Sunday Snippets
By Venkatesh Raghavan
The island city of Mumbai rarely gets much of the winter blues that the northern regions of our country are subject to, at this time of the year. I just recall an early evening out at Kirkee that is located near Pune in the late nineties. The College of Military Engineering was celebrating its golden jubilee on that occasion. Our press team from Bombay arrived at the venue at around 7.30 p.m.
We were all ushered into a huge hall on the ground floor that was surrounded by a huge lawn. It was in the dead of winter. I recall this owing to the sudden change in my body metabolism. I usually dreaded hard drinks and confined myself to drinking beer. However, the cold was so acute that I enjoyed gulping three pegs of military rum without any mixing, be it water or cola. There was a warm sensation that travelled down my throat and it made me feel comfortable and relaxed.
Though I rarely travelled to the north, the winters I experienced outside Bombay were the most memorable ones, in the interiors of Maharashtra, away from the coast. The first severe winter that I was witness to was in Shegaon, a temple-town that comes ahead of Akola when travelling from Bombay. I was in my first year of engineering. I along with a couple of my seniors was in a video parlour watching ‘Nightmare at Elm street,’ a horror movie.
When we stepped out after the movie it was around 10 p.m. Both my friends from our senior batch were wearing sweaters. I was unable to bear the cold and my teeth started chattering. Uday Shinde smiled and said, “You will get used to this.” He pointed out that just outside our row of rooms was a shekuti (bonfire of wood) that was meant to keep people warm. I then had the firsthand experience of staying close to a fire and warming myself with the hands close to the flames.
On the weekend, I travelled to Akola and purchased myself a full-sleeve sweater that made life easier for me. The subsequent evenings in Shegaon was when I started hanging out late at night in a local shanty type restaurant that allowed us to have our drinks in its open backyard. I used to guzzle my favorite strong beer brand Khajuraho.
There were times, we used to sit in an outdoor restaurant premise and munch chicken masala along with pegs of whisky. Winter nights were generally fun in those times. I remember cold nights when I and my batch mate Mukesh Mullick dared the shivers to watch Evil Dead and Escape to Victory on consecutive nights. We viewed the movies at Balaji video parlour which was located at the street corner. Subsequently, we used to visit an all-night joint by the name Sadanand to munch kachoris along with steaming hot tea.
Back in Mumbai, decades later, I got the taste of a severe winter, when in the post millennial year, I started shivering during daytime, when out for a smoke, although I was clad in a full-sleeve. It was the first sign of climate change creeping into our city. The severe cold wave is back here to stay for quite a while and it reminds me of what my senior journalistic colleague Dilip Raote had predicted: “It will rain ice in Bombay”.
