Kashmir snowfall and the tales of yore
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Kashmir snowfall and the tales of yore

Someone has said the child in you never dies. While admiring the snowflakes piling up; I wondered where the child in me had gone

Post by on Tuesday, December 28, 2021

First slide

Sitting by the fire place, sipping kandi chai, I watched the first major snowfall of Chilaikalan in Srinagar from the huge Venetian window panes of my drawing room. Everything started slowly getting covered with snow as though a white blanket was enveloping it all. The scene looked so pure, serene and beautiful. I just couldn’t stop admiring.

Despite being mesmerized by the beauty, there was a constant lurking fear, at the back of my mind...  ah! Now that it is snowing, the electricity may go off any moment which meant no electric blankets so no warm bed at night, no hot water running in the taps and no lights. I was constantly thinking of these related problems that make Kashmir winter such a depressing season.  My only hope of survival through all this was, relying on invertors or generator for a backup.

Over a period of time, all Kashmiri’s have marveled the art of generating their own back up electricity plans on a small scale by using invertors / generators etc.

I couldn’t help but wish we also had modern technologies and facilities like most of the foreign countries where life runs normally despite very harsh winter conditions.

My wavering thoughts took me to my childhood. I was filled with nostalgia, I remembered how despite the limited modern technology (since Invertors and generators were not so common in use in those days) we would enjoy the harsh winters and look at this time as fun filled time- a time of playing harmless pranks, a time of making snow man’s, a time of cooking exotic dishes like pachin,  hogadh, phareh, wangan hach, tamator hatch etc

I remembered how I and my brothers would impatiently wait for winters to experience snowfall. I guess this enthusiasm had something to do with the fact that we had spent most of our childhood outside the country (in Africa) and whenever anyone there would ask us, what is snow like? We wouldn’t know how to describe it, as we had never experienced winters in Kashmir.

This  being the basis of our enthusiasm, whenever it would snow, we would be amongst the first ones to be out, touching it, feeling it, enjoying it. I still remember everyone would sit in doors and prefer watching it from there like I was doing now.

Someone has said the child in you never dies. While admiring the snowflakes piling up; I wondered where the child in me had gone. I was only focusing on the woes associated with the snow now.

As I looked out of the window, I could see the mountain range behind our house had got completely covered with a thick blanket of snow. My thoughts took a long flight and I remembered how in my childhood, huddled around candles and gas lamps in the long winter evenings, while munching on mishr makai (roasted maize) my grandmother would narrate stories about strange creatures.

These creatures weren’t any fairy tale characters that would help me romanticize about life but creatures that were dark and scary. I still remember a few names “bramm bramm choeq“  “Vaii woff”  “Yech” “ Sheen Pep’in” .  Even naming them right now sends a chill down my spine, as I recollect how scared I would be listening to these stories on dark wintry evenings. I would imagine these strange creatures with a lighted candle on the head calling out my name to come and join them in the mountains. I think my grandmother (God bless her soul) was an excellent story teller, she would have us glued to her fascinating style of narration.

The art of storytelling is to some extent long over in Kashmir as most of us live in unitary family systems where grandparents are generally missing from the scene. The youngsters nowadays have no clue about famous stories that would depict our culture, language and tradition. The children of modern times lives in the virtual world of electronics, for them computer and internet is the main source of knowledge.

I remembered many interesting stories that I had heard in my childhood like Arnimal, Shoeq Pachin, Soen Kesar which most of the current breed is unaware of.

Some time back I decided to take this up as a project at my personal level and look for people in urban and rural areas who have the skill of storytelling. I remember discussing it with some office bearers of Adhbi Markaz Kamraz to do something about this dying art, but unfortunately neither I came across any person who remembered these fables not did the Markaz find it an interesting idea. My passion for doing this made me come across some stories on the internet but they had been written in a different way. I had earnestly wanted to compile them. It was disappointing.

I forcefully brought my disturbing thought to a close and tried to re-focus on the beauty of the snow all around.

I decided to re-live some beautiful moments of the past, give the child in me a chance. I made up my mind, as soon as the snow stops I am going to make a snow man.

I recollected how I had marvelled the art of creating beautiful creatures with snow and I decided to give it one more shot...

"Ye path wan ye sheen’ech khudaiye ye rotul... Kunei pahri pawor te’ aeth manz ye aadam... Mae gov bronth aennus andar paan deu’thum... Mae won'mas ne keinh .. teer hish chas sanemets … Wohaan chus dil'uk naar haraan aechan manz… Wouth'an peth muna'jaat ches taar -e -gamaet"(Rehman Rahi)

(The author is Research Scholar, Educator and Columnist)                                                                                          

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