The roads look abandoned.

Dogs hide beneath parked vehicles. Birds negotiate whatever patch of shade the city hasn't yet paved over. Even the wind feels exhausted — like it showed up, assessed the situation, and decided to conserve itself.

At 44 degrees, summer stops being a season. It becomes an endurance test.

And yet, whenever someone says summer, my first instinct is not heat. It is freedom.

Which is strange. Because summer should remind me of sweat and dehydration, of heatwave curfews and afternoons so thick with heat that even thoughts seem to move slower.

Instead, it reminds me of childhood.

Summer was the official declaration that school was done — temporarily — with its strange insistence on mistaking obedience for learning. For the first time all year, time belonged to us.

It meant cousins arriving from different cities like migratory birds returning to a familiar season.

It meant wandering through old forts, forgotten temples, and dusty ruins simply because curiosity refused to sit indoors.

It meant loud debates about science, cricket, films, and wildly unqualified theories about why a universe made of mostly invisible matter somehow managed to function.

It meant evening cricket matches that only ended when someone's mother screamed their full name from a balcony.

It meant chaotic group baths with cousins that sounded less like hygiene and more like civil war.

It meant sitting in front of the television at exactly 7:30 PM for Disney Hour — a ritual that quietly planted my lifelong admiration for animation.

And nights?

Those belonged to the terrace.

A thin mattress. A reluctant pillow. A sky overflowing with stars. And conversations so strange, philosophical, and beautifully unnecessary that only childhood could produce them.

Looking back, I think summer was the first season we ever truly belonged to.

But seasons grow older. And so do we.

Then adulthood arrived — and brought summer with it as a warning notification.

Rising temperatures.

Water shortages.

Burning roads.

Exhausted animals searching for survival in a city that forgot to plan for them.

The same sun that once illuminated our cricket matches now feels like it is conducting an audit of human arrogance.

Perhaps summer is not cruel. Perhaps it is simply honest. Brutally, unapologetically honest. It strips away distraction and reveals what actually matters.

And that clarity always brings me to two trees.

One attracts admiration · The other creates value

This feels like summer's deepest philosophy.

In pleasant seasons, we celebrate beauty. In difficult ones, we rediscover utility. At 44 degrees, nobody asks how aesthetic the city looks. The questions become more honest.

Does it have enough trees?

Does it conserve water?

Can it protect the birds and animals it displaced to build itself?

Can beauty alone save a city that was built without wisdom?

We have spent decades perfecting the Gulmohar — taller buildings, brighter lights, cleaner aesthetics, louder success metrics — while quietly removing the things that actually sustain life.

Trees. Water bodies. Silence. Patience. Community.

Then one unbearable afternoon reminds us that survival was always embarrassingly simple.

• Water
• Shade
• Food
• Sleep
• Human connection

That's all. That was always all.

And somehow, despite its severity, summer still knows how to be tender.

Cold mango slices in steel bowls.

Watermelon after long afternoons.

Late evening walks when the temperature finally concedes.

The smell of soil waiting desperately for rain.