Winter is Coming

My earliest recollection of winter is a mixture of pleasure and sadness. I remember tears of pure agony streaming down my face and freezing quickly as I ruffled the snow manically in vain to find my favorite mitten, which was ever so unmercifully cast into the white void by a Russian boy of equal age but unfairly unequal strength. His aide was a foot taller than me, and assisted in keeping me at bay as I flayed my arms in retaliation. Play school was a rough world. I never found that lost mitten, and have archived this event as my first experience of heartbreak. A child doesn’t quite differentiate between love and materialism in the context of wool. When I think of the pain I felt and the guilt that soon followed, considering I was explicitly told not to lose my mittens, I draw up on a huge well of my intrinsic capability to feel. The mitten robbing incident, ironically, robbed me of the unadulterated joy only a child could feel upon being let loose in freshly fallen two foot high snow.

The next memory of winter that surfaces is the one of me walking in the dark in the park, holding my father’s hand, and being told to look up at the stars. What I saw was breathtaking, and I feel that feeling even now – I saw a pitch black sky silhouetted by street lights, pin-pricked with stars, and snowflakes the size of umbrellas falling on my face. Size exaggeration apart (I was a small kid with a huge imagination), it felt fantastic to hold a snowflake for just that one second, watch it disappear, and wonder why it disappeared into a drop of water. The science behind it all eluded me then, and I yearn for the magic I once felt.

I snap to the next memory of winter – a stark contrast to the sadness and beauty of the earlier memories I had. To contextualize the older memories, I’d say that that those were of the first true Russian winters we had experienced as a family, and times were rough then. My family had just moved to Moscow and the ’90s weren’t exactly easy to manage for a new Indian family in the ruthless Russian winter and economy. Toboggans define snow based liberation. The quintessential wooden seat on two metal rails, and a rope to pull it with– I had it all. What pure genius this device was. Is.

Sliding down a slope at breakneck speeds screaming in joy is very well balanced by the sweat and sometimes tears it takes to haul the thing back up the slope on the snowy side. I think those were my first conscious self-taught lessons in humility. But one never questioned worth of it all, except for, “Is the slope fast enough?” I remember looking at those hillsides in summer and spring and wondering where the shrubs disappeared during winter, and asking my nanny whether it would snow soon, so I could go sledding again. Life had a single speed-oriented snow-based purpose back then.

The strangest feeling I felt in the cold of the winter was the warmth of sliding down an icy slope in snow pants. I remember my nanny’s amusement at my endearing confusion when I told her what I felt. She tried explaining it to me to appease me, but the urge to feel the feeling again overcame my curiosity every single time, and I’d throw myself face first down the slope. “Friction causes heat“, I learnt a few years later, and I remember eagerly waiting to tell my mother that I’d figured out why my pants heated up as I slid down a slope of ice. She agreed. It was scientific magic.

I built my first snowman with two people I hold very close to my heart – Dego and Chaku were visiting us in winter for the purpose of experiencing snow. Late into November, there was no trace of the magical whiteness, and all seemed to be lost. They came. They saw. Nothing.  And the next morning, the ‘adults’ in the family (we had gotten around to calling our parents that by then) were experiencing a role reversal – I can now fully identify with the excitement they felt at waking up and seeing three feet of fluffy snow – and getting us out of the bed and towards the window and then into our warm clothing and then into the snow. Even the sun shone through winter’s bleakness. What a magical morning that was!

In my world view, snowmen don’t fit into the magic of snow. It takes effort, planning and weight lifting to develop this transient being. D, C and I decided to test our engineering skills in the snowman department, and landed up snowballing a snowball into an enormous four foot wide avalanche worthy snowball. This took half a day, and we had (technically) only just begun. Suffice to say, we gave up after rolling up some more slushy snow (which packs very well, unlike the fluffy snow), stood on these pedestals and struck mighty poses. I imagine those snowballs we made are still melting away slowly somewhere.