Water, no ice!

Water, no Ice!
The year was 2006, early April in Chennai. I was living my dream, or so I thought then. Born in a tiny town of Thrissur, Kerala, I had grown up in Muscat, Oman. The luxuries of having a car and an air conditioned apartment did nothing to alleviate my conservative Indian childhood in Muscat. The most “happening” event of my teen years back in Thrissur was witnessing the opening of the first ever mall in the district. Finally, there was a place to go hang out with friends, we cheered. No matter that you couldn’t afford the overpriced fried rice or even coffee at City Center!
I had high hopes when my first job took me to the capital city of my state, Trivandrum. Capital CITY, I thought to myself! Finally, I get to live where people rode fancy cars, ate in fast food joints and wore jeans without inviting long stares from strangers. Yeah, Trivandrum is not that place. So imagine my excitement when I finally reached Chennai, the first city I had ever lived in. Jeans wearing was acceptable and there were real life pubs!
When I gushed about living in the city, everyone asked me how I planned to survive the summer in Chennai. I received useless trivia from family and friends about the Chennai’s horrid weather. It gets unbearably hot; they told me in hushed voices. I had lived in Muscat, where it gets up to 45 degrees centigrade during summer, I huffed. I can handle it. Besides, it’s a CITY!
Nothing prepared me for the reality that was my first Chennai summer. The heat in Chennai is a beast with a mind of its own. It’s a baking wet heat for months. April and May pass in a haze that can be blamed on cooked brains. But June, oh sweet June! June signaled the start of monsoon in the heart of every Keralite. But not in Chennai. June brings some more heat. If you think that the sun is the bastard that makes it so unbelievingly hot, the nights snicker at you. You don’t get a good night sleep for months because you are waking up to take late night showers to wash away the sweat.
I lived in a stuffy 1 bedroom hole in the 2nd floor of a house. The man who made the house had not grasped the meaning of windows. The house had none. NONE. The only air in and out was the front door and thankfully the tiny hole in the bathroom wall which rocked the exhaust fan. Every time you walked out of the house, the heat punched you in the face till you were a shell of sweaty clothes.
Outside my house was a cold drink shop that I set foot in just once in the year that I lived there. Every morning at eight, the ice delivery man dropped off his goods at the shop. If you imagine Reddy Ice trucks with bags and bags of equally sized ice cubes, you have been in USA far too long. Ice delivery in India happens on an open cart, huge blocks of ice many square feet in area are stacked covered with sacks made of jute. The delivery man unloads a block together with the sack covering it outside the shop, on the side of the road. The block of ice lies there, in the sweltering heat, not melting. That was the first sign that this ice is funky. The drink shop almost always had worker so low in the totem pole that his daily duty was to break this ice. He takes a hammer to this sack covered ice to break it to smaller pieces, collecting them in a steel vessel.
People blinded and parched stumbled into these shops and asked for a lemonade. The drink is made cold with this ice. This ice, made from water you don’t want to know where it came from, floats expectantly in your drink. You have seen the sack of ice on the cart, you have seen the block of ice lying in wait for the worker to come break it up. You have seen the ice make friends with the stray dogs on your street. If you have seen this, you never want ice in your drink EVER.
Fast forward a few years. I sat in my booth in the newest Indian restaurant in town, last week, enjoying a spicy chicken curry, when I hear the man in the next table ask for a glass of water. “Water, no ice ok?” the man cautions disrespectfully. What a douchebag, I think, shaking my head. The image of the sack covered ice block pops up in front of my eyes. His jerk-ish charm notwithstanding, maybe he has a point, I concede grudgingly. Ice remains a mystery to us, Indians. Its origin, shape and its strange power to dilute the drink you paid full price for. If people can survive the Chennai summer staying away from ice, the winter in America is a no-brainer. But not me! I like the clink of ice in my drink. My brain freeze from snacking on ice chips invites the strangest stares from my Indian friends. We live in the land of free refills, I tell them. You should order your Pepsi with ice, I encourage hopelessly.
But only I know the reason why ice and I are so tight. We are making up for lost time and how!

 

Thank you!! I have been a closet writer for few years now. I am so happy you all like it. Gives me confidence to post more of my stuff.