Morning Walks and peacock feathers

What do you do on a summer vacation or weekend morning?

No school or office, so what  is the need to wake up early. The charm of sleeping on a cozy bed for longer hours is too good perhaps to find out if anything else could possibly be happening in the morning. What could be more important?

I think me and my siblings were doing something certainly more important. We were busy making beautiful memories of the morning time that we spent together. Summer mornings or even weekend mornings were great time to wake up actually extra early like 5:30am and go for a morning walk mostly with our mother. We would all just go to walk from our house to several different places nearby in the campus. A favourite place was a 'forest' close to the school. Though it was full of trees it was perfectly possible to navigate around. So one of the favorite activities and charm in the morning was to navigate in that forest and look for peacock feathers. 

I had the opportunity to see a peacock in Pilani with my family on a fine summer morning walk!

Oh yes, there were peacocks and peahens and we totally coexisted with them.They would be in our gardens, dancing in our garden and all the courtship would follow that dance. They would dare to come closer when we offered food. They would not be even tad bit bothered about destroying our flower beds on a routine basis and we would run after them, if we saw them. They would not fly very easily but managed to get on some lower branches of tree and shout and call each other "Peyoooo, peeyooo..". They would do all of that but seldom leave their feathers, we had such a hard luck finding their feathers.

So the walks, that's where we would find feathers. Not sure, if people who don't live with peacocks know this but peacocks shed feathers in fall just like trees. So summer vaccation and then fall till winter set in we would go for walks in the morning and look for feathers, find feathers and compete as to who got more. Over a period of time we had a lot of feathers. Waking up early for morning walks was a wonderful feeilng by itself to be one with the nature and then added to that the charm of collecting peacock feathers so very rewarding.

What we did with those feathers eventually? When we had collected enough our mother made a peacock on a cloth canvas that decorated our living room for years. A peacock in our own living room with the feathers we contributed from a morning walk! Morning walks, peacock feathers, art and memories sewn together in a common thread!

Summer nights and coolers!

Our childhood was spent in a small dusty town somewhere in the middle of desert. The temperatures  in summer would soar up to 45 or may be even 47C that would be 115-120 Fahrenheit. In peak summer even mornings were warm. If we were to walk in the afternoon, not only it was blistering hot but the slippers would stick to the melting tar on the road. Occasionally we would have sand storms, sometimes outside brown and at times it was so sandy, so dark that we called it black storm (kali aandhi). All this could be reason for power outages and of course at times power outages had no reason or time spans. The heat felt even more as the entire campus would get deserted and all students from schools and colleges would leave for their homes. Empty town was certainly hotter. 

The temperatures would not even drop at night, so it was sort of a challenge to sleep. So that was the interesting part. We would sleep outside in a kind of patio in make shift beds. We made sure that we had sprayed some water on the ground, so it would get cooler locally. Then we would take a bath and sleep right away, while the body heat is still low. The only thing we had to cool us down was a table fan. And sometimes we had to run in the middle of the night to our beds, if it would thunderstorm or rain. Thinking of it now, it must have been all good, because I don't think we have bad feeling about it, anyways. It was just another life style.

Then came in technology in our small town not air conditioners but coolers. Air conditioners were out of question in homes and totally a luxury. The only place that had air conditioners were the computer labs in the institute. To walk on those labs barefoot was heaven. We would go there with mummy and papa who worked there. But coolers, were more affordable. A cooler was a device where you fill in water and a pump would use that water to spray mist filled cool air. 

As time passed and people in our town got more money, more and more coolers were installed. we still did not have any may be till I was 13-14 years or so. Cooler so as to say was a luxury which we did not need to get used to off. But then one day me and my brothers said "As such it is hot, but when we hear cooler sounds at night from the neighbour's home we feel even hotter". That's it! Our daily debates of "To have or not to have cooler" was over. Finally the cooler was brought, one , two , three...we finally had three coolers in house! Sleeping in those coolers is a wonderful memory which can not be recreated by our homes and offices that are centrally air conditioned throughout day and night.