Indian summers are so extreme. Here in Pune, the mercury hits 40C+ and it’s pure hell. The whole world is wilted and wrung out. Food is a distant memory. I can’t even imagine eating anything I cannot slurp, preferably cold. I hate the heat in the kitchen. Soups, casseroles, stews and gravies seem like far too much effort to exert.

Instead, I turn to the cold kitchen. Suddenly it’s chilled chicken -mayonnaise sandwiches. Refrigerated roast chicken with potato salad. Bowls of icy, crisp green salads with fruits, sprouts and whatever leaves have survived this heat. Iced cubes of deep orange musk melon and deep, red watermelon. Popsicles made of coconut milk and mango. Frozen banana smoothies. Cool, spicy curd rice. Loads of kakadi ka raitha. Chilly pani puris. Bhel. Platters full of fresh, juicy mangoes followed by anything mango: hot, spicy, fresh mango curry, raw mango in aam panna with jaggery and cardamom, sweet mango ice cream, mango lassi, snowy mango smoothies. Coffee is served cold with milk or cold pressed and drunk black. Anything warmer is an effort. The ice maker works overtime. We squeeze fresh lime juice into glass bottles of water and fill them with mint sprigs. These are hoarded in the fridge and drink through the day, no sugar, just cold, refreshing lemony water. We have anything tangy and lemony. And coconut water: sweet, refreshing coconut water.

But now the hot days have vanished and we wait in the muggy hours before the rain decides to visit. As the weather keeps playing hide and seek, we are dealing with a whole new season of produce.

It is summer in Europe and monsoon here in India. We have a short harvest of local peaches, plums, apricots and lychees. It’s that odd month where it’s not the monsoon and the sky is filled with dazzling sunlight, the bluest skies, and ethereal sunsets, while the few drizzles have turned everything into fifty shades of green. And during these magical few weeks, we have a slice of English summer and fruit. I have always been baffled as to why we cannot mirror Thailand and grow the amazing fruit they produce: all those luscious dragon fruit and mangosteens and rambutans and longans.

Luckily we do have plenty of Indian summer fruit, fruit designed to refresh and rejuvenate us the worst months of year.

We have deep purple jamuns that stain the mouth with their rivers of juice, easy to find but suddenly trendy and now wildly expensive. They are addictive and your tongue is suddenly a bright aubergine.

Mulberries, maroon and black and hairy, fall by the roadside as no one quite knows what to do with them. They are neither loved nor hated and the only fun we had with them was in holding a bedsheet below the tree as someone climbed up and shook the boughs, dropping a rain of fruit below.

There are tiny, sweet purple karvandas which I absolutely love. They are small and round and sweet and juicy. It is so hard to find them, and I make sure to stop at the top of a particular spot on the highway and buy them from the local boys who sell them in little leaf cups.

The king of summer has always been the alphonso mango, here in our side of western India. Special to our coastline, Alphonsos are devoured and prices begin at ridiculous rates in March. Wait until May and the mangoes are sweeter and you can afford to eat a dozen a day! Their fragrance permeates the house as we greedily buy them in wooden crates filled with straw, each layer ripening later then the one before. I have someone listed as ‘my mango guy’ on my phone. Iqbal comes from the north only for three months and opens a small hole-in-the-wall shop dealing in some really good mangoes he sources directly from farmers. He calls me and reminds me to collect my peti and I am coaxed into buying more than I need, every week for the entire summer. He charges me reasonably and replaces any fruit I am unhappy with. The whole family knows him and #lovethisman will quickly let me know if I miss a call from ‘my mango guy’.

Currently we have a huge shortage of peaches due to bad weather and I sorely miss my regular peach crumble. I always imagined the peaches in Europe were better but this time I found the peaches there bland in comparison to our smaller, less fleshy Indian fruit. The trick is to allow them to ripen just right.

The pale green Golden Delicious apples aren’t to be seen, only perfect-looking, imported red Washington apples. I am not a fan of frozen fruit.

Knobbly, juicy local William pears seem to be a distant memory from my past as we have weird-tasting, hard, perfectly shaped fruit. I plan to grow my own pears someday. I love pears, dripping juice as I bite into their ripeness. Pear crumble, stewed pears with cream, or just pears with cheese are a rainy season treat. Not the crated stuff from far away, but the Indian version of English pears, grown up North.

I have to console myself with local mangoes like payree and chausa, now that Alphonsos have waved goodbye after the first rainfall. There are large kairis to freeze for bhel and curries in the winter ahead. There were some good, golden -pink cherries that were nice but nothing close to the deep, dark Italian cherries we gorged on our holiday. The lychees fell prey to a sting operation exposing how they are coloured their vivid pink with spray cans without any scruples and now we can’t find any. Ouch, a whole year without fresh lychees??!!

There are a few apricots, small and hard and bland. Sometimes we get good plums, but mostly they are sour and not very popular. I remember my mother used to make a delicious plum preserve, when we were kids. She then used the preserve to make a pudding, setting it with gelatine. It was absolutely delicious. Unfortunately she has no clue how she made it and I was too young to even pay attention. I still remember the taste of it, smooth and wobbly, and deeply luscious. She stewed a lot of pears with cinnamon, and we had a huge glass jar of them to eat through winter.

I found a very good crop of long avocados at a fairly decent price and I watch them impatiently as they gently ripen in their basket. Sometimes my fruit-wala surprises me. More often than not he is trying to get me to spend ridiculous amounts of money on imported mangosteen and California grapes rambutans. I refuse to buy fruit that has this enormous carbon footprint.

Local limes are tiny and sour., But indispensable nonetheless. My Kaffir line plant has two fruit and my lime tree has a dozen. They aren’t ripe enough to pluck yet. I check on them every day.

The monsoons are when we make marmalade from large, knobbly, sour lemons from my Father-in-law’s tree. Hopefully he will have plenty to spare for me after he makes his bottles of lemon squash, which we enjoy with long , lazy sunday lunches.

If I’m lucky my uncle in Chikmnagalur will send me heavy avocadoes that grow in the forest of his coffee estate. And wild, tart passion fruit as big as tomatoes, from old creepers on the trees. He is diversifying into avocado farming and I can’t wait for him to harvest his crop.

Local apples should appear soon, and crumble wil be on the table every day for tea until my daughter groans and begs me to stop. I like my crumble with a hard crust of burnt-ish sugar and loads of cinnamon and vanilla. And drizzled with thick cream.

But still I search in vain for peaches.

PS: I made it to the fruit market yesterday.

I found ginormous guavas from South Africa, dragon fruit from Malaysia. There were a few peaches and he was demanding gold in exchange for them. There were California purple grapes, pears from New Zealand, and deep red cherries too.

I bought local plums, local peaches, elaichi bananas, a bright red pomegranate, local cherries, the cutest sweetest baby oranges from I-dunno-where, a papaya and some imported William Pears. Apparently the local pears don’t exist anymore (!!!)

I paid more than I would for meat and chicken but then I’d rather eat fruit!!!