It is garmi chutti in Sukma. Our office is inside a residential area, the kind where families stay, where life spills onto the streets in the evenings. I used to notice them regularly: kids playing, laughing, throwing balls. Whenever someone would walk by, you would hear “Hey, didi aa rahi hai, ball mat pheko!” and the shuttlecock would hang mid-air for two whole minutes while I crossed. Small, quiet courtesy that made me smile every single time.
Sunday, 8am
One Sunday morning, five boys and two girls showed up at my door. Around 8, 9, 10 years old. One boy was pushing another. I asked what was going on. They held out a small handful of desi berries, asking “Didi, do you want to buy?” I stood there for a full fifteen seconds, just looking at them. I don’t know what was going through my head. And then I said yes. I gave them 10 rupees.
The next evening, Monday- they came back. This time with a leaf folded into a kattori, a little bowl, holding guava pieces. 10 rupees, they said. I gave it. And the sound that came out of those seven kids when they saw that ten rupee note? Pure achievement. Like they had cracked some great puzzle of the universe. They were already shouting plans, “Kal kuch laate hain tere liye, kharidna pakka!” I smiled and said yes.
“I was watching their happiness. Some feeling was rising in me, not sadness, not quite joy either. Something in between. Something that smelled like sunscreen and summer mud.”
And then it hit me. Childhood. My own. The garmi chhutti kind, the long, shapeless, glorious kind.
The kind where you woke up and the only plan was to find your friends. Where you would get so tanned that family would call you kauwa, crow because you were wandering like one, all summer, not coming home until 10:30 at night. Where nobody was tracking you on a phone. Where the street itself was your GPS.
Those days- Shouting a friend’s name from the road so they would come out. Sneaking into the terror aunty’s compound to rescue the ball that had sailed over her wall during throwball. Building little homes for the street cats and dogs out of cardboard and whatever we could find. Pumping the borewell to wash the ball, the cork, our muddy legs and hands. Noticing, genuinely noticing, why a leaf had a worm on it. Falling into the drainage ditch during kalla manna and getting up laughing.
We never went home to drink water during play. Because we knew the second we walked through that door, Mom would pull us in and we would never get back out. So we drank from whatever friend’s house was closest, gulped it down and ran. We shared one packet of biscuit between six people and nobody counted.
“When did we play last? Not a team-building game. Not a sport. Just play. When did we stop?”
I keep turning that question over. Nobody sent a notice. There was no last day we agreed on. We just… slowly stopped showing up. The streets stayed the same. The seasons came back every year. The summer got just as hot. But we didn’t go out anymore. We had things to do now, apparently.
And now here I am in Sukma. Watching seven kids treat a folded leaf like a tiffin box and 10 rupees like a trophy. And somewhere in my chest, something cracked open quietly.
They came with a leaf folded into a bowl, guava pieces inside, 10 rupees on their lips — and cracked open every summer I had forgotten about myself.
🍃 🫐 🪁 🌳
I thought of every friend I ran in those summers with. The ones who moved to the next district, the next state, the next life. The ones I haven’t spoken to in years but who live permanently in some corner of me, in the sound of a ball hitting concrete, in the smell of summer dust, in the memory of a specific shade of evening light when someone’s mom finally yelled loud enough that we all scattered home.
To all of them, wherever you are, thank you. For every scraped knee, every shared biscuit, every daring plan, every evening that stretched longer than it should have. I loved those days. I loved them with you.
And I hope one day, a folded leaf full of guava finds you too, and brings all of it rushing back.
💛 I love you all, my friends. Hoping one day you also remember me, like how these street kids in Sukma remembered to come back the next evening………
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