The lure of white extends far beyond hills, and subconsciously, we hope that the picturesqueness of snow-clad highlands somehow permeates the surfaces of flatlands as well — as witnessed in Delhi after a recent hailstorm

Iss baar sardi lambi pad gayi… Mausam ka kuchh pata hi nahi chal raha hai...” (“Winter this time has lengthened... The weather has been behaving so indecisively”). For someone who has just shifted from the hills of Shimla to the plains of Delhi, the inherent perplexity of this and similar statements being uttered by the Capital’s residents comes with a charm of its own, for winteriness remains in the blood and the mind. In fact, if there is something that has quietly yet most efficaciously helped me and my family during the settling-in process over the last few months, it is the continuation of winter in the plains, for what has allegedly been “a long time, this time”. While the mountains have now been replaced by high-rises and the fresh, silvery mists have made way for (sadly) the haze of smoke and the coughs of smog, the chill of winter has nonetheless retained, injecting a cool that is otherwise desperately sought in the harsh of Indian summers.

In the middle and upper highlands of the country, it isn’t uncommon to witness a spell of snow well into March, a period that otherwise coincides with the youthful ‘warmth’ of spring and Holi. Just as seasons behave differently in different places, directions and directionality also assume distinctive currencies in dissimilar settings. There was a time when weather reports at the end of television news invariably began with a nod towards the four metropolises — Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta — with Delhi automatically becoming a synonym for the ‘North’. And yet for me, with a childhood spent entirely in the foothills, valleys and ridges of the Himalayas, ‘North’ was uncontestably something much higher and distant from the country’s Capital. And if the curious relationship between directions and seasons is anything to go by, then season-wise, Himachal directly relates to winters first and summers second, and Delhi, vice-versa. Of course,

Delhi winters, too, get celebrated just as the Himalayan spring and summer, but essentialism about a particular ambience of a place continues to hold its sway in the popular consciousness: “Delhi heat” (Dilli ki garmi), “Shimla chill” (Shimla ki thand). Consequently, temporality itself assumes a different tenor for people habituated to varying vistas and weathers, the lengthiness of summer holidays in plains finding an equivalent counterpart in the protracted winter breaks of hills and mountains for school children.

One key reason for the ‘automatic’ link that people draw between Shimla (and many other hill stations) and winters is the shape that the season takes as a result of natural topography and architecture. Some months ago, I had reflected in this space on how a typical hill house exerts a strong claim to intimacy and coziness because of its picturesque shapeliness: Gabled and pitched roofs, symmetrical and stylised facades. Add to this and the surroundings a cover of snow, and the already romanticised setting gets further intensified in charm and appeal. It is remarkable that a number of features that we tend to associate with a typically generalised understanding of a scenery — rivers, clouds, mists, sunsets, and snow — depend on the penchant of water for various forms, because water by itself is transparent and shapeless. Snow bears testimony to countless visual profiles as evinced by the intricate lure of geometrical snowflakes (for the keen eyed), and more pervasively, by the layering it congeals into over buildings and natural terrains (for the common eyed). Shape further evinces prolonged tactility, and it never ceases to amuse me how visitors from plains regularly exult in the discovery of the thinnest layer of white on hillsides during their travels, instantly stopping their cars to touch and hold a bit in animated, expansive gestures, to be further immortalised by photography. If in the plains, it is the moon atop the Taj Mahal that must be customarily palmed or fingerpicked for a photograph, then in the hills, it is the pristine snow that has to be handled to experience and demonstrate the feeling of being alive in a thandi jagah (cold place). Snow embodies the quality of being faraway just like the distant moon, and once you touch it, you bring yourself closer to a fantasy world. No wonder then, that across the country, temporary amusement parks under the rubric of ‘Winter Wonderlands’ routinely spring during the season, and snow — even if artificially created — gets excitedly sought after by one and all.

Snow is the silent cousin of sonorous rain. Extravagantly celebrated in culture, from rituals to poetry and cinema, rains in India dictate a season of their own (the monsoon), the land after all bearing an overwhelmingly hot, tropical topography. Unlike many European nations whose de rigueur damp atmospheres generate around persistent but diffident precipitation, Indian rains are ever confident in their might and music. But whereas rains occasion song and dance, snow primarily harbingers meditation and contemplation, because its entry indexes a wholesome silence, a quintessential quietness. In the hills, it is often the case that only after a prolonged, resounding spell of rain will snow gather the dignity and gravity to chart a way for itself. Once the drama begins, all differences begin to recede, the unity of a colourless colour resiliently seeping surfaces and sensibilities. It is not always easy to make sense of this inherently contradictory hue, and I still remember my childhood classes where drawing snow invariably posed a difficulty, so that we usually left patches of white sheet uncoloured whenever we had to depict frozen mountain peaks.

But the lure of white extends far beyond the hills, and subconsciously, we fervently hope that the picturesqueness of snow-clad highlands somehow permeates the surfaces of flatlands as well. When some weeks ago, a strong hailstorm took over Delhi and left it soaked in a sheet of white, the question that immediately propped up alongside the images was: “Is this Delhi or Shimla?” Another such speculative query also mentioned “Switzerland”, the dream of inhabiting a distinguished destination in a distant land once again infiltrating human desire via the bait of white.

