There was always a plan to leave. Hyderabad, with its roomier skies and better biryani, was supposed to be my annual summer escape. As a Telugu girl living in Chennai, my seasonal discontent peaked right around the first week of April — when the heat made my earrings feel like branding irons and I’d begin pleading dramatically with my parents: “Just send me to Ammamma’s house, please.” Some years, they gave in. But the few times that I couldn’t fly away, I was forced to surrender to Chennai’s heat, its slowness, and the way time folds differently here in May.
And yet — between the dramatics, something surprising happened. I started collecting memories. Not the postcard kind. But the humid, specific, and funny kind. Cold showers that never really felt cold. Waking up at 5.30 am because the power randomly goes out. Biryani that makes you sweat — eating spicy food in the heat just makes things more intense. Neighbours sending over mangoes wrapped in newspaper. I began to see that the city didn’t need to be escaped from — it needed to be remembered, the way one remembers a fever dream: with half-exasperation, half-affection.
So I started asking people — what was your Chennai summer like? What follows is a collection of memories — chaotic, sentimental, and heat-soaked — from girls like me, boys on summer break, elders with stories of a pre-AC Chennai, and even vacationers who accidentally fell in love with the city’s sultry charm.
People who grew up visiting the city remember it vividly. Pranitha Pillai, who would visit from Hyderabad every May, insists it shaped her entire emotional landscape. “We didn’t have a beach. So I thought Marina was magical. We’d go at 6 am to beat the crowd. I’d come back sunburnt, sandy, and so happy I’d cry when we left. My mom used to hate it because of how tanned my brother and I used to get.”
She still talks about the mangoes her aunt in Chennai sliced and served on steel plates, her cousins dunking each other in an inflatable pool on the terrace, and the smell of Pond’s talcum powder after a cold (not-so-cold) shower.
Sweat and sentimentality
Chennai summers also have amusement park stories. Charvi T, recalls a road trip to an amusement park on the outskirts. “It was supposed to be a one-hour drive. Took three. My cousin puked in the car. But we went on every ride, ate popcorn and cotton candy till we couldn’t move, and passed out in the return van.”
For others, it was VGP Marine Kingdom — a mini escape into air-conditioned fish tunnels. “The tunnel with sharks felt like therapy. I cried when they said we could scuba dive with them and my mom said no,” said Devansh R, who visited from Delhi.
Even the simple joys hit harder in the heat. One mother said her 8-year-old’s favourite part of the summer is coming home from basketball drenched in sweat and drinking Tang. “I only give it in summer. It’s a ritual. He gets one glass with ice cubes and some snack on the side. I try not to make it a habit. Occasionally when we visit the beach, he begs for the Kwality Walls orange stick ice cream. So that is something that’s allowed during the summer too.”
When summers were wild
What was Chennai summers like for the generation that lived through the season without Google Maps, ACs, or face mist?
Eshwari, 63, remembers the summers of the 70s not through sweeping sentiment, but through specifics: the scratchy back of cane chairs, the sound of water being drawn from copper pots, and the smell of freshly soaked vetiver roots left to chill drinking water. “We didn’t have fans in every room. So we followed the breeze. Some days that meant folding laundry near the stairwell where it was a little cooler, or eating lunch on the thinnai because it faced east and stayed shady.”
Instead of “cool floors”, she recalls how she and her sisters would sneak into the prayer room — the quietest, darkest part of the house — just to escape the heat. “It wasn’t even about prayer, honestly. That room always smelt of camphor and was one or two degrees cooler. We would pretend to meditate and just sit there.”
The food was precise. No creamy curries or elaborate biryanis. Just curd rice with green chillies, roasted appalams, maavadu, and maybe a few slices of Neelam mangoes. “We didn’t snack. (We had) Buttermilk with salt and ginger, lemon juice with sugar, and rose milk if you were lucky.”
The houses were also built with survival in mind — thick lime-coated walls, windows with wooden slats to let in air but not sun, and terraces that doubled as night beds and social spaces. “We’d sleep on woven mats, one eye open for mosquitoes, one ear open for ghost stories. I remember pressing my ear against the transistor during the cricket commentary and not caring that I was sweating through my nightie.”
Vasanthi,71, says she rarely wore synthetic fabrics. “Cotton was mandatory. Dupattas would be rinsed and wrung out just to be tied around the head before stepping out. We’d wear checked skirts stitched from leftover blouse fabric. Nothing matched — it didn’t need to.”
Meanwhile, 68-year-old Niroopa S still talks about the smell of roasted peanuts in evenings, when the street hawker’s cart would come by. “We didn’t have cafés. Our version of a snack run was walking barefoot to the corner and buying boiled peanuts wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. We’d sit on the stairs, salt on our fingers, not speaking — just shelling and eating.”
Summer stories
Summer in Chennai doesn’t care about your plans. It strips you down to your most basic self. No filters. No moisturisers that work. Just you, a fridge, and a vague desire to be anywhere cooler.
But it gives you stories. The drama, the sentimentality, the fruit stains. It gives you the unhinged laughter of kids screaming over water fights. The soft ache of your childhood house, — the echoes, the rituals, the noise.
And sure, we carry water bottles with motivational time stamps. We go to breezy cafés with cold brews and solar roofs. But deep down, we’re still the same people who saw power cuts as an excuse for conversation. Who thought opening the fridge and standing in front of it was a form of self-care. Who knew drinking Rasna after running barefoot across a sunbaked terrace would give the thrill. Who knew, for those two months we would be emotionally over-invested in mangoes. This is summer in Chennai. It’s sweaty, sentimental, occasionally spiritual.