Summer love, it was a different kind of feeling

Sometime in the first week of our class 9 summer vacation, my friend Karan made an important discovery. “If we go to Siri Fort after ten, it’s only five bucks. But we have to get out of there by evening. If they catch us after four-thirty they’ll charge twenty five rupees.” This struck us as a pretty fair deal.

Thus began, for our little band, a summer love that lasted even when we could afford the full fee, until marriage and middle age approached, until finally it left us, the spirit to run around without complication or narcissistic purpose. What’s the most reliable signal of adulthood? Grey hair? Bad back? When play turns into exercise – racquets and bats replaced by routines and Fitbits – you are no longer young. If I am idling through Instagram now my eye stops not at pictures of friends in faraway places but at the ads for yoga gear. They make it in California and sell it at ten thousand rupees and inspire unrequited lust. On a bus to Mysore many years ago, I watched, on a tiny TV screen suspended to the ceiling, a ten-year-old boy wearing only a saffron langot assume a series of scarcely credible contortions and positions. How he would laugh at our export-import yoga.

But I digress. Back at Siri Fort, what explained this neat reduction in price, this lowering of the drawbridge? Try playing a three-setter directly under a forty six centigrade Delhi sun. You have to be mad or thirteen to attempt it. It certainly didn’t bother us. Every day of the frying pan summer we would gather at our temple, this sprawling sports complex built by Rajiv Gandhi for the Asian Games and almost immediately colonised by Delhi’s bureaucrats and politicians, who would arrive for their evening walks and golf swings on the floodlit driving range just as we “temporary members” were chased out. We scorned these schmucks, with unstinted access to the best sporting facilities in the city, who chose instead to while away their day in air conditioned offices in South and North Block.

The basketball court was the first port of call, built, conveniently, just beside the sweeping main entrance. By the time we’d played a half-court game or two a worker would notice us and wander out with a pink receipt pad, prompting at least one of our group—whoever was most broke that day—to sprint off in another direction. The man would give half-hearted chase, but no forty year old propelled only by a DDA wage was catching us. We had fear on our side. The fear of a clip on the side of the head. The fear of parting with the ten bucks we’d need in the canteen for the essential afternoon Pepsi.

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Next to the basketball court was a shooting range. None of us had anything beyond a passing interest in shooting, but we went here to get out of the sun, to claim respite on the row of red plastic bucket seats. We would dry ourselves under the fans (on days of power cuts, wide indignation) and literally cool our heels, watching the Serious Shooters with pirate-like guards for one eye and braces on their wrists fire tiny metal pellets from rifles and handguns that seemed like they’d stop a bull. Shooting was far too serene to hold us more than a few minutes. But on occasion it made us move very fast. Karan, aforementioned, once mistakenly triggered a pellet into my cousin Nishant’s thumb, setting him dancing across the concrete. My cousin still shows me the scar sometimes. He claims the wedge of tin remains lodged inside him.

That heat. That heat. The memory of which I could summon years later, on another continent, walking to class between giant snowdrifts. It made the top of your head and the soles of your feet feel precisely the same, no longer serving individual purpose, simply appendages in desperate need of dousing. If you were in the middle of a noon game of tennis and suddenly it felt as if your shoes were on fire, there’s a good chance they were. Sometimes you could smell the rubber of your soles smoulder.

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Often forgotten by the residents of the great and cruel city I grew up in is that Siri Fort is not only an arterial road winding along Gulmohar and Uday Parks and leading to Colonel Kebabz, Def-Col market, that the fort was an important feature of the second of the medieval Delhis, built in 1303 by Alaudin Khilji – he of Ranveer Singh fame – to defend the city folk against the Mongol horde. It is said to have this name, in fact, because Khilji built the fort’s foundations on the severed heads -- “sir” -- of Mongol soldiers. A gloriously macabre history underneath a stretched, soothing arbour of neem and pipal, chitvan and amaltas. How perfect for Delhi.

But we knew none of this. In fact we did not see the fort at all. We came to play, bearing racquets for tennis and squash and table tennis, because to play was to burn away the blood pumping madness of being a boy of fourteen. There were incredible glass-backed squash courts, better than you’d find in private clubs. Off to one side, next to a tiny roller rink, was an open hall with a mysterious dark pool that we weren’t allowed in – only full members, mind – where they conducted swimming classes for children. Day after roasting day as heat rolled around our brains and rose up our veins we plotted ways to jump in. But we never had the courage. At a journalist’s barsaati party years later, summer night, no electricity, sweating, buzzed, I was waxing eloquent about Siri Fort when I was informed that this pool was a notorious canyon of little kid pee.

Now some of this same gang from school have children who are five and six. Our cities have changed so much. Late in the nineties Delhi felt still safe enough that we could hack around on our own all day, a playground that stretched wide in every direction. We could cycle where we wanted, main roads or colonies. I spent many of my formative years living in Palam Vihar, in Gurgaon, so getting to Siri Fort was more than a challenge. Sometimes my mother would drop me on her way to work, but often I would sling my racquets either shoulder and begin a somewhat epic journey, pitstopping like Odysseus: walk to the end of my road; hitchhike on a passing uncle’s Bajaj Chetak down the straight shot that led into Bijwasan; Blueline that took me onto the four-lane National Highway, past the bronze Shiva statue that looked then so enormous set against flat fields of mustard, now neatly dwarfed by outlet showrooms for Puma and Diesel; another thumbed hike from Vasant Kunj (which would look and feel abandoned, apocalyptic, on a really hot day), hopefully with a Gurgaon-living officegoer, which meant air conditioning at least until Hauz Khas. Sometimes the last stretch in an auto, depending on the wallet situation, depending when the first game was tipping off.

I realise, after putting it down, that this is simply my equivalent of an ancient trope, the privileged-nineties version of “I cycled twenty kilometers to school through pouring rain and mud”. But it does feel like our cities have changed irrevocably. Now my friends’ children don’t go out to play, they make playdates with each other, at which their parents hover in the background like anxious ants, waiting to plunge in, protect. When my son is old enough no doubt I will behave exactly in this manner. You can’t do nothing about the march of time, someone wise once said. You can only fill your life with things you will remember, like baking summer days with your oldest friends, racing about a fort of severed heads.

Prayaag Akbar is the author of the award-winning novel Leila. He is a Senior Fellow of Krea University.