A vacation but no breaks

The concept of spending a day, or three, just reading, would suggest unusually nerdish behaviour

Heat brings with it a kind of hush, a somnolence that puts to mind lazy afternoons spent sucking mangoes chilled in buckets filled with ice-water, devouring books borrowed from libraries and exchanged with the neighbours, swatting houseflies, waiting for the endless days to turn into the welcome relief of nights. We flew kites from terraces and played with marbles on the streets. Holidays meant going “home” to the grandparents, which in our case happened to be in Rajasthan where we watched furious sandstorms build up every evening, and where sleeping on the roof offered respite from interiors baked by the