The weather, the weather
(Published in First City Magazine, June 2012)
“The world’s a weather-turned mystery,” a friend once wrote to me, sending Writer Me face-down into a deep pool of envy at that inexhaustible thought, snuck so wittily into a turn of phrase.
That darn phrase rings in my ears every time I brave my Dilli outdoors; every time I feel 45-degree June summer leech up on me and smack up all my life-juice; every time sultry July days turn me into a river of sweat and I begin spewing bottled-up venom at uniformly rude change-hoarding Mother Dairy booth vendors; every time a sunless January deprives me of all motivation and transforms me into a gross underperformer in the fine art of haggling with autowallahs.
Weather-talk might be polite conversation everywhere else, but I’d say in Dilli, it’s the seed of the world. It’s the stuff of our days and nights; we carry it like a tiny splinter in our brain, like a heirloom nestled deep in the crevices of our weather-beaten faces. It’s that final trial by fire (iceberg, in January) to become the asli Dilliwala/li. It’s what sorts the original from the fake (that stifled ‘why’ muttered against the cruelty of Dilli weather screams ‘imposter Bangalorean’, you!).
Dilli weather, it’s the sutradhar of the city’s history, nay sculptor of the peculiar civilisational DNA of this City of Settlers. Arid, inhospitable Dilli seethed like an ember and wrung able Persian rulers like Babur (with a name meaning ‘tiger’, no less) into a willowy, enervated man hallucinating about his land’s Chinar trees, and weeping for muskmelons. Dilli’s monsoon air, thick enough to cut with a knife, made our Brit colonisers go delusional and pay for ice in gold. The whip-cracking winter chill made Bollywood Bombaywallahs write loony SnM love songs that croon, ‘Pyaar tera, Dilli ki sardi’. They all had similar fates; leave, die, flee. The Dilliwalas watched them, shrugged their shoulders, bent their heads, and carried on the Sisyphian task of braving the annual weather.
At some point, a curious thing happened. An invincible vicious circle was created. Dilli weather took poetry’s pathetic fallacy to a wack extreme and began chiselling the Dilliwala’s emotions: aggression was sharpened to the bite, pleasant behaviour made so arbitrary it became downright shocking, and an innate frown-reflex provoked automatically at all things moderate and kind. Over time, the huge seething collective of Dilli Sisyphuses began breathing their behavioural tendencies into the atmosphere in such a way that even the clouds and the sun were forced to behave a certain way in these parts. And so, Dilli summer sun became a giant Tata Sumo, reckless horn-y bully and flattener of all things in its way. Rain doesn’t fall here, it lashes (like an army of water-balloon pellets painfully drenching you on Holi), then turns up the heat, so you steam. The winter is a cunniving cheat that smiles sunnily until people step out of the house in few woollens, then steals Siberian winds and hurls them on said monkey-capless underdressed fools. And thus goes the city’s self-perpetrating weather illogic.
The weather, the weather; but what would us Dilliwalas do without this incredible friend-maker? Shared weather-woe, we prove, can deepen bonds between strangers like no shared cigarette or beer can. We frown-snarl silently at strangers in public spaces; then someone says ‘Hai, kya garmi!’ and we all melt, nod, cluck-cluck, and pass our story-observations around like a dabba of homemade laddoos at lunchtime. The weather isn’t merely weather; it is our emotional response.
All that’s fine for us Dilliwaley. But what does the Delusional Dilliwali do? She crochets delusions even here, and calls them ‘weather-gifted’. She, of the enviable WFH life and writerly conceit of ascribing epiphanic meaning to every bloody thing, claims that Dilli has seasons, not just weather. Arre, she even dares to say they aren’t mere seasons, they’re ‘emotionscapes’ (not in January though, when she leaves her brain next to the room heater before stepping out). The bitch revels in her luxury to feel the change of seasons so terribly delicately; she sips her chai and writes of ‘sharad ritu’, “I find everything about September-moving-into-October in Dilli unbearably beautiful. The nights are so blue, cool like caresses; they make me long for rain. The days are so bright, so bright; light floods every nook, as if the sun has a zillion eyes. And the in-between times: the mornings and evenings, they have both, and they make me so wondrous and so restless all at once, sometime I think I might go mad.” She says the about-to-rain-madly days in July make her melancholic, restless, wanting to run away into some forgotten pocket of time. She quotes Japanese haiku expressions for weather-as-emotion (‘shunshuu, spring melancholy’ and ‘shuushi, autumn contemplation’), phoo-phoo artist-type badi aai. She smiles when you writhe at her romanticism, and says it’s a genius thing, this delusional experience of the seasons; haven’t you read Kalidasa’s play Ritusamhara, heard Guru Nanak’s Barah Maha poetry in the Guru Granth Sahib, seen a Ragamala painting? Show-off, saali.
