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So winter’s come
Summers fall
Time is just a whisper
In a waterfall – bebel gilberto

Dead leaves have begun their yearly gathering. They fill the pavements, cover the unused spaces on the road, turning a green lawn into a multi-colored quilt. In a last gasp of brilliance, they blazed in many colored hues before dying. The trees now stand naked and brown, like ascetics on penance. The squirrels which seem to get even more frenetic as the leaves turn have begun their winter rest. The symphony of birds has given way to the spare, solo notes of the crow. In some other places in the world, winter looks even more austere, life stripped to its essentials. Winters weren’t like this where I grew up.

To spin Tolstoy’s famous line a different way: Summers are the same everywhere; each place has a different experience of winter. I’ve always come West in the winter, the winter accentuating the strangeness, the differentness of the foreign land. The bitter cold that my bones hadn’t experienced, that I tried to to prepare for with winter clothes purchased in a place that couldn’t conceive of such temperatures. Gray days gave way rather too quickly to night as if even the sun wanted to stay away at such a time in such a place. And the strange custom of setting back the clock, as if to trick ourselves that the sun continued to rise at a more accustomed hour. And our breaths that hung in the air, an experience so foreign that some days I’d step out just for it.

The first time I traveled west was to Paris, almost twenty years ago. I could hardly contain my excitement at traveling abroad. Just as my mother yearned to see Kashmir, my father hungered for foreign lands. I sometimes think that all his life, he ached to be elsewhere, as if the physical constraints of reality were much too much of a burden on his freedom. So many such impressions of him I carry within me, silent and buried deep, driving me in ways that I don’t always comprehend till much later. In one of the stories in Emperor of the Air by Ethan Canin, a son tries to bridge the chasm with his silent, reserved father. One day, the father tells him: “You don’t have to learn to know me. One day, you’ll become me”.

At the beginning of that year that I went to Paris, I had started at my first job, in Bangalore. The thrill of the first job was accentuated by the knowledge that most engineers there got a chance to travel abroad within a year. The firm was owned by a French computer company and so our assignments took us to France, the suburbs of Paris mostly, while a handful went to the mountain town of Grenoble.

In Paris, the company provided accommodation in apartments that they rented, and paid us a measly sum to deal with the rest of what it took to live. A friend used to say “We’re living in one of the best places in the world in the worst possible way”. The company accommodation involved in many cases, people sharing rooms in a single house, some even made to stretch their legs in a makeshift bed in the living room. A a lucky few had a room to themselves. When I heard about all this, I demanded from the powers-that-be a room for myself. I told them that I didn’t fancy a return to college dorms. They placated me with assurances of a room for myself.

But on arrival in Paris, they assigned me to a makeshift bed in the living room of an apartment, on the excuse that they were looking for a room for me. A room that I had to share was however, immediately available. My colleagues in the project had already accepted this offer. A couple of days later, I came to know of a room being vacated because the person was moving to another apartment closer to his workplace. So, in the middle of a weekday, I took a cab to the apartment and occupied the vacated room without informing the powers-that-be. They were furious at what I did, but I told my boss that I wouldn’t be able to give my best at work if they moved me out of that room. He intervened and the matter was settled. Reading my father’s blog a few weeks back, I came to know that he had done a similar thing when we moved to Bangalore from Gulbarga.

The apartment was located up four flights of stairs in a cream colored, two building complex fronted with a small piece of green. No elevators. I don’t remember now, but I believe there were two or three other apartments on our floor. The front door opened to a corridor that formed the spine along which the rest of the rooms were laid out, like compartments in a train. There was a single bathroom for use amongst four, sometimes six people. My room was not a room, but a patched up salle d’attente, the waiting room, a slightly set back extension of the living room. Two doors from the corridor led to the living room, one via the salle d’attente. Someone had used thermocol and duct tape to cover the opening between the salle d’attente and the main living room. Once I closed the door, I had my prized privacy. That’s all that mattered to me. I believe that I even had a window, though I can’t seem to remember now. Here is a picture of the view looking out from my room. Our complex looked much like the building seen across the street.


The apartment was along the train tracks and every morning, the TGV would zip by. Having read about the world’s fastest train, I would watch with excitement as it flew by, right outside my window. Even towards the end, I used to empty the last drops of the banana juice that was my breakfast, along with a croissant, watching the 8:50 train go past, snaking its way I imagined, to places and people more interesting than mine.

I ate pretty much everything in those days, though meat was infrequent, usually only when we traveled. But in Paris, I faced the choice of eating meat just about everyday or eating rice with flavored yogurt or some such tasteless dish that is passed off as vegetarian food in French cuisine. Even the meat offered slim pickings. Barely cooked fish with even less flavoring, roast chicken so lightly cooked, tiny rivulets of blood coursed down when I cut a slice. Only sausage lit up the taste buds. Pizza was available once a month or so and many times it was with anchovies on top. Eating meat everyday for lunch became stomach turning pretty quickly. French cuisine seemed the direct opposite of Indian cooking. Skimpy vegetarian entrees and even less spices. “Let the natural flavor come through” is the French mantra while the Indian one is “It ain’t right if it ain’t spiced”. I read that spices such as cumin, coriander and cinnamon help kill much of the bacteria in the food. So spices are the natural disinfectants in a tropical place where the germs are aplenty compared to the more temperate climes of Europe.

A gourmet chef or someone who didn’t know his pot from his pan, we all had to cook. Eating out cost an arm and most of a leg. Most of us had never cooked before and so we ate barely palatable food more often than we cared. We were happier eating this compared to the office cafeteria. The first time I cooked cauliflowers, I so overcooked it that one of my apartment mates asked if I had cooked upma. We took turns cooking and cleaning. For the first six months, I offered my cooking turn to someone else and instead did the dishes more often. However, I left Paris after 15 or so months, a much more proficient cook. I even enjoyed it. One of my apartment mates had a photocopy of a cookbook by Tarla Dalal, which became my chief reference. To this day, I cook using cookbooks, even dishes I’ve cooked many times before, mixing each ingredient as precisely as the recipe specifies.

