Summer siesta

It's summer now. And summer, with all its languorousness, is such a good time for lazy people like me. (Winter is, of course, even better. But summer is charming in its own way.) I can now squarely blame the heat for all my inactiveness and get away with being a sloth.

Yesterday being a Sunday, I decided to do my own bit to welcome the summer in my own inventive way -- by being a little bit more lazy. The only activity I permitted myself was reading. So, after a particularly heavy lunch I laid down on my bed with Ruskin Bond's Book of Nature by my side, ready to doze off while reading. An afternoon siesta is, I said to myself, a perfect way to welcome the summer. And a Ruskin Bond, a perfect lullaby.

I cannot say the exact page, but I must have been somewhere in the first chapter, Grandfather's Zoo, when I slipped into sleep. I didn't drown in sleep altogether, though. Rather, I felt as if I was swimming in and out of sleep. Also, I could feel that my senses were still functioning, although feebly. I could, for example, hear the whirring sound of the ceiling fan, the flapping of the open pages of the book I was reading, the rustling of mango leaves in the hot wind outside my window, the sound of a lone cuckoo singing somewhere...

When I woke up late in the afternoon, the sun's rays were already slanted. The day was about to end. I lazily looked out of my window at the wayward clouds floating in the sky. And, thus, the rest of the afternoon was spent in figuring out the shape of the clouds.

Well, so much for welcoming the summer.