In Gurugram, especially in the older parts of the Millennium City, this is the season when vendors of cooling drinks begin reclaiming corners of the bazar lanes. A few operate year-round, but summer brings these stalls into sharper view. Their return also revives familiar notes of the season. The siren of a hand-held horn, the scrape of a machine wheel against its facing wheel, the sight of mashed fruit. Over the years, this page has written about many of these vendors. Their stories reappear this summer because they themselves return each summer, to the same market lanes, repeating routines that have become woven into the city’s annual cycle. Just as, during the extreme cold of deepest winter, cooks from Morena return to these same lanes to prepare the gajak delicacy, which fills the body with warmth.This is the season when vendors of cooling drinks begin reclaiming corners of the bazar lanes. (HT Photo)Near the shortcut leading to Kamla Nehru Park is a sugarcane juice stall that has occupied the same patch of the pave for more than twenty years. It consists of a juice machine, with two metal rollers moving in opposite directions. Thick stalks of ganna are fed into the machine, which crushes them into dry fibres within moments. The juice trickles down into an ice-filled pan.Maybe you have heard it. The sound of the siren travels through the markets every summer, though infrequently. It comes from the hand-held horn of an ice cream cart. The horn and the cart, belong to Jawahar, an elderly hawker who drags his cart through the markets and housing sectors of Gurugram throughout the day. Shaped like a funnel, the plastic “bhopu” was bought years ago from Sai Chowk. Actually, carts of this kind, especially those selling kulfi, now rely on brass bells to draw attention, and even these bells are slowly going out of fashion. Jawahar’s cart remains the only one with this siren, whose sharp cry at times drowns out the other sounds of the street.Nand Ram spends his day moving along the market lanes with his bel juice establishment. One side of the cart is stacked with whole bel waiting to be cut open. The hand-operated metal mixer is used to turn the fruit pulp into a viscous drink. When a customer arrives, Nand Ram pours the drink into a paper glass, mixes it with a bit of sweetened water, adding crushed ice.Radhe wakes before dawn at his home in a nearby village. He ties four large plastic containers to his bicycle, and then he leaves for the day. He first stops by at about a dozen village homes, where the householders are ready to hand him an ample quantity of freshly prepared lassi, as part of an arrangement under which they receive a share of the day’s earnings. Radhe then cycles through Gurugram’s markets and mohallas, calling out, “Lassi le lo.”PS: Photo shows vendor Raj Kumar’s shikanji stall, close to the post office building in Sadar Bazar