Winter In Goa.

          My New Year memories 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 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 blisters, fires and cancer (I’m told, 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 used as a mattress. The latter I’d left behind for the next tenant in the house I lived in. Sri Husband’s nomadic job made us set up home in several remote corners of India. Our weekly ration of an approximately 20 kg chunk of coal was dragged over the quarter kilometre ‘kacchaa’ lane that led to our house from the main road. By candle-light (the voltage, whenever we had ‘current’, hovered around 40 watts), we hammered it into manageable pieces to feed the ‘bukhari’. Sometimes we injured our fingers.

Winter thoughts: our soldiers at the border live (and sometimes die) in extreme discomfort so we can enjoy our parties, crib about the government, do our own thing.

          Winter memories: carts loaded with juicy crimson carrots, fresh peas, cauliflowers the size of my head, so much home-grown spinach that neighbours who grew it in their yards gifted away big bunches to passers-by. Mounds of tomatoes. Cracked heels, cracked lips, steaming adrak-ki-chai, women clerks in offices speedily knitting something instead of putting fingers to keyboard. Fog.

Goan winter: 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, ‘socked’ (accurate Goan term) feet. Fingers tucked into folded elbow.

“Bai,” she says, “Cold, no?”

          I nod, whilst I untangle a kink out of a stiff plastic pipe.

The poder comes along, ‘monkey-cap’ on head.

Neighbour 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. 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 shaken, a white substance floated to the statue’s head, and slowly floated to its feet. “Snow,” proclaims this true-blue Goan. “I have it in my show-case.”

          I tell her about the extreme conditions our soldiers live in, in Siachen.

She tells me 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: “The Himalaya is so cold that the soft snow on the ground hardens into ice.”

I know, her eyes tell me; she says: “Ice? Lots in my freezer. We don’t use it because of sore-throat-problem.” Then adds: “But you won’t fall sick, this early morning oxygen is good for health.” Her yoga teacher said so.

I try again: “There are places colder than Goa.” (What is wrong with me?) She quickly gets and triumphantly waves a newspaper at me. A headline says something about ‘coldest night’ hereabouts. I shut up.

          I recall bygone debates about non-use of geysers in bathrooms and wearing (artificial) leather jackets on motorcycles so that you didn’t get the sniffles, 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 below 3 degrees Celsius.

          I shut the windows at bed-time and wrap myself at bedtime. I remember I own a pair of woollen, ankle-length and leather-soled ‘Santa-shoes’, with white bobs at the ends of the laces. I wear them. My south-west-coast blood is warm. 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 2015 everybody. Belated doesn’t matter, does it?

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