Sandip Roy: Kolkata's winter charm is now smothered in smog

The first time I was invited to the Jaipur Literature Festival I showed up fashionably dressed at the inauguration party sans cap. I thought my pedestrian cap would ruin my outfit at the glamorous Rambagh Palace. But the party was open air and I froze my head off. I skipped all the fancy icy cocktails. A kindly bartender who had an electric kettle was a lifesaver, serving me whisky with hot water. Later I encountered the Bengali writer Manoranjan Byapari in the writer’s lounge. He was swaddled in sweaters and of course, a monkey cap. I congratulated him about an award he had won recently. He nodded absently, peered up at me and mumbled, “It’s so cold here.”

The Bengali in winter is a cultural trope, some would say cultural joke. Though the winters of Kolkata are temperate at best, temperatures hovering between 12 and 25 degrees Celsius, the Bengali dares not risk the chill. He muffles up in sweaters, cardigans, scarves and the infamous monkey cap. There is no snow in these parts but every Bengali mother knows the peril of him or dew. Him falling on your head at night is akin to a death knell for the fragile Bengali. And yet despite the falling him, it’s also a happy time. In my memory it is our winter of content made glorious by sundry things.

Winter in these parts has a sound of its own. The quilt fluffer man comes around twanging, offering to fluff quilts that have been sunned, ready for the nights when temperatures might fall to a chilly 17 degrees. Kolkata never gets cold enough for treats like old Delhi’s daulat ki chaat, lightly sweet and airy. Instead vendors appears with Joynagarer moa, their singsong voices selling the only-in-winter delicacy, a soft crumbly ball of parched rice and jaggery, densely sweet, studded with raisins and nuts.

The produce market is bursting with vegetables that make for a happy change from summer parwals (pointed gourd) and lauki (bottle gourd)—mustard greens, radishes, young garlic greens, mounds of peas, broccoli that does not cost an arm and a leg like it does the rest of the year. The government owned Haringhata meat shops start stocking not just chicken and mutton, but also curry-cut duck. When we were young we were only allowed bacon and sausages in winter. Summer was too hot we were told. Come winter restaurants put up placards for Duck Festivals.

At my local market, the gur-seller beckons me over and offers clay pots filled with nolen gur, the first sap of the date palm, golden and sweet. Each year he tells me it’s better than the one from the year before. Each year I nod. Every season comes with its rituals. These are the rituals of winter, its gifts.

But the greatest gift winter gives us is the temperature. Our winters are a far cry from the winters we read about in our storybooks—Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen or the frozen eternal winter of the White Witch in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Our winters are far milder. Summers are blisteringly hot and sweaty. Monsoons are wet and sticky. Winter is the one season which encourages us to be outdoors (of course before the dreaded him starts falling). Other parts of the country have harsh winters. Roads are cut off by snowfall. Ponds freeze over. The cold gets bone-chilling. But here just the days become shorter and the sun becomes buttery. E. B. White wrote, “At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.”

But we make the most of them, as if trying to linger in the cosy warmth of a dream. Makeshift badminton courts spring up on lanes, sometimes with lights strung along the side. Boys play cricket on street crossings with a wicket made up of a tower of precariously piled bricks. It’s the season for the office picnic and the neighbourhood sports meet. Children are deposited in parks for sit-and-draw competitions—A Rainy Day, A Visit to the Zoo, Summer Holiday. Even the LGBTQ+ Rainbow Pride Walk happens in winter. It used to happen in June/July in tune with the original pride marches in New York and San Francisco. But organisers quickly realised it was either sweltering or pouring. Winter’s mellow sunshine is much more conducive to marching.

This is the time the migratory birds show up. There are the feathered kinds coming all the way from Siberia. But there are the two-legged versions as well making their annual pilgrimage home from London and San Jose and Bengaluru. They gossip and drink and have devilled crab at old restaurants that boast a 1950s decor. The clubs are jolly with ho-ho-ho Santas, the lines for plum cake are long, and there are Christmas lights up on the streets.

Durga Puja might be the city’s biggest festival but winter is truly festival season. Winter carnivals spring up in every neighbourhood with stalls selling costume jewellery, “designer” saris and T-shirts with pithy Bengali sayings. As one fair shuts down, another opens and the stalls move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. The city is awash with fairs—winter carnivals, handicraft fairs, saras melas for women entrepreneurs, pithe puli fairs devoted to winter sweets stuffed with coconut and khoya, all leading up to the huge Kolkata book fair and not one but three literary festivals.

But now the winters are shrinking.

They come later and leave earlier. Sometimes it’s gone by the time the quilts are pulled out of storage and set out in the sun. People nostalgically remember winters of old when mothers sat in the afternoon sun knitting sweaters. Now it’s too warm to do that they lament. This year has been an exception.

Kolkata has been shivering for days in a cold spell with temperatures dropping to 10 degrees in the city and lower beyond. Even the street dogs are wearing raggedy “sweaters”. As I walked down the street, a vendor at a stall selling nighties joked, “Mamata Didi has done this. Didn’t she promise Kolkata would become London? Now it’s as cold as London here.”

But this is a different kind of cold than the one we grew up with. With the AQI shooting up to 200s and 300s, the air is consistently unhealthy. Vehicular emissions, construction dust, and biomass burning are the main culprits. For an entire week in December, the AQI in Kolkata was worse than Delhi’s even hitting 558 on 11 December, The Telegraph reported. The days are sunless, the city cloaked in grey. Kolkata’s air turns toxic but no one seems bothered though people complain about hacking coughs, itchy throats and teary eyes. But there’s yet another fair to go to. If they cannot have clean air, let them have fun fairs.

Last month when my plane landed and I looked out of the window, the street lights glowed hazily yellow under a cloud of grey. It indeed felt like a scene from Dickensian London. I almost expected Jack the Ripper to emerge from behind a lamp post. Once the great gift of winter in a city like Kolkata was that it allowed us to enjoy the outdoors. Now as AQI levels cross 300, the very air outdoors feels far more dangerous than the him our mothers used to warn us about.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.