Winter in Delhi

One of the reasons that I love living in Delhi - all right, NCR - despite all its many shortcomings and hassles is the glorious change of seasons. I am a person who likes and revels in change - if things stay the same for too long, I get restless. I'd hate to live in a place where the weather is the same, so you don't know if you're in March or May. Delhi with its four definite seasons and a different mood for every month just suits me.

In the winter, Delhi is a different city to the dun-coloured, dust-ridden one it is in the summer. You wake up to an intensely cold morning, and despite having gotten a good nine hours of sleep, it feels like you just went to bed. You burrow into your many layers of thick razais some more, wanting to snatch yet another twenty winks. It's gray outside and so foggy you can barely see the ship building which in summer is like the lighthouse marker to your home. You can see the fluffy angora fog sitting on its haunches on your terrace as you step out of your warm bedroom. You shiver, wrap the shawl around you one more fold and ask for more hot ginger chai, its steam mingling with the steam issuing from your mouth.

The bathroom feels icy-cold, despite the rod heater that has been on since morning to try and warm it up. The water is like ice, instantly freezing your hands into claws useless for so much as holding a toothbrush. As the blood thaws after a while, you rediscover the joys of opposable thumbs. Undressing to have your bath or change clothes is a form of exquisite torture, as the cold air delights in springing at your icy back. Goosebumps appear all over you, in the mere instant it takes for you to jump into the tub and hurl a mug of hot water at yourself. The dry cold of Delhi necessitates copious anointing of moisturiser but the prospect of staying bare for the time it takes you to smoothen some on is daunting.

Food cools in seconds, so in the time between your first and second bites of breakfast, you have moved from having a hot meal to a cold one. You layer on a warm vest and a thick sweater, followed by a jacket or coat. Make-up actually stays on your face in this weather, so you take a few minutes to slather it on. You discover you do have a face, after all.

The temperature slowly drops lower and lower as the year draws to a close. I remember college days when we had to take the college special bus. A whole gang of us would congregate at the bus stop, looking like mummies in our multiple layers of clothing. Gloves, wool socks and caps or scarves would be brought out. We would stamp out feet up and down and snuggle deeper into our jackets or shawls waiting for the bus. The bus never had a door which could close, and the windows never shut fully. So once the bus started, blasts of icy-cold wind would come in, making us shiver all the more.

One winter evening, we were invited to some cultural performance. My uncle and cousin, both unused to Delhi winter, were visiting and we decided to go and see the performance. We spent a sum total of about 2 minutes at the show, since it was held outdoors. It took us more time to come and go from there. Later we discovered the temperature had touched a new low of 0.25 degrees that evening!

Traffic seems thicker and more congested in winter, for some reason. The warm blast of the car heater pointed at your frozen toes is like a benison. You peer anxiously through the swirls of traffic to discern traffic signals and other vehicles. The Delhi fog has only grown worse over the years...

The fog can be so thick that you completely lose your bearings. One winter, we had gone out to a friend's home for Christmas dinner. The place was barely fifteen minutes away but by the time we emerged at 10:30 pm, the roads were blanketed with fog. Nothing was visible, not even the car which was parked right outside the front door. Those were the days when Delhi had no night life, so by this time the roads were completely deserted. Dad had to walk by the road divider, holding on to it with one hand and to the car with the other to guide us back home, while Sohan Singh, our beloved driver, drove at about 5 kmph all the way home. One morning, during my sister's pre-board exams, Dad had to drop her off to school - about 5 km away. The fog was so thick, even at 9 in the morning, that the two of them got completely lost and reached a good one hour late for her 10 am exam. Once when A and I had stepped out for a New Year's Eve party, we were driving from Vasant Vihar to Saket. Suddenly we saw that the lights of nearby houses were below us rather than on the same level - we were on a flyover. That's how we realised we had wound up near GK II, thanks to the fog.

Winter afternoons were chunks of time stolen from a magical place. Back when we lived in Pandara Road, all the neighbours would pull their charpoys into the common garden in between two rows of houses. They would busily knit - those were the days before readymade sweaters - and gossip together, exchanging sweater patterns and news while munching on puffed lotus seeds, chikki and revadi. All the kids would sprawl in the warm sunshine which was still cool because of the breeze that blew in from snow-laden Shimla, apple-cheeked and drowsy from the sun. Later, we had a house with a front verandah all glassed in, which caught a wonderful amount of sun in winters. We put a couple of comfy divans and a hammock into this porch and it became the family room through the winter, as it would stay warm till about 5 in the evening.

It gets dark early in Delhi winters, by 5 o'clock, and home seems all the more cozy. We used to light ineffective blowers or rod heaters to warm our chilly feet, and the family would huddle all the closer in the raw evenings. We would fight at the dinner table to sit closer to the blower. Now we have oil-filled radiators which keep the home nice and warm. But the first leap into bed, after drawing back the quilts, is still exquisite agony as you are greeted by the cold sheets which only gradually warm up. Mom had a good way of escaping this torture - when she came into the bedroom, usually a good half hour after everyone else had gotten into bed since she'd be busy preparing for the next morning, she'd ask dad to move to the other side of the bed!

Dad used to help us warm our beds by heating up water at night and pouring it into flat glass bottles which we used instead of the rubber hot water bottles which never made much impact. These would stay hot for ages. Even earlier, way back in the 70's, dad would get brick halves which would be heated on the gas range and wrapped up in soft cloth, and insert these into each bed a good hour before we went to bed so the bed would be all toasty. In the evenings, he would brew up a posset of hot rum, with honey, lemon, cinnamon and cloves and some hot water, to warm us from the inside. Every so often, mom would find that this made her too tipsy to get dinner ready, so dad would take over the kitchen for the evening.

Late evenings, the neighbourhood would frequently gather around a bonfire or an angeethi, particularly around New Year's Eve. We would throw in peanuts and corn kernels to roast them in the fire, and eat them, carefully raked out and blown upon, still hot from the fire. One winter, while I was still in college, dad who used to be rather strict had not let me go out to attend any parties. We had a dinner party at home with family friends etc. My friends promised to come over after the party. We had laid the makings of a bonfire near the house. The gang vroomed up on mobikes and cars around 2 am. I had been lying awake waiting for them. I ran out, armed with cake and my guitar. We struggled with the bonfire and eventually got it alight. My singer friend, after conspicuously blowing upon his chilled hands to warm them up, tuned up the guitar. We all curled up around the hot bonfire which was shooting sparks up towards the sky, the notes of the music lingering in the still, dark night...