If snow naturally embodies an ambience of otherness through the magic of movement, texture, and transformation, then one of the ways of relating to that otherness (in addition to posing and photographing) is by wearing something warm and woolen. There is a joke amongst Himalayan folks that people from the plains, even while visiting the hills in the thick of summer, automatically don layers of woolens, because for them, it is enough that they are in the hills. But there is another joke to do with the woolens amongst the Himalayan folk regarding themselves. Once, when someone from the upper reaches of the Kullu valley (other versions say Lahaul-Spiti) was visiting Delhi during a hot summer, a perplexed local enquired: “Don’t you feel hot in this dress?”, referring to the layers of woven cloth traditionally worn by Himachalis of the higher areas. To which the visitor promptly replied: “Jab garmi andar jaayegi hi nahi toh lagegi kaise?”(“When the heat won’t pass through the thick layers of my clothing, how would it affect me?”). In the first joke, wool becomes the way of relating to the hills by staving off the cold (existing or not) when you don’t originally belong to the landscape; in the second, wool strangely transforms into a ruse for staving off heat by making one feel entirely at home. On similar lines, I too have occasionally wondered why do we drape a snowman in a woolen cap and a woolen scarf when he himself is made of snow? Shouldn’t their warmth be considered a threat to his snowy, frozen identity?

Recently, the ever-versatile social commentator Santosh Desai observed that “the idea of warmth as a defining human condition gets re-affirmed only when it is cold. It is then that the idea of being alive becomes synonymous with the idea of being warm”. This remarkable insight is perhaps most potently illustrated by the persistent cultural image of a working fireplace, with people huddled around together and snow falling outside.

For, to follow Desai, fire makes special sense when it is cold outside.Warmth is a crucial human emotion and affect that takes root in our desire to connect and continue the art of living. AR Rahman and Gulzar’s gorgeously composed title song for Shaad Ali’s 2002 romance-drama Saathiya evocatively brings out this desire by sewing the presence of snow with the intimacy of wool: “Baraf giri ho waadi mein/ aur hansee teri goonjey/oon mein lipti simti hui/baat karey dhuaan nikley” (“The valley be clad in snow/and your laughter echoes/cuddled within the weave of wool/your voice condenses into fog”). While the film is set in Mumbai, the song itself is shot in Kullu and Manali. But there are a number of films based in the plains that do not have to rely on hill stations to conjure the idea of winteriness. One can think of Aankhon Dekhi (2013)and Delhi 6 (2009) among others, both set in Delhi, that seek to construct the visual aesthetic of warmth by choosing the season of winter, as visibilised by the accoutrements of shawls and sweaters.

And yet for all their charm, wool, winter and their various wonders need to be contextualised, not generalised, because cold places themselves differ in patterns and persistence. My younger brother, a social anthropologist who working in the Trans-Himalayas for the past few years, tells me of the extraordinarily tough life that the people of Lahaul-Spiti (which form the cold deserts of Himachal Pradesh) lead when winter arrives. The old saying that holds spring nearer when winter comes needs tweaking here, because spring is certainly far behind in such areas. Here, societies wage a back-breaking battle of arduous labour to remove the massively thick layers of snow from their houses and establishments, day in and day out (for months in and months out), in addition to finding means to survive within temperatures of minus 10 to minus 35 degrees. Snow isn’t benign here, and even its pervasive whiteness becomes a source of blindness under the sun, such that people must necessarily wear goggles to protect their vision. In the months that have gone by, such extremes have also been reported from Western cities and metropolises, but their technologically advanced materiality of daily life still makes it easier to alleviate the inhuman conditions as compared to the traditional and rudimentary methods involved in the Trans-Himalayas. Simultaneously, however, the evil of snow and ice incessantly springs up in Western fantasy literature, whether it is the reign of the White Witch in the CS Lewis’ Narnia books, or the regime of icy ‘darkness’ in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, or, most popularly, the White Walkers of George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones books, whose fear lends an incomparable negative chill to the words “Winter is coming”.

Perhaps, it is futile to reconcile the two sides of the season. Nature destroys, but as George Eliot put it at the end of her masterpiece, The Mill on the Floss, it also “repairs its ravages”. I am biased in using the phrase since the full quotation actually stands as: “Nature repairs her ravages, but not all.” As climate change swells in its reach and impact, the truth of Eliot’s prescient words becomes even more loud, more threatening than ever before. And again, the most recognisable symbol of its destruction is to do with snow and ice, their melting and disappearance. It appears that to keep the earth stable, ice in the upper regions of the planet must retain its iciness. As a human quality, however, ‘iciness’ rings with an undesirable undertow, as does the word ‘coldness’ (“He gave me a cold shoulder”). And yet in Hindi, we routinely use the phrase “thand rakho” (“Keep your cool”) to assuage someone seething with anger that is aligned with garmaahat (aggressiveness that is invariably ‘heated’). Nature continuously provides us a palette of objects and occurrences that can be used to entirely different effects in different situations. With a major part of my life spent in the Himalayas, I remain more attuned towards cold places (not cold dispositions!) that constantly sing with a warmth and intimacy of their own, notwithstanding the hardships involved.

As the Delhi winter slips into spring only to quickly fade into summer, I know that my eyes and ears will automatically be looking forward to all the advertisements promoting thandai, from Dermi Cool talcum powder (with its alliterative “thanda thanda cool cool” jingle) to assorted squashes and drinks, that habitually work with close-ups of ice and snow. For winteriness firmly remains in the blood and the mind.

The writer recently completed his PhD in English and Materiality Studies at the University of Cambridge, and will soon join the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, as a Research Fellow in Global History