Ah yes, the good ole 80s! Well we – my family and I – had moved back to India from Kuwait (and in my case, moved – as I was born in Kuwait) in the summer of 1987 and I joined a school near our home in Thrikkakara. During the work week we would occasionally drop by at my mom’s eldest brother house in Kacheripady. We had our two cousins who were 9 and 3 years older than me and we spent a lot of time with them. And then that summer during the school holidays, I spent almost a month with them along with two other cousins.

First of all my aunt is a sweetheart and she managed u 5 boys with no complaints and a smile on her face and she probably loved the fact that we were there. We didn’t have enough space to play outside so we instead spent the days inside. After a shower and breakfast, my cousins and I would spend the entire day playing Hind Trade (an Indian version of Monopoly) while playing The Beatles, Scorpions, Dire Straits & assorted other 70s & 80s rock music. We would only stop for lunch after which we would watch a movie.

Evenings after tea was more games until dinner after which we would watch another movie and then go into the bedroom and fall asleep while we read books or played general quiz, with our eldest cousin playing the role of quiz master. The whole month that’s all we did and it was a fun time. After a month 1 of my cousins, the youngest of the 5 of us, and I went back to my house and he stayed at my house for a couple of weeks before his parents came to bring him back to their house. Such memories of summers gone by sometimes just come back to me.