless sleep. I envy them sorely as I recall my failed attempt at a nap earlier this afternoon. How do they do it I wonder.

The heat seems more oppressive because there is a promise of rain somewhere in the distance in both space and time. It is always thus before the expected relief of a few hours of coolness. Such is life as well after all. It is usually just before a breakthrough or the first sighting of success that things seem the darkest and the most difficult. The tough part is hanging on, waiting in hope that the heaviness will ease. Most people,I suppose, give up just before things get better. How would they know that if they had held on just a little while longer that things would indeed become better?

The heat will get worse as the summer starts in earnest but just when we complain the loudest, the weather will turn and the rain will come in to cool the evenings and nights. Here in Bangalore we see rains mostly in the evenings. The rains are more civilized somehow with their polite pattering and sometimes slightly louder drumming. Back home in Kerala, the rain is a mad passion inciting in watchers the desire to revel in life, in lust, in creative productivity of the highest order. The rains are never tame in Kerala.

I have to get back to work and making dinner soon enough. The heat has made me a dull, lethargic and rather lazy creature. For now, I sit right under the fan whose sounds are more soothing than its actions. I type away, my mind on auto pilot as I steal glances at the lawns just a few feet away so I too can feel as cool as the pumpkin plant with its bright yellow trumpet flowers resting on the just-watered grass. Even the heat has its pleasures after all…