6 wintry memories of a 90s kid from Kashmir
This article was first published in The Greater Kashmir newspaper under the title, “Winters in Kashmir: What changed since the 90s?”
With life getting complicated, adult life to be precise, it’s tempting (for all millennials) to harp on about the 90s when we were kids and life was so simple. More so this year, because after more than two decades, Kashmir faced a harsh winter: the kind 90s kids would fondly remember. In winters, schools would be closed for vacations and those three months would bring unadulterated joy, even though we were living a low-tech life with not many places to go and not much to do.
As chillai kalaan decided to go retro this year, here’s a flashback to winters in Kashmir during our childhood.
1. Snow: All play and no work
It’s hard to describe the feeling of witnessing the season’s first snowfall from children’s perspective. We couldn’t be more thrilled at anything than waking up to at least six inches of accumulated snow. The norm would be to get all layered up and venture outside to derive unmatched pleasure from creating footprints on the pristine, untouched, crisp blanket of morning snow. This would be followed by making snowballs to engage in a snow fight (sheene jung), with siblings, cousins and friends who lived nearby; battling the freezing weather for hours to hand-mould a snowman and bring out the best accessories to adorn him. We would almost always attempt to make an igloo and fail miserably. There were no worries or concerns, except to watch out for icicles (the fascinating shishur gaant) and chunks of snow sliding off rooftops. No amount of biting cold could curb our enthusiasm and make us go inside, until the first signs of frostbites started causing numbness in our hands. Not much has changed in this regard except that kids these days will probably go inside once they have taken the perfect shot of the perfect snowman, (or snow woman, snow tiger, or snow-what-not) and posted it on Instagram. Anybody outside Kashmir got snow fatigue from all the snowy reels and stories yet?
2. The room for winter hibernation
Only one room in the average two or three storeyed house would be well heated up. This would be either hamaam or a room fitted with an elaborate space heater with a chamber for burning coal or wood called bukhaer, which would take up half of the space in the room. This room would be furnished with namda/gabba (warm, hand-woven rugs) and the windows would be covered with moamjaam (transparent polyethylene film) such that no heat could escape, its effect on the aesthetics completely ignored. We would be practically be confined to this room, at least till the coldest spell got over. For some of us, this was the room for winter hibernation; it was the place for sitting, eating, sleeping and even for hanging clothes to dry. And if yours came with an attached washroom (sraan kuth) then you were the luckiest. In the years that followed, dozens of different models of kerosene and gas based heaters started flooding the market; even central heating started gaining popularity, but nothing can still beat the reliability and warmth of hamaam and kaangir.
3. Power hungry?
Erratic electricity supply has not changed much. Our back-up alternatives have improved though. Those days the small DC battery would only take up to two bulbs, one for kitchen and the other for hamaam/living room, and its charge wouldn’t last long. Now we’ve moved on to inverters, which are life saviors but only if the supply is restored within two days. Our concerns may have moved from whether we are stocked up on gas lamp mantles to whether our devices (phones and tabs mainly) are stocked up on charge.
4. Water woes
As the social media was flooded with memes about frozen tap water in 2021, I would say that little has changed in this regard. However, I do remember water tankers doing rounds in each neighborhood and people collecting and storing water in all the buckets they had at hand.
5. Dressing
Pheran continues to remain our favourite winter outfit. Patyuv pheran may have been replaced by modern pherans featuring leather elbow patches and velvet pherans with fur borders. One might sport a down jacket occasionally for style but it can’t even come close to the cozy snuggles in a pheran with hands tucked inside the sleeves and a kaangir held underneath.
6. Food wise
Eating something different out of boredom isn’t something unheard of. In our case, we’d just roast a potato in the kaangir or make ice cream out of snow and it would be the height of excitement for us. Now you can order whatever you fancy eating- from pizza to harissa, with guaranteed delivery at doorstep. Well, the guarantee stands only if the phones/internet services are not blocked for some reason and the snow is cleared off the roads. There’s a 50:50 chance that it won’t be possible. Hokh syun (sun dried vegetables) have managed to remain constantly present in the pantry. For one, it’s a delicacy we can never let go out of vogue. And for another, harsh weather or not, we never know when we’d be shut off from the outside world and run out of food supply in the market.
As I sit in the comfort of my centrally heated space, with the luxuries of continuous electricity, water and high speed internet, I can’t help but miss all the chillai kalaan/chillai khorud action back home. Watching the dreamy Instagram stories of fluffy snowflakes twirling from the sky back home, the memories of a happy and carefree childhood kicked in. Truth be told, I’d have had enough of the snow by now, like everyone else, if I were actually there. But that’s the generic irony of life: one learns to value things (or places, in this case) by letting them go for a while.
I wish this was a nostalgic account from an adult, conforming to the cliche (elsewhere in the world) of lecturing today’s children on how different, difficult and glorious our childhood was. I wish it included anecdotes from my childhood that today’s kids would find historic and hard to imagine. But here we are, three decades later, when more or less, the same problems resurfaced with a bout of snow. This generation is technically reliving the same childhood we did, with the exception of being on the internet. Oh wait, did they even have internet for 18 months in the recent past?
One of the many consequences of the conflict is that generation after generation our development is at standstill. Not that our resilient spirits cannot bear the hardships inflicted by nature, but being deprived of the perks of modern world while living in a part of the same world seems unfair.
These flashbacks and thoughts came to me when I was baking this snowflake bread, though it barely looks like one. This bread is stuffed with spinach and chicken filling, from the recipe for chicken patties.
