Enter, the winter

In Delhi, winter comes into our lives with padded feet, silently, as if it wants to surprise you with a nice cold hug when you are not looki...

In Delhi, winter comes into our lives with padded feet, silently, as if it wants to surprise you with a nice cold hug when you are not looking. At one moment, the sun is shining bright and hot in a shimmery, bluey sky; at the next, the world and its chachaji are ensconced in wool sneezing into their handkerchiefs as if there was no tomorrow. So we in this city have through years of training learnt to keep a sharp look out for this tricky moment of passage. So how do we know it’s winter? Well, let me count the ways…

• We know it is winter when tractors splutter in from neighbouring villages, trailing piles of cauliflower as they come. Cauliflower that will, quick as a flash, be diced and spiced and placed in the little tiffin carriers that Delhi’s vast army of the cycle-borne — government peons and office clerks, petrol pump attendants and car mechanics, tenders of gardens and painters of walls, dyers and darners and all the miscellaneous arms and feet that keep the gargantuan metropolis moving — will have carefully tied to their handlebars so that the dal doesn’t spill.

• We know it is winter when the heat of summer that had all but desiccated us and which we had assumed will ride us to our deaths, suddenly disappears to be replaced by a softest, faintest tune of coolness that plays in the air.

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• We know it is winter when the Winter Session of Parliament is officially announced and our MPs, whose existence we had quite happily forgotten about, troop in like schoolboys back from their vacations and promptly settle down to trading blows. This ceremony of return, incidentally, occurs at the precise time that the cattle fair in Pushkar gets under way, with its fine show of horses and asses, hooves and hides. Of course, any resemblance between the two specimens of animate matter is strictly coincidental.

• We know it is winter when Sonia Gandhi’s marvellous collection of shawls gets an airing and A.B. Vajpayee appears in his generously proportioned woollen waistcoats which appear to have grown wider since we last saw them.

• We know it is winter when chrysanthemums start sprouting little buds held tightly in their green fists, which will soon reveal themselves in bright splashes of white, pink, yellow and maroon, and the gladioli get plump as they await their moment of flowering.

• We know it is winter when the garage clinics of the friendly neighbourhood physicians, or garage me(di)chanics as they can be termed, suddenly fill up with bodies that are racked by coughs and asthmatic wheezing, and the compounder behind a plywood counter dispenses nine lots of three pills, red, white and yellow, to be taken morning, noon and night for three days, after which they’ll have to return for ‘‘check up’’.

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• We know it is winter when the chickens of Delhi are converted into chicken tikkas and kebabs, or are impaled on the iron rods of the local dhaba like Moulin Rouge dancers with their limbs akimbo.

• We know it is winter when the woollens are brought out from trunks that smell of naphthalene and summer hibernation, even as the mulmuls and organdies, the cambric and the voiles take their place in the grateful dark.

• We know it is winter when the water from taps appear to have emerged from Himalayan glaciers and freshly harvested and roasted peanuts appear on city pavements, gently heated by the warmth of the brazier’s underbelly.

• Most of all, we know it is winter when we get nostalgic for the warmth of summer with its supply of hot water around the clock and exuberant sunshine.