Fiction: London-born Sukanya returns to her ancestral Meerut home, where belonging comes at a price

Shiladitya’s daughter arrived in the world on a freezing night in London. Freezing nights in London were not something he was overtly fond of.

“People appreciate winter when they have enjoyed a full run of summer,” he would often say to the other homesick Indians in his neighbourhood at their monthly get-togethers. Dull evenings overloaded with Jameson whiskey and masala peanuts; everyone looking to get drunk quickly so that they could begin to forget and remember. “How can we look forward to winter here when it’s not been hot enough?”

How indeed! Before a chilly dusk could fall early, with an indefinable, smoky mist in the air, before they could gather around a small fire to eat moongphalis, making a veritable mound of brown shells at their feet, before they could warm their feet beneath the razai listening to Tai’s stories about deadly chudails and covetous dayans, before they could rub their hands together to tease out some warmth, before all of this, something else had to come first: an endless summer.

A summer which would come blazing with unrelenting, oppressive heat, hot gusts of loo winds, power cuts, and scorched earth, but also gujhiyas, gulaal and thandai at Holi, the mango journey from Dussehri...

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