by Shreya Ramachandran
My first snow in London was hilarious – it seemed to last for all of two seconds and then quickly disappeared. I saw it from my room window in the morning, and felt a flurry of excitement seeing it fall slowly and cover the roofs and settle on the ground. I must click a picture and show my sister, I thought, and the rest of my family at home, but the photo didn’t quite do it justice – my room window was grimy and dirty. I had to click a proper photo, so I got ready and left the house at 7 in the morning. I thought I would see about breakfast later and get to class early – I would do a tour of London and click photos to report back, the most exciting postcards ever.
The snow had all melted away outside, leaving no trace whatsoever. It was a cold day in London, but not especially so, and nothing going on to signify that anything special had happened. Luckily, in the park next to college, snow had collected in glorious sheets, stretching like blankets, everything you expected it to be. With the arching, bare trees and the grass and winding grey paths, the scene finally looked as picturesque as my expectations required. I clicked a few photos feeling as if I was part of something great and beautiful – and the snow disappeared so fast from the park, too, that you could have forgotten it snowed at all. By the time the grunt of the morning began, with the quiet hums of the earliness replaced by activity and routine and cars and bustle, it was impossible to believe it had ever happened, and my photos were the only proof.
I said to people in my first class of the morning how excited I was to see snow, as a tourist, as a student from India, never having seen it before, and everyone smiled and was in shock – it really snowed? Here? But where? In Poland, it snows from October, a friend said derisively. This half-snow, embarrassment, barely qualifies. It is sunny outside now.
I was reminded of another story about love and snow. I learn Bengali in college, and my classmate, who has been learning a year longer than me, told me a story our teacher had talked about in class – her first snow when she was a student in London. Her British friend, somewhat-boyfriend, now her husband, was of course used to snow, having always seen a lot of it. When she saw snow in the hostel courtyard early in the morning, she called him excitedly and he came downstairs and acted excited with her, and only later admitted that it was no novelty to him. He just did it for her sake.
That snow was somehow the marker for me that I was really in “Foreign”, that I had really seen something new in a strange beautiful land. In school, I remember feeling that awe when I read a poem about snow in Literature, a poem by Thomas Hardy about a snow-covered scape: “every branch big with it, every fork like a white webbed foot, every street and pavement mute.” It sounded so beautiful, so hushed. Despite knowing that it wasn’t all glamorous – that same poem talked about a stray cat, huddled from the cold, shivering up the narrator’s driveway, “and we take him in” – I was just in love, and had pictured it so vividly in my head. In London, of course, the snow was not quite what you would expect.from poems and stories. This is also what cemented my love for the city, I think, because beauty comes in such unexpected forms here. Cheryl Strayed talks,in Wild, about putting yourself in the way of beauty. With London, too, you have to seek out those moments – be awake, step out, want to be wide-eyed and surprised like a child. Otherwise, snow could fall right on your doorstep and you would miss it. The city seems to say, with attitude and slight superciliousness, I will snow when I want to snow. It will last for two hours. If you want to be there, be there. Otherwise, don’t blame me later. We are not like other cities, where the snow lies there and lies there for you to see it whenever you want. Work a little harder.
A few January nights before the snow, my friend and I had just finished dinner: hot, drippy, luscious cheese fondue to guard against the cold evening, and we were walking back home and took a slightly different route than usual. Our hands were in our pockets and our ears were cold – you never know whether it is scarf weather or thermal weather or sweater weather in London, because you are often caught over-heated in three layers sweating and marinating and conversely when you think it may be okay after all, a chill wind freezes you to your shuddering heart. We watched our feet make the same marks, left-right left-right, on the grey pavement. We vaguely knew where we were – Chinese restaurant that side, that park near her house the other side, my college somewhere behind us and my house ahead. But suddenly, when we looked up, we saw a gap in the shop fronts, a small lane with cobblestones and old-fashioned hanging wooden signs outside the shops. It had rained half an hour ago, and here the water collected to make glistening puddles, and white streetlight was reflected in them. We fumbled to take our phones out and click photos. It looked like an old storybook scene, some quaint town where cobblers peddle their wares and ruddy-faced bakers brandish rolling pins and horses trundle down, stopping for their owners at inns and resting houses, or the kind of street the Bennetts in Pride and Prejudice stop at on their way through London. “Where has this come from,” my friend murmured, “why have I never seen it in two years?”
The snow gave me that same feeling, the same feeling of finding a secret in broad daylight. People had been expecting snow for a while, every morning the forecast would be wind and snow, and every morning there would be stories about snow blocking up train tracks in towns north of London, but for us there was just the windy rain of the evening. London reminded me of Delhi in that way – in Delhi, too, things just stopped short of snow – you felt unendingly and irritatingly cold but you were never gratified with that storybook sight, the sight of snow falling to the ground. In London, too, I would have missed it if I slept in late. I think about that sometimes – how if I had just chosen that day to stay under the blanket for longer, just woken up at 8 am instead of 6, I would have missed an entire world that came and went outside my window. I would have missed the snow, all of it – the falling, the way it spread on all the roads, the way it slowly made everything go from grey to white. The way it felt like you were walking through a dream. I’m glad I stayed awake – I’m glad I got to find that little secret. I’m glad I saw snow without the attendant hassle of being cold and being unprotected – I’m glad I just saw a snippet, a snapshot, enough to make me feeling like there was something in the big place that I could call my own. Sometimes, it’s nice to be awake.
