As summer rolls in every year around here, one thing that never fails to happen in our household is the fond reminiscing on my part about childhood summers in southern India. While actively registering my kids of all their summer activities and camps, I ensure they know how awesome it was for me as a kid 🙂 Granted these probably are a lot of embellished memories given this was more than 3 decades ago (dating myself here!).
So I thought I’d formally document these memories for good here on my blog. That way, embellishments can be frozen and kept to a reasonable amount.. just kidding.
It was the late 1980s. I was old enough to remember but not old enough to remember them well 🙂
If you’ve spent any length of time in southern India, its no secret how summer comes rushing in unapologetically. There are no winters. Just hot, hotter and hottest versions of summer all year round. May through July can be extremely humid and hot even for the locals. But, that never really bothered the kids.
As soon as school is out, summer begins! My sister and I never went to day long/summer long camps. There were a few specific events we attended every year that spanned over a few days or utmost a week. The rest of the time was just free, relaxing summer time.
One such mandatory event that we did several years through childhood was Vacation Bible School. We were members at C.S.I. St. Paul’s Church in Chennai. They ran a VBS program every summer that lasted I think 3-5 days. Half day sessions. Lots of games, bible stories and of course the snacks! Ask any kid who attended VBS and they’d fondly remember the Juice and samosas. The drink was usually Rasna and the samosas were small, crispy and spicy hot! We used to call them ‘samsa’ as opposed to ‘samosa’. The differentiating factor between the two was that the ‘samsa’ was sparingly filled with an extremely spicy filling and fried to a crisp. The ‘samosa’ was generously filled with peas and potatoes and was larger and not crispy.
I tried my best to find a good representative picture on the internet:
I’m sure the samosa is the more familiar one typically but anyone who hasn’t tasted the samsa has truly missed out 🙂
Any way, coming back to the main topic, VBS week was a ton of fun. Life lessons, friends and a good time.
The rest of summer was marked by a few standard activities:
Mangoes:
Lots and lots of mangoes!
On the subject of mangoes, summer meant we tried out every variety of mango available to us and we religiously ate mangoes every day! Malgova, alfonso and bhanganapalli (the king of mangoes everybody!) are all varieties we loved to eat.
Also, our summer afternoons revolved around reading and watching.
Library Membership:
Unlike here in the US, membership to a book library is not free. You sign up for a fee and then you can enjoy unlimited access to all the BOOKS! As nerdy as that sounds, it was the best part of summer. My sister and I were/are avid readers and loved spending hours on end reading books. My sister was an extremely fast reader while I liked to go at a decent pace soaking in all the details. Enid Blyton and Carolyn Keene kept us occupied most summers in my childhood. We had to convince our dad to get the membership but that was part of the fun of summer. We went through the same motions every start of summer and then we’d walk over to the library on Tana Street in Purasawalkam, Chennai were we grew up. Tinkle comics, Enid Blyton books, Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys were some of our absolute favorites. We graduated to chapter books in subsequent years.
Video Library Membership:
When we were both teenagers, our parents allowed us to add on a video library membership to our summer routine. We would walk over to the book library and then also to the video library on Purasawalkam High Road to rent out all the movies (new and old and occasionally ‘camera print’ which was a pirated version of the newest movies in theatre at that time). All on VHS no less. That first summer, we collectively spent a few hundred hours (I’m sure!) watching marathon movies. I’ll make a list (not one of you asked 😀 but I’m super benevolent like that lol) of our favorites in another blog post so you can attempt to recreate our very entertaining childhood movie marathons. Anyway, we would get the movies in, setup our video player and start watching all afternoon long! We owned an ‘audio video head cleaner’ for those days where the VHS track would get stuck and not budge. My sister became an expert at using the cleaner – spray and tape and all! Fun times!
Here’s a picture of an video head cleaner in case you were wondering 🙂
And so our summers went. We sometimes visited our cousins in neighboring suburbs (Tambaram or Saidapet). A day trip and sometimes over the weekend. We had some memorable times then too. Learning to ride their adult size bikes, watching horror movies and needing someone to accompany us on our bathroom breaks afterwards was all part of summer fun.
We also tried to learn how to ride a bike in our home with our neighbor kids. We’d rent a bike for a rupee and some twenty kids all take turns within the hour of the rental. I hardly learnt a thing but it was still fun to run behind the others (as one of the younger kids in the group) laughing at the hilarity of blind leading the blind!
Sometimes, we’d buy orange popsicles from the small store on our street and just hang around in the sun until the end of the day. Doing absolutely nothing but exploring and learning by play was completely acceptable. It was also the most fun memories I vividly remember.
Hope you found this an entertaining read. I’d love to go back and visit Purasawalkam and explore my childhood spots to see how much they’ve changed in the last three decades.
To end on a yummy note, here’s a link to my onion samsa recipe. I give this a go on lazy Saturday afternoons or whenever I am reminded of those summer VBS days.
And you can find more stories with recipes (in that order) here: Schacklefree Blog
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