Seasons’ greetings

In north India the yearly changes of weather are marked by rites of ceremonial passage

In north India, spring is a brief interlude between the chill of winter and searing summer. Trees shed their cloaks of leaves and prepare for the heat to come. As though in mimicry, Bunny and I engage in the annual rite of retiring winter clothing into mothballed hibernation.

The exercise is punctuated with exclamatory observations. Can you believe this sweater is forty-five years old! I didn’t get to wear this coat all winter, it just didn’t get cold enough!

Where are the snows of yesteryear? asked the poet. In more prosaic vein we wonder where are the winters of yesteryear? Whether it’s climate change or the heat island effect, winters in Gurgaon, where we live, have lost some of their wintriness.

There is still, however, a distinct division between the nose-tingling nip of winter air, polluted as it is, and the furnace heat of summer.

The coming of summer has its compensations. Soon, the amaltas that slept through the winter will waken into bloom, its branches laden with golden clusters, aglow with entrapped sun.

Summer is also the season of mangoes, the Chausa and the Gulab Khaas, summer’s fury wooed to sweet succulence in their flesh.

And when it seems that the scorched earth can bear the rage of the sun no more, the blessed rains of the monsoon will hopefully come, drenching the parched ground and exuding a smell like no other, which has given the English language that most evocative of words, petrichor.

When the rains depart, leaving behind memories of replenished greenness and waterlogged traffic jams, the days will dwindle towards the ember months, Nov and Dec, and it’ll be time to exhume our winter clothes again.

I sometimes think of what it would be like to live in a place where it’s never too hot or too cold, never too wet or too dry, and earthly Eden of perfect weather.

Sounds idyllic, but I suspect I’d miss the repeated cycle of unchanging change, of renewed seasons bringing with them their own greetings, and their message of the permanence of impermanence.