by Ranjana Banerjee

Created on: April 24, 2008   Last Updated: November 05, 2008

First Snow

I hailed from a land of drought and rain. I saw the bleakness in the blank eyes of the peasants over the cracks on their fields seeping all their hopes, when soil no more soil to sprout their seeds instead hardened to rock and oozing the heat of the glaring sun. In those long days, even the wells shrunk beyond the level to reach for droplets. The only water that could be found easily was the one that kept flowing down the cheeks of their rickety kids for a handful of rice that made their mothers to curse their wombs and mourn over their helplessness to provide at least one full meal to quench those hungry eyes.

I saw the sky pouring non-stop for days till the ponds filled up to brim. Then rivers spilled over both sides of their banks snaking their way over the grains and the hays, sweeping the dreams of the father who promised a green sari to his daughter who just tipped over her mother ready to go to the unknown unseen with the memories of love of her parents and friends.
I had never seen Snow except on the cover of my Fairy-Tales books and in some movies I adored where the Hero sang happily with his once lost love rolling over the snow bed in Kashmir or somewhere else or on the poster of snow capped Himalaya where Lord Shiva danced.
I traveled a lot noughts to reach a land where everything I thought pulsed with the rhythm of nature; not six seasons over tracking each other and forgetting their order of sequence and where everything I thought ended with " - and they lived happily ever after". But I got the phone call when the morning was just creeping through night to roll up my blinds to witness the first Snow Fall of my life. It was not November or October but sometimes at the end of September, so odds do happen here too- I thought.
We waked up each other then jammed at the window, to have a full view we opened the panes with chill numbing our nose and touching our hair and pushing inside the room. We didn't care-not even our almost three junior, giggling out the coldness trying to take the moment as much as we could into our memory bank cause snow would fall or melt but the first snow would stay as white and fresh as a blank page of a book totally unmarred. We watched the flakes settling down on the ground and sagging to the top. We let the morning be a little more aged so that everybody awoke and my kids and their father started showing their skills in making their first snow crafts all ended like Picasso's beyond common understanding. I climbed down the stairs at least two at a time to join my bubbly family, all overdressed with extra layer to withstand the cold creep because it was our first white winter.

I touched the flakes, so light - so soft. The whiteness all around so pure and sound, even the whooping and laughter could not break the scrim of the beauty it possessed. I looked up at the sky as blue as the sea, as if all the white clouds came down to visit me. Then suddenly something happened, happened inside of me, a pain, somewhere hitching- a spot so vague to see. Something I was missing, missing deep down, a familiar smell or the land or the air I breathed in not so long yet it was then my past. I sat there in the mid of white blanket, my kids playing errands not knowing the hole inside of me. I missed my Mom, I wanted to hug her as I used to when I was a little girl in my polka dot frock playing all around her not knowing the Tomorrows that would separate us under the same big sky yet in different time zones and so far away I would have to wait ages to let her touch me.

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