Summer is here. I squint my eyes when I look out at the sun hidden behind the bluish grey sky. I think twice before stepping out as the sun’s rays don’t seem kind. My thoughts go back to childhood summers, spent under the hot sun and I never once thought to complain. Two full months of holidays and the brightest spot of sun, but I was happy and thrilled about it. I don’t remember complaining about it like I do now. Maybe the sun wasn’t so harsh, I try to tell myself. Or maybe there were so many other things to be excited about that I barely noticed the blazing sun.

My childhood summer days were spent playing with kids in the colony. We had summer games; I think everyone played the same kind of games. I don’t know how the word spread without any kind of social media then.

Sometimes I walked to a friend’s house, and we exchanged books. We always took shortcuts that we had happily found when we were on our own mystery trail — like the Famous Five, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, who took over a part of our summer days. We liked being lost in the world of mystery and thrill.

We cooked up our own mystery stories too. Oh, and we loved ghost stories too. In fact, we loved them so much that at night after dinner, we kids would all gather outside, sit on a mat under the summer night sky and tell ghost stories. Some created fear in our minds, and some we laughed at.

Why do kids love ghost stories and mystery stories? Maybe because they allow their imagination to run wild. That makes sense. We had the wildest of imaginations. Nothing was impossible. And every kind of world existed there.

In the colony where I stayed, we all had a best friend too. Someone who would always end up being our partner when we needed to pair up for a game. Mine was S. We even cheated so that we could end up being partners, others always wondered how we did that, but we never let out our secrets. For secrets were what kept the friendship tight.

S and I liked talking a lot. We discussed everything under the sun. We thought we were wise and knew everything that there was to know. How naïve we were! Only now, when I look back, I know that naivety was beautiful and filled with hope.

We spoke about being adults too, what it entailed and the things that we wanted to do. Life was clear and uncomplicated in our heads. We had dreams and lots of them and every dream was possible. Impossible kind of didn’t exist in our tiny heads. I fulfilled some of my dreams, but she got only half a life to do so. Summer reminds me of her, and I feel that life was unfair to her, and I sometimes have a silent fight about it with the God I know.

Some summers were also spent in Kerala, a place that was our native land, a place where my parents belonged. That part was filled with lots of love from grandparents and cousins. And lots of good food too. There, I was in awe of everything – the happily green paddy fields, the naughty river flowing next to it, the mango trees that were filled with mangoes and ants, which I tried to climb unsuccessfully, the jackfruit trees filled with fruits and we were cautioned not to sit under, the different types of mulberries we would constantly munch on – everything was in abundance.

When I was in high school, I got a bicycle and then summer took a different turn. I found joy in cycling, I could explore more, I could explore faster than my legs could take me. I cycled every day, pushing my boundaries a little every day. How far could I go? A bit more maybe – I told myself every day. I explored the city on my own; my parents were oblivious to it. It was a beautiful age of no cell phones, no constant connectivity, no one watching. The only deadline I had was to return home before it turned dark. So, every time I saw that the sun had started changing its colours, I would turn back wherever I was and start cycling my way back home.

There was no GPS, so I would get lost too. But I would ask a friendly person on the road and always figure out my way back home. Those were truly carefree days.

I think that was the first time I tasted freedom. Freedom to be wherever I wanted; a bicycle that could take me anywhere I wanted to be. Freedom to see new sights, freedom to meet new people, freedom to know more. Now when I look back, I think that’s where my love for solo travel started. I enjoyed my own company, and I enjoyed knowing the world around me. It could be a crowded marketplace, it could be the lanes where there were second-hand bookstores, it could be a lane filled with beautiful old houses, it could be a lane where women posed in front of their houses, or it could be a lane filled with wise trees.

So, that was an impressionable summer for me, and it stayed with me forever. And it also unknowingly changed me in a way that would pave the path for a future that I wanted. Little did that naïve me know about it then. The seeds were sown.

I thank my bicycle for giving me that taste of freedom because if I hadn’t, then I think I would be a different person today. Those summer seeds are still growing — in the way I wander, in the way I wonder.