Pnyin - Feeling hot and cold about beating back the heat in Beijing

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ENTERTAINMENT / Hot Pot Column






Feeling hot and cold about beating back the heat in Beijing


By Usha Sankar (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-07-25 14:45



It's been three years in Beijing now, but one thing that I am yet to get
used to is the winter. While all my friends can't help gushing excitedly
at the first sleet of every season, I plunge into deep depression. What's
so beautiful about a striking landscaped being clothed in sepulchral
white and sunrays struggling to break through gloomy skies, and dark,
dark mornings and even darker evenings, I wonder.

Now, it's summer; ah! That is a different thing altogether. Just look at
Beijing now - at 5 am, life-affirming sunshine blazes nice and bright,
putting a springy step in my stride as I draw back the curtains.
Everywhere I look, there is life - workers are up early and laboring at
the construction site near my villa compound, early morning joggers are
running and cleaners are toiling on the streets. Doors and windows are
thrown open, neighbors become visible and children are everywhere. The
energy in the air is infectious.

But I suspect my partiality for Beijing summers is rooted in another,
deeper memory.

Beijing's summers take me back to the idyllic days of my childhood in
hot, dry New Delhi. The city had its own "dog days" in the month of May
when temperatures routinely hit 40 C. To walk the streets of Delhi in May
or June in midday was to walk through a ghost town. Not a soul could be
found on the streets. The city's dispossessed would take over the roads
to catch 40 winks under the leafy shade of a neem, banyan or mango tree.
Those were times of roadside "ice-cold" water and sugarcane-juice vendors.

At home, we would spend the afternoons wetting the thick bamboo curtains
of our colonial-era government bungalow to cool the rooms as they flapped
in the gentle breeze. Cool water came not from refrigerators, but from
short- or long-necked earthen pots.

Every morning, mom would prepare a big vessel of thinned, home-made
yoghurt garnished with a dash of coriander leaves, lime and crushed cumin
seeds - a sure thirst-buster. Throughout the day, we would dip into this
or gorge on platefuls of delicious, succulent mangoes - the undisputed
king of fruits.

As the temperatures soared and heat radiated off the concrete walls of
the house, my sisters and I would grab a pillow each and lie down on the
cool, polished stone floors, listening to old Hindi film songs or the
cricket commentary on my parents' cackling old radio, lopping off sticks
of tender cucumber, plucked fresh from our garden and stuffed with a
paste of salt and spices.

But as the sun went down, Delhi came alive. People cooped in all day
would spill out into the streets, taking walks along the broad avenues in
front of India Gate and Parliament House or strolling through the many
gardens that dot Lutyens' Delhi. In my railway colony house, charpoys -
made of hemp and woven on to a wooden frame - would get dragged out onto
washed-down open terraces for a chat in the cool air with our neighbors.
We children would play cricket and badminton, water the gardens and chase
the house lizards.

And then it would be time to head indoors, lie down under a creaking
ceiling fan and fall into a deep sleep.

(China Daily 07/25/2007 page20)























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