Summertime

This excerpt was contributed by Ivy George in the fall 2026 issue of The Magazine of Gordon College. 

The monsoon thrummed on Ammachi’s tile roof, and the sky exploded with lightning and thunder just outside the window of my room. The rain was fierce, flooding the land instantly. The last screeches of birds settling down at dusk disappeared into a sudden silence in the rain. I’ll never forget the sweet release of petrichor after the first monsoon. 

On dry nights, we slept to the serenade of jackal howls, owl hoots, frog croaks, lizard clicks, and the thud of falling fruit nearby. This gave me great pleasure as I anticipated waking up at dawn to forage for mangoes, guavas, passion fruits, papayas, and cashew fruits with Ammachi. We had to beat the crows and the squirrels to it, she would say.

In Kerala, I saw, I felt, and I knew. There was a totality to life here. At school in Madras, I had to imagine much of what I read about. But here, Kerala’s countryside told remarkable tales of life’s persistence amid decay and of human resilience. Life here seemed audacious, churning itself out with an assertion and indifference known only to Nature—with God merely looking on. 

Growth burst, passionately. The last smidgen of dust settled in the crannies of walls and roof tiles hosted a plant or shoots. It was all so sensuous, immediate, full and profligate. The land’s perpetual fecundity mocked my life back in Madras, so removed in its modern progress. I knew that I was tap-rooted in two places, two homes, as I kept going back and forth between Madras and Kerala. My inheritance from the two worlds was my good fortune.

Our Return

I watched the slow drape of light and shadow as the train whizzed through the rain of fireflies and the night’s darkness gathered. If our train stopped for railway construction or a passing train, I heard the hiss of the night critters, the croaks of the bullfrogs, the call of the owl, and the howls of wild dogs. The sounds and light of these rural spaces would not let go of me easily, I thought, scrunching further down into my bedsheet on the upper berth. 

It seemed that only the other day Ammachi was waiting at the station to eagerly sweep us away. Now she’d accompanied us back, weeping as we awaited the train. “A year is too long to wait,” she said.

While I learned to speak Malayalam fluently, I could not read or write it to communicate with Ammachi between summers. But we were held closely by our summer life together. As the train got further and further away, I had the distinct feeling of leaving a bit of me behind, while bringing along fresh bits of me.

Steam engines now belong to an age of past inventions. They and their tracks were put together by the British to transport raw materials to the coast, where ships would take them for manufacture or consumption in Britain and its other colonies. These railways also heralded new worlds, holding out the promise of precarious fortunes and fragile hopes for many village migrants yearning to catch the spills of modernity. For me and my family and many other families, these railway journeys were part of a vast circulatory system for travel and preservation of bloodlines. For me, the train was a magic carpet taking me between my two worlds.

My India’s Ghosts

On holiday years later, I lay in a camp bed near railway tracks in the Zimbabwe bush and was lucky enough to have the train’s driver leave the engines idling close by. Listening to the nightjars and bush babies there, I remembered the dazzling glitter of fireflies and their nocturnal murmuration when our trains idled somewhere between Kerala and Madras in the late hours of nights mysteriously and fully alive. I heard the echoes of cine songs by youngsters who, for a few paisas, had boarded the train to entertain us. I felt that night that I had been left looking for my India’s ghosts in the African bush. I imagined myself caught in a kaleidoscopic embrace: born in Madras, raised by Kerala, and launched into the world at large.

Dr. Ivy George teaches sociology at Gordon College. She grew up spending summers with her grandmother, Ammachi, in Kerala, India. She was trained at the University of Madras, Bryn Mawr, Brandeis, and Harvard. Her latest book, Blind Sight: When Freedom Was Not Enough, was published this September and is available for purchase on Amazon. For more information, visit ivygeorge.org.