Non-Fiction
Let’s Talk About the Weather / Pragya Agarwal
Image by Grendel Khan via https///flic.kr/p/anekV
Cloudy, fair
Do. Do.
Do.do.
Fair, cloudy
Do. Snow
Do.
Fair.
Do.
I am looking at weather meteorological records in the UK from 1838, between March 26 to April 23, for a research project that I am currently working on. The weather is fair a lot of the time during this period. It is cloudy, snowy and windy. I ponder over the word do, which keeps repeating and I realise that it is for ditto. Ditto for the weather; repeating day after day. Most days are fair. Not too warm, not too cold. Just normal. A typical day. Not stormy, rainy or snowy.
A normal day. A fair day. A fair-weather day. I am not sure if I am having many of these right now. I long for a word for the storm raging inside me, this feeling of murkiness and melancholy, this simmering rage which rises like the morning mist and engulfs the sunshine, clouding it away. It has become my fair-weather friend, returning every day, steadfast and resolute. I miss it when I don’t feel this. And I crave calm when I do.
The day that I landed in the UK, almost twenty years ago, I noticed that people would say to me: ‘Isn’t it cold today?’ At the airport security, even before I had a chance to set foot in England, at the taxi rank, and at the train station. Then again as I would go into the shops to buy a newspaper and milk, or when I passed by the security office in my university accommodation. It was very cold, yes. But I was surprised at their surprise. Weren’t they expecting it to be cold? Was this an unusual day, a weather anomaly? I had looked at the weather patterns before I arrived in the UK, when I bought that bulky jacket in Delhi, when I packed so many sweaters in my heaving suitcases that I had to pay extra baggage at check-in. The woollens, and the books. I had bought too many books. Books always helped me when it was raining, or too cold, or stormy outside. So, I had known that it was going to be cold.
‘It is always cold in the UK,’ people kept reminding me back home, when I left. And they would pretend to shudder as if they could feel the cold in their bones 5000 miles away. ‘Make sure you have enough warm clothes,’ all the uncles and aunties reminded me as they came over to bid me goodbye. Not the first one in the family to travel overseas, but the first woman travelling alone. The distance across the seas seemed huge and insurmountable for them, sending me off on the winds to an unknown land where snow covered every corner, where it was so cold that all water had frozen over, and people had to only drink whiskey. That was what one of my elderly uncles told me the day before I was due to fly out, giving me permission to drink alcohol, if need be, if the weather demanded it.
Recently on our holiday in the Highlands in Scotland we visited a couple of whiskey distilleries, and to see the alchemy that results in the smoky golden liquid, oaky and fruity. Nectar of the Gods, one person tells me as we are tasting a range of drams in the little front room of the distillery before we go around on a tour to look at how different temperatures and pressures can change the flavour spectrum of the whiskey completely. The way barley is grown, the underground water table, the snow cover, the temperatures for the grains, all need precision and trust. Trust and faith in the weather being as it is expected to be. I can start to feel that magic, as I sit there swallowing tiny sips that begin to spread like warm fingers inside my chest, firing up dormant memories of my father who loved his whiskey, who probably loved it a bit too much, and how I have been, all my life, trying to escape the genetic alchemy that might have passed on the same obsession to me. Summer was beginning to grow and spread a golden glow across the courtyard, shadows flitting so that I had to step outside the shade into the tiny patch of sunlight to feel warmth rushing back into my toes, my head lifted up to the skies to feel some of that warmth on my face. I miss the vitamin D, the heat that buzzes through the hair and skin like jolts of electric charge that I used to hide away from back in India, fearing that I will turn a darker skin colour.
**
In India, there were four seasons: garmi, sardi, baarish, patjhad, all laid out through the year, the rhythm of our lives mapped out quite precisely onto the changing weather. In the summer, we packed away the woollens in the huge metal trunk that occupied so much of our back room, piled deep with the duvets and the thick blankets, coats and jackets along with naphthalene balls, meticulously laid out to hibernate. We would bring out the thinner razais made of muslin, and the linen sheets woven on handlooms that would be cool to touch even as our bodies flared up with the heat that wedged into every tiny corner of the house.
Hot to very hot, and uncomfortably hot. Those Indian summers of bright blinding sun, the lazy days of sitting indoors in the air-conditioned rooms, the evenings of going out for a walk in Lodhi Gardens. Watching the sun go down behind the old domes, the brick and mortar that has stood for centuries, stories embedded in each of them, whispering to each other in the dark. If only we could hear them, if only we could learn their language. That feeling of languidness, limbs like water, when it is neither day nor night, neither hot nor cold. That feeling of in-betweenness knowing that more exciting things were yet to happen, that they were bound to happen. Those evenings when I suddenly became most alive, even as I felt too exhausted to ever go out anywhere. Those evenings when I wanted to have and hold someone, to lean my head on their shoulders, to sit in silence while we traced our fingers on each other’s palms, to know and feel things that we didn’t have words for.
