Snow

Shruti Sonal

Maa had never seen real snow in her life.

As a teen, she had only glimpsed it in movies, blushing as Rishi Kapoor romanced his leading ladies on screen against the backdrop of snow-capped mountains. Or in magazine clippings, carefully cut and preserved for years, which contained pictures of hill stations she hadn’t heard of. Or on radio shows, which always listed Europe’s snowy peaks in their list of top honeymoon destinations. As a result, snow was associated with the idea of romance. Something changed when she saw her first ever movie on the big screen.

When Maa was sixteen, Shah Rukh Khan’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge released in theatres. Shah Rukh had first caught her eye on Doordarshan, the only channel that existed on Indian televisions in the nineties. Every Sunday, she would go to her classmate Nafisa’s house. Together, they would sit and watch the actor as he navigated the trials and tribulations of life as a young army man. Ever since then, Maa wanted to see the man and his confessions of love on the big screen.

However, Maa told me, she could not ask her parents for money to buy the tickets. Her father believed that women from ‘good families’ should not watch films in dark halls where they would sit next to strange men. She could lie to her father, but her mother would find out, since she was an expert in sniffing out lies, especially those told by teenage daughters. Most importantly, Maa was at the age where she felt she had to start making her own decisions. The first step towards that goal was to buy the tickets with her own money. The only question was how.

Maa did not have the patience required for sewing. The walls of the kitchen felt claustrophobic. She hated painting. But she could teach math. A month before the scheduled release of the film, Maa convinced her neighbour’s son that he needed a private tutor to get better grades in school. After taking seven classes of an hour each, she had enough money for buying tickets not just for herself, but also for Nafisa.

On the day of the release, the girls dressed unusually well. Early winter had set in Delhi by then, but their cheeks felt hot. A fifteen-minute rickshaw drive through the narrow lanes of Daryaganj took them to the famous Delite Cinema. There, they were greeted with posters of Shah Rukh plastered on the walls. They showed their tickets at the counter and took their seats. For over three hours, Maa forgot about homework, parents, and every frown that had appeared on her forehead. Now, she was a part of the movie: dancing and singing in the snow, sobbing in quiet corners on terraces, and running around in mustard fields, right along with Shah Rukh. Maa often mentioned this memory  as one of the happiest moments of her life.

This moment was also the beginning of her love affair with cinema. For the next few years, she spent countless hours in dark movie theatres, sometimes with friends, sometimes all by herself. She never missed a Shah Rukh film, and she would often struggle to focus on exams if they clashed with a release. One day, a neighbour caught her at the screening of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and informed her father. He was furious and stopped just short of raising his hand at her.

Within two weeks, when Maa was twenty-one, her father informed her that they had found a suitable groom for her. At first, Maa was enraged. She had just tasted freedom and was unwilling to give it up. But her father convinced her that it was for the best, and that the groom-to-be had agreed to let her continue her studies after the marriage. Not much was up for debate. Unlike the movies she had seen, there was no man who would come and profess his love for her in front of her family.

Before the wedding, like most other brides of her time, Maa only saw a single picture of the man she was about to marry. It was a 5x6 photo of my father in his uniform, with a hint of a smile on his face. My father was, in all aspects of the term, a handsome man. He was six feet tall, had a lean build, and sported a moustache that was the envy of many men during that time.  The first thing Maa noticed, however, was the small dimple on his left cheek, struggling to break out. A dimple that looked a lot like Shah Rukh’s. The fact that he was an army man, just like Shah Rukh was in the Doordarshan show, only helped.

In the days leading up to her wedding, she dreamt every night of holding my father’s hands in snowy mountains, snuggled besides a warm bonfire. In these dreams, she was always singing.

While Shah Rukh had a pivotal role to play, my mother’s love for snow was also born out of a distaste for water in other forms. It was difficult for her to speak about her childhood, but the stories spilled out on a few sombre evenings.

Maa was born and brought up in Muzaffarpur, a small town in the eastern state of Bihar. It was situated on a fertile strip of land in the Gangetic plains. Growing up, she had seen water in only one state: liquid. Liquid gushing and gurgling from rivers. Rivers which defined Muzaffarpur and the lives of all those who resided there. Rivers which brought the residents both joy and despair. The Gandak, Budhi Gandak, and the Bagmati, tributaries of the mighty Ganga, made the town fertile, but also prone to floods. Maa had grown to despise water. 