Shameless that she is, she holds your hand and hops onto a fictional ride through Dilli’s seasons. The auto winds its way up the endless Barapullah flyover on a hot April noon, and amidst the grey, shabby buildings in aerial view, two dozen magnificent Gulmohars peep, flare up in a vermillion burst. Our cycle-rickshaw ploughs as slowly as a June afternoon, on Kama Koti Marg – a lane impossibly hot and impossibly beautiful, bedecked with two scores of Amaltas trees and their frozen lemon flower shower. Lampblack, swelling clouds loom over the Yamuna on a freaky rainy September day, and the black river gushes angrily, making everybody in the Metro coach stare and whisper ‘Jamna ji’, and reach for their earlobes. Parijat flowers trampled by the October morning sun, make pretty patterns on tarred roads and perfume thoughts maddeningly. The florist’s stall turns into a luscious wildflower starburst in December, glinting seductively in molten winter sunlight.
The weather made Dilli and its people, seven times, and then again, she conspires. It sunk their gaze low, eyes on the road, watching each step, lest they trip. From that ground, Dilli, that clever city, grew markers of the seasons. It took centuries; Dilli landscape grew grey, but these markers grew roots, they floated up from the soil. Then they showered down by turns, coloured our grey roads wild, sprinkled fat pellets of rain. Just so some curious weather-bothered Dilliwala frowned suspiciously at that sudden hue and fragrance, traced it to a bark, a branch, a cloud. And finally, remembered the pleasures of looking up, at the expanse of sky.
WHAT’S KEEPING DILLIWALI SANE THIS JUNE
Hair yesterday, gone today; that’s what. For the last seven Junes, the Delusional Dilliwali has professed undying loyalty to her hairdresser, Sumit Israni - to the hadd that he’s one of the few men allowed to touch her hair. It’s complicated, she tells ya. Every June she pleads him, ‘Cut my hair wildly short, won’t you?’ He shakes his wild curly mane in a no, then gives her a rocking haircut that’s so feather-light, so glam, so maintenance-free, she can practically go to work in her pyjamas and still look chic. Which is just perfect, because she does work in her pyjamas, from home.
Get an appointment with Sumit at Geetanjali Salon, call 26515485/ 26601169. They have salons all over the city.
(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).
“The world’s a weather-turned mystery,” a friend once wrote to me, sending Writer Me face-down into a deep pool of envy at that inexhaustible thought, snuck so wittily into a turn of phrase.
That darn phrase rings in my ears every time I brave my Dilli outdoors; every time I feel 45-degree June summer leech up on me and smack up all my life-juice; every time sultry July days turn me into a river of sweat and I begin spewing bottled-up venom at uniformly rude change-hoarding Mother Dairy booth vendors; every time a sunless January deprives me of all motivation and transforms me into a gross underperformer in the fine art of haggling with autowallahs.
Weather-talk might be polite conversation everywhere else, but I’d say in Dilli, it’s the seed of the world. It’s the stuff of our days and nights; we carry it like a tiny splinter in our brain, like a heirloom nestled deep in the crevices of our weather-beaten faces. It’s that final trial by fire (iceberg, in January) to become the asli Dilliwala/li. It’s what sorts the original from the fake (that stifled ‘why’ muttered against the cruelty of Dilli weather screams ‘imposter Bangalorean’, you!).
Dilli weather, it’s the sutradhar of the city’s history, nay sculptor of the peculiar civilisational DNA of this City of Settlers. Arid, inhospitable Dilli seethed like an ember and wrung able Persian rulers like Babur (with a name meaning ‘tiger’, no less) into a willowy, enervated man hallucinating about his land’s Chinar trees, and weeping for muskmelons. Dilli’s monsoon air, thick enough to cut with a knife, made our Brit colonisers go delusional and pay for ice in gold. The whip-cracking winter chill made Bollywood Bombaywallahs write loony SnM love songs that croon, ‘Pyaar tera, Dilli ki sardi’. They all had similar fates; leave, die, flee. The Dilliwalas watched them, shrugged their shoulders, bent their heads, and carried on the Sisyphian task of braving the annual weather.
