Dear Reader,

Summer isn’t what it used to be. Sitting at my desk, with a list of jobs on the whiteboard before me, I miss the summer holidays of my youth, days when everything slowed to a stillness.

Days when we sprawl on our childhood beds with stacks of Enid Blytons. Above us the slow whir of the overhead ceiling fan. Then there is no fan at all - these are hours of ‘load shedding’ - we are in Jamshedpur where the Damodar Valley Corporation cuts electricity for four hours every day. In these power cuts of summer we fashion little fans from newspapers to cool ourselves down. In the soporific heat, books become even more of a refuge, transporting us to cooler climes, to the Famous Five on a boat to Kiran Island, to Claudine at St. Clairs.

Later in the evening the skies darken and we run outside into the garden to collect raw mangoes that fall off the trees. My mother cooks these - from the kitchen we hear the pressure cooker whistles and the smell of raw mango fills the air - we watch her peel back the raw green skin of the boiled mango - pouring the pale golden pulp into a tall glass jar, mixing in sugar and rock salt and roasted cummin to make aam panna. My mother adds ice cubes and mint leaves and we have a summer drink we gulp so deep, it fills our insides with sweet and tart and a deliciously cool feeling.

Now summer is a truce between duty and desire. The bougainvilleas still explode in riots of fuchsia, the........

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