Meltem soda

Meltem soda is a fruit-flavored drink launched by Şektaş, the company owned by Zaim. In Kemal’s account, it moves quickly from a new product to a familiar sight across Istanbul: sold in kiosks, promoted through advertisements featuring Inge, sampled at social gatherings, and carried on a picnic. Its significance lies in this everyday circulation. The drink gives Kemal’s wealthy circle a subject for talk and display even as his private sorrow increasingly separates him from their pleasures.

Launch and commercial visibility

Meltem enters the story through conversation about the successes of the summer, alongside the new bars, clubs, and restaurants opening around the city. At a gathering with Sibel, Zaim, Berrin, and Nurcihan, the drink becomes a sign of Zaim’s business activity and of a product that has begun to find a broad public. Berrin reports seeing Inge, the German model associated with Zaim, on a cinema screen drinking the beverage with a beckoning smile. She has also seen the advertisements in kiosks throughout the city, where Meltem is no longer presented as a drink only for children but as one consumed by everyone. Her account turns the product’s expansion into a visible feature of the urban landscape.

Zaim answers that the company’s timing was good and that it had also been lucky. Kemal explains to Nurcihan that Zaim owns Şektaş, which recently launched Meltem, and that Inge is the model appearing in advertisements around the city. The explanation connects the drink’s commercial reach to both a company and a recognizable advertising face. Meltem is not simply mentioned as a beverage: its success is discussed as Zaim’s achievement, and its circulation gives the group a shared topic through which business, celebrity imagery, and social life meet.

A product among friends

The conversation around Meltem also stages the ease and liveliness of the group. Zaim asks whether the others have tasted the fruit-flavored drinks, and Nurcihan says she has, singling out the strawberry flavor for praise. Her comparison to French products makes the locally launched drink part of a conversation about taste and European standards. Zaim’s follow-up question about whether she lives in France keeps the exchange playful; soon afterward, he invites the group to visit the factory, cruise on the Bosphorus, and picnic in Belgrade Forest. The invitation makes the product’s commercial home a destination for the same friends who discuss and consume it.

That sociability has a quiet counterpoint in Kemal’s narration. At parties, he had talked with Zaim about the success of Meltem, while privately becoming more subdued and increasingly inclined to watch events from the sidelines. The drink belongs to the outward, shared world of friends and business; Kemal’s secret happiness with Füsun and the sorrow that follows it make his participation in that world feel increasingly constrained. Meltem does not cause or resolve this separation. Its ordinary presence helps register the contrast between the circle’s ongoing pleasures and the grief Kemal cannot set aside.

The factory and the picnic

The planned outing begins at the Meltem factory in Büyükdere, beside the Bosphorus. Giant pictures of Inge cover the sides of its buildings, alongside leftist slogans that have been painted over. Inside, the party tours the sterilizing and bottling lines. Kemal notes that the factory has only sixty-four employees despite the advertisements displayed throughout the city. Women in headscarves and blue aprons work quietly under the direction of loud, cheerful supervisors. The contrast between the product’s expansive public visibility and the comparatively small workforce gives the visit a concrete scale: the drink is promoted across Istanbul, while its production is concentrated in a modest-sized operation.

The party then drives to Belgrade Forest, where Meltem bottles are included in the picnic basket with tea in a thermos, stuffed grape leaves, boiled eggs, and a tablecloth inherited by Zaim from his grandmother. The basket brings together commercial novelty and inherited domestic objects, placing the modern branded drink among familiar foods and family possessions. In Kemal’s later presentation of the scene, the basket recalls an excursion that might offer relief from the succession of indoor settings in his story. He immediately qualifies that prospect: neither reader nor museum visitor should imagine that the picnic made him forget his pain. The soda is thus part of the outing’s visible pleasures, but not evidence that Kemal has escaped his longing.

Memory and everyday meaning

During the excursion, the group visits the factory and then spreads its food on a green field overlooking Bentler. Sibel and Zaim try to set up an old swing with new ropes; Kemal plays Nine Stones with Nurcihan and Mehmet, and watches Sibel swing. The bottles are one item among the picnic provisions, not the focus of the day. Their place in this inventory is precisely what makes them useful to the remembered scene: Meltem joins food, tea, inherited cloth, games, and landscape as an ordinary detail through which a particular Sunday can be reconstructed.

Kemal’s account holds two registers together. In the public one, Meltem is a successful product, praised for its strawberry flavor, advertised with Inge, and available widely enough to appear in kiosks across the city. In the private one, its bottles sit beside a picnic whose apparent ease cannot quiet his grief for Füsun. The object therefore connects commercial modernity to intimate recollection without becoming a remedy for sorrow. It belongs to the shared day, and through Kemal’s later act of remembering, to the material record of a happiness that remained incomplete.