At some point, a curious thing happened. An invincible vicious circle was created. Dilli weather took poetry’s pathetic fallacy to a wack extreme and began chiselling the Dilliwala’s emotions: aggression was sharpened to the bite, pleasant behaviour made so arbitrary it became downright shocking, and an innate frown-reflex provoked automatically at all things moderate and kind. Over time, the huge seething collective of Dilli Sisyphuses began breathing their behavioural tendencies into the atmosphere in such a way that even the clouds and the sun were forced to behave a certain way in these parts. And so, Dilli summer sun became a giant Tata Sumo, reckless horn-y bully and flattener of all things in its way. Rain doesn’t fall here, it lashes (like an army of water-balloon pellets painfully drenching you on Holi), then turns up the heat, so you steam. The winter is a cunniving cheat that smiles sunnily until people step out of the house in few woollens, then steals Siberian winds and hurls them on said monkey-capless underdressed fools. And thus goes the city’s self-perpetrating weather illogic.
The weather, the weather; but what would us Dilliwalas do without this incredible friend-maker? Shared weather-woe, we prove, can deepen bonds between strangers like no shared cigarette or beer can. We frown-snarl silently at strangers in public spaces; then someone says ‘Hai, kya garmi!’ and we all melt, nod, cluck-cluck, and pass our story-observations around like a dabba of homemade laddoos at lunchtime. The weather isn’t merely weather; it is our emotional response. All that’s fine for us Dilliwaley. But what does the Delusional Dilliwali do? She crochets delusions even here, and calls them ‘weather-gifted’. She, of the enviable WFH life and writerly conceit of ascribing epiphanic meaning to every bloody thing, claims that Dilli has seasons, not just weather. Arre, she even dares to say they aren’t mere seasons, they’re ‘emotionscapes’ (not in January though, when she leaves her brain next to the room heater before stepping out). The bitch revels in her luxury to feel the change of seasons so terribly delicately; she sips her chai and writes of ‘sharad ritu’, “I find everything about September-moving-into-October in Dilli unbearably beautiful. The nights are so blue, cool like caresses; they make me long for rain. The days are so bright, so bright; light floods every nook, as if the sun has a zillion eyes. And the in-between times: the mornings and evenings, they have both, and they make me so wondrous and so restless all at once, sometime I think I might go mad.” She says the about-to-rain-madly days in July make her melancholic, restless, wanting to run away into some forgotten pocket of time. She quotes Japanese haiku expressions for weather-as-emotion (‘shunshuu, spring melancholy’ and ‘shuushi, autumn contemplation’), phoo-phoo artist-type badi aai. She smiles when you writhe at her romanticism, and says it’s a genius thing, this delusional experience of the seasons; haven’t you read Kalidasa’s play Ritusamhara, heard Guru Nanak’s Barah Maha poetry in the Guru Granth Sahib, seen a Ragamala painting? Show-off, saali.
Shameless that she is, she holds your hand and hops onto a fictional ride through Dilli’s seasons. The auto winds its way up the endless Barapullah flyover on a hot April noon, and amidst the grey, shabby buildings in aerial view, two dozen magnificent Gulmohars peep, flare up in a vermillion burst. Our cycle-rickshaw ploughs as slowly as a June afternoon, on Kama Koti Marg – a lane impossibly hot and impossibly beautiful, bedecked with two scores of Amaltas trees and their frozen lemon flower shower. Lampblack, swelling clouds loom over the Yamuna on a freaky rainy September day, and the black river gushes angrily, making everybody in the Metro coach stare and whisper ‘Jamna ji’, and reach for their earlobes. Parijat flowers trampled by the October morning sun, make pretty patterns on tarred roads and perfume thoughts maddeningly. The florist’s stall turns into a luscious wildflower starburst in December, glinting seductively in molten winter sunlight.
The weather made Dilli and its people, seven times, and then again, she conspires. It sunk their gaze low, eyes on the road, watching each step, lest they trip. From that ground, Dilli, that clever city, grew markers of the seasons. It took centuries; Dilli landscape grew grey, but these markers grew roots, they floated up from the soil. Then they showered down by turns, coloured our grey roads wild, sprinkled fat pellets of rain. Just so some curious weather-bothered Dilliwala frowned suspiciously at that sudden hue and fragrance, traced it to a bark, a branch, a cloud. And finally, remembered the pleasures of looking up, at the expanse of sky.
WHAT’S KEEPING DILLIWALI SANE THIS JUNE
Hair yesterday, gone today; that’s what. For the last seven Junes, the Delusional Dilliwali has professed undying loyalty to her hairdresser, Sumit Israni - to the hadd that he’s one of the few men allowed to touch her hair. It’s complicated, she tells ya. Every June she pleads him, ‘Cut my hair wildly short, won’t you?’ He shakes his wild curly mane in a no, then gives her a rocking haircut that’s so feather-light, so glam, so maintenance-free, she can practically go to work in her pyjamas and still look chic. Which is just perfect, because she does work in her pyjamas, from home.
Get an appointment with Sumit at Geetanjali Salon, call 26515485/ 26601169. They have salons all over the city.
(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).
posted by Punky PJs @ 1:14 PM
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