Build friendships in summer that last through winter

Outside, Delhi is drunk on summer.

The greens are overwrought, almost operatic. Bougainvillea behaves badly, spilling magenta over walls as though restraint were a moral failure. Gulmohar sets the avenues aflame. Amaltas hangs its yellow chandeliers from tired branches. Mangoes grow heavy with sugar and secrecy. The sun is cruel; heat presses its palm upon the city’s forehead and refuses to lift it. Dogs find islands of shade. Cows stand contemplative beneath trees. Birds edit their journeys. Ants, wiser than economists, carry tomorrow on their backs.

Nature, in abundance, is never merely celebrating.

She is storing.

And I wonder: Are we?

Freud understood that beneath the civilised tablecloth, desire keeps kicking the table. We are creatures of appetite and attachment. We want love but postpone the telephone call. We fear loneliness but neglect friendships because they appear sturdy. We crave community, then treat it like emergency infrastructure: Break glass only in case of despair.

Proust knew better. Memory, for him, was not an archive but an ambush. A taste, a scent, a crumb could collapse decades. I know this. One summer smell and I am no longer 50-something, sitting in Delhi beneath a merciless summer sky. I am in Hebron, New York, at our farm, where summer was so brief it seemed to arrive already saying goodbye.

We knew.

That was the gift.

That summer did not pretend permanence. It came in green gusts and golden evenings, in grass growing faster than plans, in tomatoes turning from promise to plenty. We ate outdoors because we could. We called friends because daylight lingered. We opened bottles, doors, arms. Someone brought bread. Someone brought berries. Someone arrived bruised by life and left laughing.

Every day, the outdoors was celebrated because everybody knew winter was waiting.

Honestly.

We sat under blue silk skies and watched fireflies punctuate the dark. We cooked, argued, overfed everyone. We made memories without announcing that we were making memories. No hashtags. No heritage plaques. Just plates passed from hand to hand, dogs under tables, mosquitoes misbehaving, someone searching for a sweater after sunset, somebody staying later than intended.

Then winter came.

Cold, cold, cold. A tundra of white and grey. Trees stripped to their handwriting. Roads hardened. The sun became a rumour. But something extraordinary happened: summer had already done its work.

Those same friends returned.

Several times a week, through snow, carrying soup, wine, gossip, grief. We warmed rooms with repetition. We knew one another’s kitchens, silences, irritating habits, impossible opinions. Friendship had acquired muscle memory. Nobody needed to perform happiness. The welcome had been rehearsed in July.

Perhaps this is what Jiddu Krishnamurti meant by relationship as the mirror in which we discover ourselves. We imagine self-knowledge as solitary excavation, but people are our weather. They expose our impatience, generosity, vanity, tenderness. Relationship is not decoration around life. It is the laboratory of living.

Tagore, who saw the human and natural worlds in conversation, understood seasons as spiritual syntax. A flower is not only a flower. Rain is not merely water. The world outside is constantly translating the world within.

Look at summer. Even its excess has intelligence.

Bees feast, yes, but pollinate. Trees luxuriate in leaf, but manufacture shade. Clouds gather before they give. Fruit ripens to be eaten, carried, scattered; sweetness becomes seed. Nature seems extravagant because her extravagance is circular. Nothing truly abundant hoards abundance.

We do.

We save affection for funerals. Praise for retirement speeches. Apologies for hospital rooms. We send flowers when someone can no longer smell them and write magnificent paragraphs about people after they have lost reading.

What peculiar creatures we are.

Dinkar wrote with fire in his blood; his poetry understood energy as moral force, not ornament. Summer has that Dinkarian blaze: sunlight asking to be converted into courage. Mahadevi Varma, by contrast, could make solitude shimmer, could find in ache an interior lamp. Between them lies the human year: flame and fog, assertion and absence, noon and night.

We need both.

Faiz knew that private love and public responsibility share a bloodstream. His beloved could become a wounded world; the wounded world could still deserve tenderness. Parveen Shakir brought perfume, rain, womanhood, vulnerability into poetry without making softness small. She understood that fragrance travels precisely because it cannot be fenced.

What if kindness was a fragrance?

What if summer were our season of scattering it?

I ask differently now. Weather has a way of removing decorative philosophy. Stand long enough beneath a punishing sun, watch one cloud suddenly turn an entire afternoon tender, and empathy stops being an elegant word for Sunday columns. Care becomes climate. Shade. Water. A door opened. A mother nearby. A friend who checks again after already checking.

The seasons are classrooms, if we are willing to study them.

They ask: Suvir, whom have you called?

Whom have you fed?

Whose winter are you preparing for?

And, more uncomfortably: who is preparing for yours?

Summer seduces us into believing there will always be more. More mangoes. More evenings. More invitations. More time to repair the friendship, visit the aunt, thank the teacher, know the neighbour. But abundance is not evidence of eternity. The fullest tree is already negotiating autumn.

Animals know this without philosophy. Squirrels gather. Birds build. Elephants remember routes to water. Wolves survive cold through the intelligence of the pack. Humans, with Freud and Proust and Tagore on our shelves, still sometimes imagine independence means needing nobody.

It does not.

The opposite of dependence is not isolation. It is interdependence with dignity.

So enjoy summer. Please. Eat the mango over the sink and let juice run to your elbow. Wear the ridiculous shirt. Stay outdoors until mosquitoes declare war. Flirt. Feast. Forgive. Fill the table. Put flowers everywhere. Laugh indecently.

But while the sun shines, build shelter in one another.

Invest in the friendships standing. Water the people who have watered you. Meet your neighbours before an ambulance makes the introduction. Give to your community before you need its generosity. Practise presence before grief demands proficiency.

Because autumn will come, beautiful in its surrender. Then winter, with its long corridors and early dark.

And when it does, may we not find ourselves surrounded by contacts but starved of connection.

May someone know where we keep the tea.

May someone enter without ceremony, open the curtains, warm the soup.

May our winters be foreign to loneliness because, together, we were wise enough to spend summer making memories.

The flowers will fade.

The leaves will fall.

The season will turn.

Who will be beside you when it does?