(21 May ‘08)
There’s a rumour that the monsoons
are going to be ‘very cold’. Last December, Goa had a real ‘winter’. Goenkars
claimed even their didn’t work in such conditions, and as for their efficiency
(the staff’s, not the watches’), floods, rains, earthquakes have never stopped
them from cooking their xeet kodi, but a temperature drop? That was something
else. Goenkars are a warm lot. Anything less than twenty degrees decreases
their ability to think, and motivates them to do anything but work. You need to
sweat to work here, not the other way around.
Colleagues tell me last winter the
lowest temperature was ‘eight point five degrees Celsius’; that takes me back
to Srinagar. Every evening, we lit a candle at dinner time. The voltage,
whenever we had electricity, made every 100 watt bulb look like it’d come from
the hinterlands of Bihar or U. P., looking for rozgaar. Gloomy and cheerless. The coal-heater, known as a bukhari, if you didn’t feed and nurture
it well, simple killed you off with odourless, colourless carbon monoxide. The
coal that had to be used came in the form of a single large lump of rock
weighing some fifteen kilos (government ration stuff) which had to be dragged
half a kilometer from the main road where the bus dropped my husband off. We’d
sit together, me cooking on our solitary kerosene wick-stove and keeping an eye
on the toddler, the husband systematically breaking to manageable bits the lump
that would be used as fuel to warm us. Much of those lumps crumbled to powder
that, when the bukhari belched out
the smoke, added a daily layer of soot to the already very black walls. The
ceiling was low, the windows didn’t seal, and small clouds of angry mosquitoes
would attack us. Once their bellies were full, they’d go to the ceiling to rest
before the next sortie. That’s when we could smack them dead with a chappal.
Over the season, there were plenty of footprints up on the sooty ceiling.
My Goan blood never got used to
winders. “Banihal bandh hai” meant
the markets were empty. Our gracious landlady gave us a portion of her stored
vegetables. Like we dry bombils, bangda and
shark for the monsoon months, the Kashmiris dry slices of brinjals, gourds and
other vegetables, and stock them in ‘garlands’ for the lean season.
The worst days were when the minimum and
maximum hovered around zero, and the snow turned to gooey slush. One had to
allow the tap to drip a bit through the night so that the water in the pipes
wouldn’t freeze. Otherwise the expansion caused by the solidifying liquid burst
them.
We lived in Punjab through its
curfew years. The cheery sight of stretches of golden mustard fields did
nothing to dispel the ache in the bones. I remember the washing lying out at
night, stiff and white with frost next morning; the husband removing his helmet
to reveal specks of tiny icicles on the brows and lashes.
In the uttar-most part of Uttar Pradesh, it’s the season of abundance. A
strong memory is of a neighbour stopping our car, standing in the middle of the
road, her arms laden with leafy vegetables, forcing us to accept them, whether
or not we could consume them. “Give them to your favourite charity,” she said,
“Mine doesn’t want any more of these. They’re happier with their dal-kaanji.”
Rajasthan is cruelly cold at night,
but the daytimes are kind and pleasant. Nevertheless, the candle-lit dinners
were a necessity, the reason being no electricity, not romance. Down south, the
Tamilians lived simple lives because their climate allowed it, we thought. One
could live on fewer clothes, lighter meals. We were wrong. The day we arrived
in Wellington, near Ooty, (it’s something to do with my behaviour in my pichla janam, for wherever I go, I
welcome the coldest season in forty years), the dew poured like it was rain,
and the temperature was below eight point five.
A recent tv show that I’d seen told
me about the rough time the locals in the north eastern states have in winters.
My sympathy stretched to the men in uniform, our soldiers at high altitude, in
desperate conditions, fighting for their lives, for the country, for our
freedom of speech and activity, … and as I write this article, for a fair deal
in the VI Pay Commission…keeping themselves warm with whatever sub-standard
equipment our politicians have doled out. Every candle-lit dinner that I have,
I think of them, in that miserable cold, forgotten by an ungrateful country.
Those who’ve retired after having served the nation are mostly living in the
villages, dependent on their grandchildren, worrying about their pensions. Do
we care? Do we know how many Goan soldiers are living thus? They have brought
glory and honour to the state. We need to support them in their quest for a
fair pension. This is a country-wide movement that’s happening. Let Goans take
the lead in it.
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