The first time I attended the Jaipur Literature Festival I showed up fashionably dressed at the inauguration party sans cap. I thought my pedestrian cap would ruin my outfit at the glamorous Rambagh Palace. But the party was open air and I froze my head off.
Later I encountered a Bengali writer in the writer’s lounge. He was swaddled in sweaters and of course, a monkey cap. I congratulated him about an award he had won recently. He nodded absently, peered up at me and mumbled “It’s so cold here.”
The Bengali in winter is a cultural trope, some would say cultural joke.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
Though the winters of Kolkata are temperate at best, temperatures hovering between 55 and 75 degrees, the Bengali dares not risk the chill. He muffles up in sweaters, cardigans, scarves and the infamous monkey cap. There is no snow in these parts but every Bengali mother knows the peril of him or dew. Him falling on your head at night is akin to a death knell for the fragile Bengali.
And yet in my memory it is our winter of content made glorious by sundry things.
Winter in these parts has a sound of its own. The quilt fluffer man comes around twanging, offering to fluff quilts that have been sunned, ready for our wintry nights when temperatures might fall to a chilly 17 degrees.
QUILT
Vendors appears with Joynagarer Mowa, their singsong voices selling the only-in-winter delicacy, a soft crumbly ball of parched rice and jaggery, densely sweet, studded with raisins and nuts,
MOWA
The produce market is bursting with vegetables - mustard greens, radishes, young garlic greens, mounds of peas, broccoli. The government owned Haringhata meat shops start stocking not just chicken and mutton, but also curry-cut duck and turkey.
TURKEY
At my local market the gur-seller beckons me over and offers clay pots filled with nolen gur, the first sap of the date palm, golden and sweet.
Each year he tells me it’s better than the one from the year before. Each year I nod. Every season comes with its rituals. These are the rituals of winter, its gifts.
But the greatest gift winter gives us is the temperature. Summers are blisteringly hot and sweaty. Monsoons are wet and sticky. Winter is the one season which encourages us to be outdoors (of course before the dreaded him starts falling).
Makeshift badminton courts spring up on lanes, sometimes with lights strung along the side. It’s the season for the office picnic and the neighbourhood sports meet.. Even the LGBTQ+ Rainbow Pride Walk happens in winter. It used to happen in June/July in tune with the original pride marches in New York and San Francisco. But organisers quickly realised at that time it was either sweltering or pouring. Winter’s mellow sunshine is much more conducive to marching.
Also this is the time the migratory birds show up. There are the feathered kinds coming all the way from Siberia. But there are the two-legged versions as well making their annual pilgrimage home from London and San Jose and Bengaluru. The clubs are jolly with ho-ho-ho Santas, the lines for plum cake are long, and there are Christmas lights up on the streets.
CAKES
But now the winters are shrinking. They come later and leave earlier. Sometimes it’s gone by the time the quilts are pulled out of storage and set out in the sun. People nostalgically remember winters of old when mothers sat in the afternoon sun knitting sweaters. Now it’s too warm to do that they lament.
This year has been an exception. Kolkata has been shivering for days in a cold spell with temperatures dropping to 10 degrees in the city and lower beyond. Even the street dogs are wearing raggedy “sweaters”.
But this is a different kind of cold than the ones we grew up with. With AQI shooting up to 200s and 300s, the air is consistently unhealthy. Vehicular emissions, construction dust, and biomass burning are the main culprits. The days are sunless, the city cloaked in grey. Kolkata’s air turns toxic but no one seems bothered though people complain about hacking coughs throats, itchy and teary eyes. But there’s yet another fair to go to. If they cannot have clean air, let them have fun fairs.
Once the great gift of winter in a city like Kolkata was it allowed us to enjoy the outdoors. Now as AQI levels cross 300, the very air outdoors feels far more dangerous than the him our mothers used to once warn us about.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW.