Hello Winter, my old friend

Winters appear differently in different lands. Having done a bit of traveling and also lived long enough to have 64 winters under my belt, there are some memories that are pleasant to share. Some are however not so.

Nobody  suffers from the cold as much as the poor do, so I can’t say that the wintry cold is a fixed reality. A Toronto winter is brutally cold but few can experience it because of all round  heating. Even the homeless drunks are rounded up and put in safe places There are both cold  and heat shelters in that city and alerts are sounded in case of every extreme weather.  Interestingly, it’s the ones with homes that are often the victims. There is nothing like a hot temper to kill you in extreme cold.

A wife had a fight with her husband and walked off to cool herself  at night. Soon of course she did, returned home and rang the bell. But the husband also in a huff locked the door and went to sleep and never heard her ring the bell till she could, and then collapsed due to hypothermia. Her body was discovered the next morning on the door step. Her own anger and her husband’s stupidity killed her and I really think it shows come what may, people will always act in ways that defy reason.  I would always expect the homeless would be found dead on the pavement like frozen sparrows but they never did. It was always the better off who died.

I was once In Moscow when elections were on to elect Yeltsin. It set a new bar on how corrupt elections could be with his aides visiting various offices and shops to collect money for the boss. Everyone paid and did so because the price for not paying was known to everyone. There were parties everywhere and drunks on the streets littering the snow but nothing stopped the collection. Some people asked me if I wanted women and that due to the cold, the price would be less. In that drunk city of snowy winter, the hands of despair were all around. My companion was taking me to my hotel in an unheated bus and my hands were getting stuck as I held the rails. He offered me vodka but I don’t drink. We entered the subway but he rushed out in panic, his face twisted by what he had seen inside. Later, he was to tell me that he had seen his University Professor’s wife begging inside. The breakdown had so many casualties in Moscow along with the new rich, their fancy cars, women, dachas. Not fond of that memory at all.

I was once in Muree Pakistan and remember how cold the unheated winter was. I got a cut and it would not heal with the split in the skin open and raw. But the people on the road sat around upturned metal korais baking bread and warming their hands in the painful cold. Kathmandu cold was kinder I suppose, but the sight of men and dogs huddled together and asleep near dead fires still carry a smell of a winter in a land I love. Waking up with a tingle in my hands from the cold, the first bubble of solar heated water and the pleasure of the first cup of tea with breakfast  is an enduring memory for me.

Dhaka winters also mean street scenes with makeshift shops offering chitoi, bhapa and other winter pithas. I had stood and bought most of my winter days as the family shops sold and bantered with the clients standing. The mud stove with the wood shavings give off a heat that is so pleasant in the cold that one is grateful to be alive. The food becomes only an excuse to taste the many shades of winter in a strange and dusty city, looking so much like us, a little ugly, a bit bewildered but always ready to laugh and smile.

But I suppose the best winter will always be that of 1971 although there had been so much suffering, killing, sacrificing and traumas that would never go away. I remember Dhaka as it changed hands, listening to the footsteps of the retreating Pakistani soldiers and waiting for other footsteps as freedom was dawning. In the late evening, on 16^th December Dhaka was wild with joy. Freedom fighters walked on the road, Indian soldiers marched on the road, people walked on the road and the air was rent with slogans of Victory and relief. There was no fear, no agony with only a dead, horrific and shackled past to bury  and a future to look forward to. That kind of  a future never dawned but that winter in that moment was the finest of them all.