Winter In Goa.

(5 Jan ’13)

            My memories of New Year’s Eves away from my home state are of thick woollen coats, prickly inner garments, warm shawls, and painful toes and fingers. I have lived much of my adult life in North India, where temperatures hover in the single digits at this time of the year.  I couldn’t have survived without the tent-like pherans in Kashmir, inside which I hugged both son and kangdi together. The latter is a matka housed in a cane basket. Inside the kandgi are kept live, glowing coals, quite dangerous to hold against skin and kid, can and do cause fires and cancer (when used over long years). But for me, ignorance was bliss. The heat it generated was more bliss.

Words like razai and bukhari make no sense in Goa. The former my aunt uses as a mattress. The latter I left behind for the next tenant in the house I lived in. As the government of India had ‘posted’ us in that cold place, it weekly rationed us a big (approx.) 20 kg chunk of coal which we used to drag over the quarter kilometre kacchaa lane that led to our house from the main road. By candle-light (because the voltage, whenever we had ‘current’, was seldom over 40 watts), we hit at it with a hammer to break it into manageable pieces to feed the bukhari. Sometimes we missed our target and injured one of our fingers.

Painful memories of winter.

They take my thoughts to our soldiers at the border who bravely live (and sometimes die) there in extreme discomfort so that we can earn a living, crib about the government, be a democracy. My deep thanks to them.

            Other memories: carts loaded with juicy red (not orange) carrots, fresh peas, cauliflowers the size of my head, so much spinach that those who grew them in their yards stood in the middle of traffic on the road and gifted away big bunches to drivers of cars that stopped. Mountains of tomatoes. Cracked heels, cracked lips, adrak ki chai (ginger-flavoured tea doesn’t sound or taste the same, does it?), women clerks in offices speedily knitting something instead of putting fingers to keyboard. Fogs and mists.

My Goan blood hates low temperatures.  These days, it’s ‘cold’ in Sangolda. One neighbour politely wishes me good morning through chattering teeth, head covered by an acrylic-wool shawl, upper limbs enveloped in two layers of husband’s long-sleeved shirts, brand new canvas shoes firmly on socked (sic, but that’s how we talk hereabouts) feet.  Her hands are folded, fingers tucked into elbow folds. “Bai,” she says by way of conversation. “Cold, no?”

            I’m busy bending, stretching, untangling a kink out of a stiff plastic pipe. Yes, I tell her.

The poder comes along, ‘monkey-cap’ protecting his head from frost and chill. She feels sorry for him and reflects a second “Cold, no?” towards me.

            I stupidly decide to educate her about the temperatures in the Himalayas, Kashmir, the North-East, even neighbouring Belgaum. Blank stare. I tell her about snow. She has her aha moment: she’s seen snow. Her cousin from Canada had come via New York once, bought her a transparent globe with a ‘Statue of Liberty’ inside it, floating in clear fluid. When the globe was shaken, a white substance floated to the statue’s head, and slowly floated to its feet. “Snow,” says my true-blue Goan friend. “I have it in my show-case.”

            I tell her about the extreme conditions our soldiers live in, in Siachen. She tells me how her arthritis improves with a khare udak  dip in the Baga waters in late February. “Our bhangrachey soil and the cold-cold waters of the sea at this time of the year make miracles, haan.”

            I don’t give up. I tell her: “The Himalaya is so cold that the soft snow on the ground hardens into ice.” I know, her eyes tell me; she responds: “Ice? In my freezer, lots of cubes, but they give us sore throats, so we don’t use them.” Then adds: “But you won’t fall sick, this early morning oxygen is good for health.” Her yoga teacher said so.

I try to convince her that there are places colder than Goa. (What is wrong with me?) She quickly goes into her house and triumphantly waves a newspaper at me. A headline says something about ‘coldest night in five years in Mollem’. I shut up.

            I recall a debate about use of geysers in the bathrooms and wearing (artificial) leather jackets on motorcycles so that you don’t get the sniffles, sore throat, joint pain, headaches, fever, the runs, etc. Another trick: Hot milk with sugar and haldi consumed first thing in the morning, last thing at night. I guess the nausea it gives rise to makes you forget all discomfort due to 17 degrees Celsius.

            Whilst wrapping myself up at bed-time, good Goan that I am, I remember that my offspring brought for me a pair of pretty woollen ‘Santa-shoes’, with white bobs at the ends of the laces, ankle-length and leather-soled. I wear them through the night. My south-west-coast blood is warm and any temperature in the teens reminds me ‘it’s winter’.

            Whichever part of the world you belong to: the cold northern hemisphere or the sunny southern one, happy 2014 everybody, belated doesn’t matter, does it?

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