A note on Delhi winters

A note on Delhi winters:

 

Everyone explains that winter here is the period from Divali to Holi. How and ever, when I left India for home I was still only ever needing to put on a light jacket at night, and during the day it had become bearable to wear jeans and a cardigan. However, when I arrived back to the metropolis with Iain, it was freaking freezing. It was drizzling, maybe 5 degrees during that day and misty. Oddly reminiscent of a slightly bleak October in the UK. I was stunned. I was cold for perhaps the first time in India. I hadn’t taken heed of all those who had warned me that Delhi would get cold and that I would feel it too, no matter how hardy the Scots race is and so on and so forth. It was so cold that walking on the stone floors without socks was painful.

None of the buildings here are designed for the cold. So it could in fact be colder IN your room than out of it. The hostel is effectively one big concrete block, so no heat is trapped in the rooms. Ineffective in summer and too effective in winter, this led us to being freezing at night to the extent of having to wear all our clothes in bed as well as all our duvets. In the worst weeks of January I habitually went to bed with:

5 woolen jumpers/hoodie

1 t-shirt

1 pair wool socks

1 pair leggings

1 set fleecy pajama bottoms

2 duvets

1 blanket

1 set wool gloves

1 scarf

Top that if you can…

You didn’t even want to go and have a shower and get changed at all. The showers were for the most part hot, which was a life saver, but even so, we were quite content to let ourselves get dirtier and greasier lest we should have to strip off a layer. I think Amanda epitomized this. She is unashamed to admit that she hardly changed her clothing at all or washed much at all, save her knickers. Lauren came up with the affectionate nickname of ‘Maevis’ to describe Amanda’s new found love of all things a bit baggy, comfortable, and woolen. There was a period where she was wearing a dusty pink chunky knit cardigan and a little white chunky knit beanie, and I have to say, ‘Maevis’ suited her.

We wondered how the rickshaw drivers coped. A lot of them didn’t even have socks on. They all covered their faces with a scarf to try and keep out the wind. The only other change was that some seemed to have acquired perhaps a wool vest to go over their shirt or perhaps, if lucky, an old moth-eaten jacket. If I, wrapped in as many layers as could fit under my wool jacket (got to love wool) was cold in the rickshaw, what the hell were they feeling? It was like a reversal of the month of August – then I wondered how the rickshaw men coped with the sweltering heat and humidity.

It occurred to me on various occasions that the winter in Delhi, while comparatively unextreme compared to the ones at home, would kill a lot of vulnerable people. There is no flu vaccine. But that is the least of the worries of some poor person who lives on a pavement and who has to gather pieces of plastic to make a fire. Except they might not even have been able to given the fog density. You could hardly see two feet in front of your face. I read on the BBC a feature article about the homeless in Delhi. Apparently some government scheme was trying to move some of them out from under a bridge in an effort to ‘clean up’ the city. The journalist had interviewed one or two of them, and they sounded completely desperate. The government was moving them out and leaving them to find some other bridge to colonise, or else to just get on with a slow, cold and hungry death. 

Seeing the little kids in just a shirt, or the rickshaw wallahs in their summer clothes, or the people clustered in a tent around a dung and rubbish fire forced me to consider them so much more than in the heat. At least in the heat they won’t suffer cold and all the ailments it brings. At least then, running around without your sandals on it not a problem, as even the ground is hot. Sleeping outside might even be considered preferable in the summer months. But in the dark, mist and cold, it must have been truly awful to be one of these people. And all we felt we could ‘do’ for anyone was to try and make sure we had biscuits to give the kids and an extra five rupees for the rickshaw wallahs, because Christ knows they deserved it. And perhaps then they could buy some socks. Personally, I would probably have spent it on alcohol.