Growing up in Delhi, I felt vaguely superior to people who lived in India's other metropolitan cities because we had winters and they didn't. There was Bombay which basically did hot and wet. Madras just did hot. Calcutta, where I had lived as a child, pretended to shiver in a cold season it didn't actually have.
The case against the Bengali monkey cap isn't just that it's absurd to swaddle your face in wool in balmy spring weather; it's also the dumpiness of it. The balaclava, from which the monkey cap is presumably derived, has a vulgar glamour to it: the sporting cool of a hooded skier careening downhill or the criminal chic of an anonymised terrorist making sinister demands in a voice muffled by a mask. The Bengali variant, however, makes young children look like their dadus; this is not a good look. Even Dharmendra, the hunkiest hero in the history of Hindi cinema, couldn't transcend its essential dowdiness when he wore it in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Chupke Chupke. He looked better than most, though; he looked as if he was auditioning for Hanuman.
The alert reader will have noticed that I haven't mentioned Bangalore in this short list of Indian metropolises. This is because in the Sixties, when I was a child, Bangalore wasn't an Indian metropolis. It was a pleasant provincial town, the love-child of an affair between a large cantonment and a low hill station. Like Madras, Bangalore had one season all year but instead of Madras's endless armpit summer, it specialized in spring. Weirdly, the only two hot months in Bangalore's calendar, March and April, happened when the rest of the world was doing spring.
Delhi's winters were wonderful because they seemed full of possibilities, unlike its summers which flattened the city into inertness. There was the kohra, or fog, that descended on winter mornings, slowed the bus down to a crawl and held out the slender hope that we might never reach school. The condensation that curled out of our mouths like cigarette smoke on really cold days was a preview of grown-up-ness.
Delhi's winter gave us bragging rights to extreme weather because in its own way it was really cold, colder even than the snow-bound Western winters we saw in the movies. Delhi was colder than London or New York because people there had central heating... and we did not. I remember the winter of '73 when I was cramming for my school-leaving exams and the mercury dropped to two degrees Celsius. Toes on the grill of the newly acquired blower heater, I tried to keep Rashtrakutas and Gurjara Pratiharas apart in my mind while also memorizing the many differences between a partnership and a joint-stock company. How many of the people in Calcutta or Bombay or Madras can honestly begin a memory with 'I remember the winter of...'? Not many.
How do the natives of these cities respond to films or television serials set in really cold places? What do they make of them? When someone in Bandra watches Fargo, a television drama set in the frozen wastes of mid-western Minnesota, is the cold received as a placeholder for not-hot? When a teen in Mylapore, sweating in boxers, binge-watches Game of Thrones, especially the scenes set around that icy northern boundary, the Wall, how does he know what to feel in the absence of experience, short of exposing himself to an open fridge or extreme air-conditioning? When the gathering apocalypse in Game of Thrones, the foreboding that a big freeze is imminent and with it an invasion of the undead, is expressed in that resonant whispered phrase, 'Winter is coming', what goes through the minds of mamis in Matunga? Cubes, trays, freezers?
To those who might, at this point, charge me with literalism and the discounting of imagination which-is-the-true-stuff-of-fiction etc., I will cite the greatest opening sentence in the history of the novel: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." To return to the point I made at the beginning of this column, thanks to winter, we Delhi wallahs had no need to make a special journey to discover the prior condition for ice, namely the cold.
However superior Delhi's citizens might have felt to Indians elsewhere, by the logic of their own argument, natives of colder cities abroad had a truer understanding of winter and wintery-ness than they did. I remember my excitement when, at the age of fourteen, I flew to Tehran in December to visit my parents: the strangeness of snow falling, black ice underfoot and rich women in furs. When I returned to school in Delhi and tried to explain to my friends what Iran had been like, I went on for a bit about the many-storeyed departmental stores that I'd never seen in India, the brilliance of the Shah's crown jewels on display in the subterranean vaults of the Bank Melli, the smell of its flat breads and the chicken, weirdly stewed in pomegranate juice, that I had eaten in Isfahan. Then, tired of detailing one thing after another, I stopped and said: it's like a hill station.
It wasn't, of course, the least bit like a hill station, but I think my friends knew what I meant: cold, iced over, not like a normal place. Which is, after all, what a hill station was designed to be: not-India. The only reason Simla had once been India's summer capital was that it didn't have India's summer. For many of us our first experience of encompassing foreignness was a hill station and the most alien and valuable thing about it was its coldness. When I see boys in monkey caps or young women in knee-boots in not very cold weather, I realize that they inhabit the idea of winter, not its reality, that cold is something to be aspired to, not endured. As L.P. Hartley might have said (but didn't), winter is a foreign country: we get there by doing things differently.
