The White Wonderland

It started like any other day of the wintertide. The by lanes of the hill town were their usual self in the morning; speckled with dry leaves of various hues of orange and yellow, crackling under the feet and rustling in the soft gushes of cold air sweeping the seldomly cleaned trails. It seemed they were chattering indistinctly, narrating their tales of glory of by-gone ages, of weathering the most appalling of storms in the rainy season, of hosting the most sparkling bird on their stalks in the spring and of full moons brilliantly silvering their slender fringes in the starry clear skies of the summer; yet castigating the winters in the same breath for the miseries brought upon them. A pair of streaked laughingthrushes foraged the shrivelled foliage for insects along a dirt track going uphill from the narrow tarred path. The golden sea of sunlight had filled up the valley and had reminded, like every day, the people living on the shadowy sides of the hills of their abject indigence.

The grind of the day’s work soon took over and I spent the day like all others; buried in inconsequential labour. The day seemed a bit unusual towards the evening when the unswerving radiant heaters of the good old Armsdale* started faltering and were no longer able to contain the dip in mercury. I took a quick glance outside the window and saw the clouds gathering together and trying to jostle the sun into obscurity. I tugged off a frayed muffler from my bag, loosely tied it to my neck and pulled my coat tight around my waist; only to clutter myself once again with the insignificant errands. When the cold finally became unbearable, I collected my stuff and started my long march back home. It was much much colder than I had expected, when I stepped out of the snug environs of the building. The sky was as dark as slate, except a narrow strand of saffron on horizon which the sun was permitted to paint on the canvas which belonged to the clouds exclusively that dusk. The icy cold gusts of wind blew straight into my face and I could feel the jack frost nipping at my nose. The flimsy denuded branches of the trees swayed to the command of capricious and howling gales.

I hurried to the warmth of my home, only to find my family huddled under two layers of quilt. ‘Was it going to snow?’ my better half questioned me. It was then that it dawned to me that it might even snow in this early part of the season. She had never seen snow falling and the rest of the evening we spent talking about how the snow grows on you silently and how it transforms a familiar landscape into something entirely magical. We checked the accuweather umpteen times in hope of a prediction of a snowfall. The excitement in the household was palpable and visible.

“I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says ‘Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.’ And when they wake up in the summer, Kitty, they dress themselves all in green, and dance about – whenever the wind blows.”

The next morning was a bit different. The weatherman was right. The snow had silenced the rumble of the dried leaves, the valley was covered in silverine sea and the mighty deodars stood even taller, taking the weight of the snow on their robust shoulders. The lone familiar sight was the laughingthrushes scouring the brown earth at the base of the deodars.

*Armsdale – Himachal Pradesh Secretariat building at Shimla