Experiencing Snowfall
Finally, at age 36, I get to know the feeling of falling
snow, that for Kashmiri dna is really belated and delayed in every way.
However, I have seen snow already fallen and collected. For the first time as a
child with the army family in the early 80s to a mountain pass, the Nathula
Pass on a high altitude where huge amounts of snow covered everything in sight.
I saw collected snow once more at
a trek where my sister took me along to a glacier in the Garhwal himalayas. There was no snowfall at the time, our family first visited Kashmir as children on a summer trip. In all those years of the smoldering heat of
the 80s and 90s in New Delhi we were fed heaps of ice cream to make up for the
lack of snowfall around us by parents who grew up mixing fresh snow with milk
and sugar. But it never really made up for looking at the world around covered
in snow.
In all those years of the Delhi heat in summers, I ran to the freezer
and rubbed several pieces of ice on myself and the cold air of the freezer with
its door open made up for icy cold wind breath, it really felt my brain wanted
to extract out the moisture and wetness it should have felt through rain, air
and snow through my own self. In the
rooms of Delhi homes, when light rays shone in through windows they lit up
dancing dust particles, I looked at them very often and imagined maybe falling
snow would look like that.
I have looked through several window frames hoping
for snow to fall outside. In Delhi the
window opened to a road and the same set of trees and still weather.
In
Melbourne in 2001, the window brought colourful birds twittering and breeze and
sun.
In Pune in 2004 I sprayed off lots of fake snow through snow spray cans. In
Mumbai, the window opened to lots of air and sun and I kept sourcing
photographs of snow from Kashmir online.
In 2011, I finally visited Srinagar in Kashmir on my own and there was already fallen snow all around.
In 2016 I visited Kashmir again to seen fallen snow on its greens. But It’s only now that I ever looked through a window and saw snow falling outside of it, in the Indian hills in Himachal for a 3 day visit with my Kashmiri parents.
- I don’t know how snow falls in other countries. Maybe the feeling of snowfall anywhere is the same. The sky darkens, the breeze begins, a few drops of rain soon turn into pieces of snow, soft and gentle like our kashmiri skin that was made to breathe the moisture of snow and rain and feels really unhappy without encountering any. Rain is noisy, but snow is silent so it gently and silently settles onto everywhere it falls. Walking in a little snowfall, did no harm but when the amount of snow falling became heavier it is time to be indoors. The sky is grey and the falling snow obviously only adds its grey cover over the entire area, there is low visibility outside. Soon, by evening it’s dark and silent. The next morning, really early, the sky turns a brilliant dark blue and reveals snow that has collected on trees and rooftops and the ground now white. If there is sun, the snow begins sparkling with the rising sun. Snowflakes shake themselves off from trees and scatter like sparkling silver glitter. The sun shines from behind the trees and adds its own golden hue to them. Through the day, the sun turns brighter and adds warmth to the frozen feeling of snow all around, a magical mix of heat and cold. Then pieces of snow begin falling off trees and rooftops, melting away reveal a much brighter green around and a cover of snow on the ground beneath.
Snowing from smriti vij on Vimeo.