As a liquid, water was too unpredictable, too devious. One moment, it could invite innocent children to sail paper boats in its gentle stream. In the next moment, it could swell up rivers and gobble up people, houses, and memories. Just like it had gobbled up Maa’s grandparents and their memories, many many years ago. All she had to remember them by was a grainy picture of the two, gathering dust on the top of a bookshelf, along with a few stories.

My mother’s mother, Nani Maa as I called her, was a quiet woman. She had not always been so, though. During her school years, Nani Maa had the personality of a storm, the kind that hated stillness. She was one of the first girls in her village to attend high school. Her father, who had fought passionately for the country’s freedom, believed that it could be preserved only if women contributed to its foundation. Her mother, though, was constantly worried about  her only daughter being surrounded by 'rowdy' boys.

"What will she do with an education?” Nani Maa’s mother often used to say. "In a free country, the women still have to make rotis and bear children."

For once, patriarchy worked in Nani Maa's favour. Her father ignored his wife's concerns and insisted she finished college too. There, she met my grandfather, who spent more time organising Jai Prakash Narayan’s rallies than in classes. As she spent hours listening to his speeches, she felt like she had found a new purpose in life. Nani Maa immersed herself in politics and quickly became a strong presence in the college community. She especially mobilised women and helped gather both numbers and funding for rallies.

At the age of twenty-one, days after the Emergency was lifted, Nani Maa married her lover in an intimate ceremony. They spent days in each other’s arms, dreaming about possibilities. However, a few months later, the very thing that had got them together started driving them apart. Her husband wasn't too happy with her growing participation in affairs outside the household. Freedom for the country was one thing, but too much freedom for its women? That surely was a bad idea. She, on the other hand, hated that the man preached about equality in the world, but couldn't tolerate it at home.

The differences soon spilled into the tiniest crevices of their lives and the distance between their minds and bodies became unbearable for Nani Maa. One evening, she packed her bags and slipped out of the house, as quietly as a morning’s dawn. She took her two-year-old daughter—my mother— and went away to live with her parents.

One monsoon, when Nani Maa was away in Kolkata for community service, a flood washed away three-quarters of the houses in Muzaffarpur. Her parents, who had gone to the vegetable market, died on their way back. My mother, unaware of the loss, survived back home. An old neighbour picked Maa up in his arms and hid her in a temporary shelter. One blanket, two packets of biscuit, and some rice. That’s all he could give her. Maa never forgot his name: Basuriwallah. When Nani Maa reached two days later, however, she couldn’t stop wailing. In a state of shock, found herself wishing that the water had gobbled up her daughter instead. Since that day, she forgot how to speak. Doctors came and went, but none of them could find a cure. She had no desire to say words out loud, they said.

The silence strained an already fragile marriage. In 1986, my grandparents moved to Delhi, where they lived together and raised their daughter, but without any traces of love. It hardly mattered to Nani maa. Their bodies and hearts had grown irreparably distant.

Water, in its liquid form, had robbed Nani Maa of her parents and flooded her heart with melancholy. It washed away words and stories from her being and only left behind a barren field of sadness. It took away the mother my Maa knew and left behind a woman who was only a shadow of herself. Therefore, Maa never forgave water. Instead, she put all her faith in its solid state, snow. Steady and reliable snow, which didn’t swell up and turn children into orphans.

Maa got married in March of 1999, when winter had receded and made way for spring. Unlike the movies, her wedding did not have much singing and dancing. While her father did the rituals, Nani Maa stood like a mute mannequin.

During the marriage, Ma’s husband smiled a lot. He seemed like a man capable of giving love, which Maa had craved for all her life. The first time she slept in the same bed as my father, her head nestled over his shoulder, she dreamt about snow. The next morning, after handing him his cup of morning tea, she gathered courage and said her first proper sentence to him: “I want to see snow.” My father looked up from the newspaper he was reading and grinned.

“Have you ever seen it before?” he asked.

My mother shook her head. “Not even once,'' her voice filled with longing.

My father ran his fingers through her hair, leaned in closer, and whispered in her ear. “Okay my Gul, I will take you to Gulmarg soon.”

She had read the name in a magazine once. Gulmarg. She squinted her eyes and tried hard to recollect information about it. She could only remember that the word meant ‘meadow of flowers’ and was located close to Srinagar. She spent the entire morning wondering what it would look like and how she’d survive the cold in her sarees.

Two weeks later, Ma’s daydreams were cut short, like a forced interval in a movie. My father had to leave for the mountains alone. There were voices growing louder each day; a war was imminent. A war between India and Pakistan. A war amidst the snow.