For Indian spices, we made a monthly pilgrimage to the Indian grocery stores located around the Paris metro station of Gare du Nord. The whole journey took about three hours both ways and so we bought in bulk, which meant lugging the heavy groceries back, the bags spread around our feet in the train, inviting stares from the fellow travelers.

To top all this, Shanthala and I had parted company, over a misunderstanding, just before I began working. I missed her. Terribly. For the past six years or so, we had talked just about everyday. Even when we traveled, we’d find the time and privacy to call each other up. I don’t make friends easily and couldn’t connect with most of my colleagues. And of course the winter, colder and darker than I’d ever known left me lonely and depressed. Simon & Garfunkel’s “Boxer” kept me company many nights as they sang:

And I’m laying out my winter clothes,
Wishing I was gone, goin’ home
Where the new york city winters aren’t bleedin’ me,
Leadin’ me, goin’ home

To top all this, the festive Christmas atmosphere with songs of sleigh bells, white christmas, love and family drove me crazy with loneliness. The only things that kept me going were the work, studying for GRE and this friend who would haul himself to my apartment on the weekends and forcibly take me to Paris. “I can’t leave you feeling miserable and sorry for yourself”, he’d say.

Lonely winters can make the winter feel even colder. A study that I read in the blog “Cognition and Culture” found that loneliness can make you feel physically cold. In one experiment, people who were made to feel socially excluded gave lower estimates of room temperature compared to those who didn’t feel lonely. In another experiment, those who were made to feel socially excluded expressed a greater desire for warm food and drink than those who felt socially connected.

Another article at the beginning of the year in the science magazine, Discover, spoke of the discovery that loneliness affects the very core of ourselves, our genes. From the article:

“They found that gene expression is different at 209 sites in chronically lonely people and that many of those changes fit a pattern of elevated immune activation, inflammation, and depressed response to infection. “We now have a molecular framework for understanding the relationship between social experience and physical health,” explains the study’s lead author, Steve Cole of UCLA.
…
According to John Cacioppo, an author of the study and a psychologist from the University of Chicago, the work suggests that loneliness is a warning sign, much like physical pain. “This very process of feeling bad because of disconnection contributes to what it means to be human,” he says. “It makes us care for other people and want to reconnect when we’re disconnected.””

The next time I traveled West was to Boston. If the suburbs of Paris were bad, the suburbs of Boston were much worse. Much colder than Paris, the windchill cut through the thickest of our clothes as we waited at bus stops and in train stations. My friend used to say “They should hang a banner as you approach the skies of the US: ‘Pedestrians prohibited’”. With our pay too paltry for us to afford a car, we relied on the meager public transportation to get us everywhere except the office. Our apartment was a hop, skip and jump away from our workplace, a saving grace. For nearby errands such as grocery stores, we walked along the side of the road as cars zipped by, swerving to avoid this unrecognizable life form on the road, a pedestrian. One evening, as the four of us walked home, hauling our heavy groceries in our hands, we walked past a McDonalds. A kid looked out and pointed at us, his mouth wide open, hamburger half eaten. Soon, many people stared out of the window as we walked past, dressed smartly in suits, but with the groceries in our hands, walking on a road with no sidewalks.

Shanthala and I had patched up and our relationship had gone places it hadn’t been before. So, I was miserable again, differently miserable, but still from missing her. I had hoped to save some money so that I could pursue a masters program in the US without taxing my parents’ finances. But almost all the money went in phone calls to Shanthala. And we wrote to each other every week, old fashioned letters written before the ubiquity of emails. Again, the same friend who had saved me from total ruin in those early days in Paris was my ally in Boston.

So for me, winters in the west have always been linked with homesickness, nostalgia and loneliness without the season itself causing seasonal mood disorders. Interestingly, PsyBlog mentioned a study published in the journal Emotion concluded that contrary to popular notions, weather has negligible effect on people’s mood, except for a minority who suffer from seasonal mood disorders. The study conducted in Germany between July 2005 and February 2007 using online participants found that while less exposure to sunlight made people feel more tired, in general, temperature, wind power, sunlight, precipitation, air pressure, and photoperiod had little effect on their mood.

The third and final time I came West was the last time. I’d be away from Shanthala for the first time since our marriage. I had put my masters program on hold to get married as we realized, after Boston, that we couldn’t stay apart for as long as the graduate program took. Many of my colleagues at work who had high expectations of me had expressed disappointment at my giving up of the program in favor of getting married. “Your life is over, you won’t be able to do much if you don’t study in the US and get a job there”, some of them had commented, shaking their heads sadly. My father was disappointed too, but putting aside his hopes that his son would be more educated than he was, he joked “You are doing an M.S. Marrying Soon”. I wanted to return to the US to get the MS program back on track.

The California winter was much milder than the previous ones in Boston and Paris. As if portending of better days to come. Shanthala was to join me in a few months, soon after she completed her residency in Mumbai. Here we are, thirteen years later, with a child, a mortgage, gray hair, leading in many ways, a more comfortable life (and still no MS). A life together, still too far from much of family and some friends, but amongst friends and people who care for us here.

Now the years are rolling by me,
they are rocking evenly
I’m older than I once was, and younger than I’ll be,
that’s not unusual
No it isn’t strange, after changes upon changes,
we are more or less the same
After changes we are more or less the same
- Simon & Garfunkel, The Boxer

P.S: Thanks to my father for getting digital copies of some of the Paris photos.