The Met Office Meteorological Glossary, first published in 1916, defines an Indian summer as ‘a warm, calm spell of weather occurring in autumn, especially in October and November.’ I remember seeing a painting by William Trost Richards from 1875, of a burnished part of the wood, all autumnal ember and russet, glowing against the low sun, casting deep shadows into the stream running nearby. The painting is titled ‘Indian Summer’. My Indian summers were never like this, they did not glow with such quiet restraint. They were times of restless energy, lethargic languor and agitated evenings where warm and cold would sit in discomfort together.
During Saawan, the months of July and August, the hot winds carrying dust storms from the Sahara would blow furiously across the concrete landscape, and my mother would go out in the evening muttering to herself as she swept away the dust from the front yard, and wiped her plants lovingly with a cloth, leaf by leaf, singing to them. And then soon after the intense blistering heat and dust storms, the heavens would burst, and the rains would come, with large heavy drops shattering to the ground in globous gulps, and we would eat pakoras and drink garam chai. I remember dancing and running in the rain with my two girl friends when we first arrived in the hostel for my undergraduate degree, first time away from home, and were asserting our right to be what we wanted to be away from what our parents thought we should be. We ran through the empty street, splashing in puddles, with our thin cotton salwar kameez soaked through to our skin. Even the catcalls, and whistles from wide hungry eyes couldn’t bother us that day as we inhaled the smell of the soil once the rain had calmed down, the fine drizzle exciting our skins, the pitter patter of the drops settling on our eyelids. I had felt the rain inside my heart that day, the water filling it up to the brim, as if it couldn’t take any more joy, but we let it spill out around us. Bollywood films had made me believe that this was truly the season of love and romance, of ardour and longing. And every time it rained, all of us, barely out of our teens, would put on Jagjeet Singh ghazals and sit around in a circle, feeling this desperate longing in our bones. The warm rain outside soothed the scorching earth, but set a flaming fire ablaze inside us, crackling with intense desire, unnamed and unattached. I think of it often when we have the fire blazing in our living room and it is raining outside, yet again, in this small town in the north-west of England, where I have put down roots, where it rains most of the time. I don’t jump into puddles now even when my children want me to. And it is a hassle to make the pakoras every time it rains, sometimes four or five times a day. The smell of the rain is mixed in with homesickness, a longing for home, even as I am home.
**
When I think of summer, I think of the Georgia O'Keeffe painting, Pelvis Series Red with Yellow: the rich golden yellow sky bursting forth from the red and orange shapes around the pelvic bone. I once cut out a picture from a magazine where O’Keeffe stands in front of this painting in the middle of a desert in New Mexico, the place where she lived and returned to look after her ailing husband. I would imagine her wandering around the desert at night alone, studying the animal bones that were scattered around the desert, these animals that once were but no more, just a part of the earth now. In this painting, she zooms in, no extraneous elements of the bone seen, only the curve and the hole. Something so dead, and yet there was the whole universe bursting forth so alive. Dead and alive. Lifeless and so full of life. Maybe when we zoom in, we really see life in something that seemed lifeless. Maybe when we get closer, we find that sunshine can burst forth from the relics of a past life. Maybe. But sometimes all we can see when we zoom in are shards of old bone. What if it rains every day and the sky is overcast?
As we take a ferry across to the Isle of Mull, the person handing out the tickets, with their broad sunny smile, and a yellow hat to shelter their face from the falling rain, says ‘it’s a wee bit dreich’ and suddenly I have a word for this incumbent feeling inside me. Always drizzly, never stopping. Relentless, and ever-present. As if suddenly, I can name the grief and anger that I have been carrying at the changing weather, at my nostalgic yearning for the places I had walked through the four seasons for the first twenty-odd years of my life in India, that had become coded into the map of my bones in the way that my father’s addiction had embedded into my genetic code, my father who died a year ago suddenly, unexpectedly. Poof. I have felt unanchored since losing that external navigational compass to align my body and mind to.
Maybe we do talk about the weather when we don’t want to talk about anything else.
Maybe we talk about the weather because there is so much to talk about.
Temperatures through the summer have been high, raining when it shouldn’t have, and scorching the next. There was rain on Greenland ice sheets for the first time ever. The ice sheet is melting, and the sea is rising.
Maybe I am looking for a map of the seasons to understand what kind of world I am going to be leaving behind for my children. Will this world hold still, or will it be submerged in the deluge of my anger at the way we are destroying this planet. I want to leave a compass for my children to orient their seasons with. But we seem to have lost our way somewhere along the way.
Maybe I am looking for a map of our seasons to understand whether I bring out the woollens from the trunk in the back room, the one which has all the thick coats that my father will never ever wear again. I feel disoriented, as if my body does not have a map anymore. I do not have the name for this sense of despair and wistfulness, stoked by the disconnect I feel from the weather around me. I can’t find the words for the melancholy that I am feeling.
Do.
Do.
Do.
Ditto.
Every day.