As my father packed his suitcase, Maa asked him the one question she had been dying to ask. “What is snow like?”

My father, a rather poetic man, spent several seconds thinking, before giving her an answer. “Snow, my Gul, is a lot like love. It is cold yet comforting, and it melts in your hands if you hold it for too long.”

A woman of simple words, Maa was rather disappointed by his cryptic response. Seeing her fallen face, my father added, “I’ll take you to the mountains after I come back, I promise. Then you can see for yourself what snow is like.”

As she saw him get into the car, a part of her sensed that the promise would never be fulfilled.

After my father’s departure, Maa was left behind with her mother-in-law. A house with only women adopts a different aura. It becomes quieter, and the air grows heavy with longing. In their house too, the birds always seemed to look towards the door, waiting for a knock that would bring my father back from the mountains. In nooks and crannies, nostalgia grew like wild mushrooms. The stillness of the present was combated by relying on stories of the past. Pictures of my father and my father’s father covered the walls.

Both women turned to television to fill the silences. By then, Doordarshan was not the only channel to exist. Cable offered movies, music, and more real-time news. Kargil was the first Indian war to be televised. Images and sounds of army men bravely fighting in the mountains poured into the homes of civilians. Reporters on the ground gave updates, clinging to their microphones amidst shelling and gunfights. At our house, a modest BPL TV relayed these visuals to Maa and Dadi Maa. The television set was gifted by my father’s friend at his wedding. It was, in fact, the first gift my mother had opened, carefully removing the multiple layers of bubble wrap.

When the visuals of the war became too bleak to handle, the women turned to cinema. They watched Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, over and over again. Through the corners of their eyes, they saw each other laughing and crying with Shah Rukh and Kajol. In the Swiss mountains, where they danced and sang, there was plenty of snow. But it was unlike the snow of Kargil. No, that was a man’s world. That was the theatre of war.

Maa prayed the war would get over, even if her country lost, so that her husband would return. So that they would go together to see their snow, which was a lot like love.

Even as she struggled to understand the two forms of snow, my mother grew constantly sick. A part of her felt that she was being punished for holding on to silly ideas of love. The doctor offered a different explanation. She was in her fifth week of pregnancy.

I had entered her life. But instead of giving her a fresh lease on life, my entry only filled her with loneliness. She wrote several letters to my father to break the news, but there was no response. Maa had no idea how to have a child, where the only presence of a man’s life was his looming absence. She thought about abortion multiple times, but did not have the heart to go ahead with it.

She would often go to bed with a strange tinge of guilt. A looming motherhood often does that to women. In the restlessness of the night, her mind played tricks on her. It told her that she deserved this life for lying to her parents and sneaking into movie theatres. Every night, before falling asleep, she said the words out loud: I hate you, Shah Rukh. Every night, she dreamt of him.

After many such nights, Maa started staying awake till dawn and speaking to birds. Each time, she would ask them the same question. Was it wrong to dream about making love in the snow while her husband was fighting a war in the snow? The birds never responded. Her mother-in-law thought she had gone crazy. Maa never contested it.

The war came to an end after two months of intense fighting. The two women saw images of valour and victory on their television. Visuals of Vikram Batra shouting “Yeh Dil Maange More!” and a group of soldiers hoisting the Indian tricolour on top of Tiger Hill defined Kargil’s memory for an entire generation. Maa prepared the house for my father’s arrival. She finally looked at her swollen belly and touched it tenderly.

Days stretched on. There were no pictures of my father on the TV, no mention of his name in prime time debates. Months after the war had ended and disappeared from television screens, Maa and Dadi Maa received a phone call. My father’s body had been found, trapped in a snow trench, miles away from the flashes of cameras and the staccato of microphones. He had been recognised by the golden chain that he always wore around his neck. Everything else was beyond recognition.

Since then, Maa never dreamt of seeing snow.  

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 About the Author

Shruti Sonal is a Delhi-based writer, poet and journalist who loves to tell stories in all their forms. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies, including  Penguin India's "Ninety-Seven Poems", HarperCollins' "The World That Belongs To Us", and an upcoming collection of food writing by the Alipore Post. She has written for publications such as Times of India, Scroll, The Wire, The Hindu, Film Companion and more. Her poetry book 'In Which Language Do I Remember You?' was published recently. She's also a Writers Ink Screenwriting Fellow for 2023-24 and is working on her first feature film screenplay. 

An earlier version of Snow appeared in Kitaab's Best Asian Fiction of 2023.