Reflections on the Blizzard

In Madras, India, where I was born and grew up, the temperature differential is ten degrees between summer and winter. In the summer it is 90 degrees and above, and in winter it is 80 degrees and above.

It is unfair that the south of the world is never treated to a scene so grand and so breathtaking as last month's snowstorm. After the torm, I sat down at my desk and started to write a letter describing it to my younger brother in Madras.

I know how to describe the elephant to a blind man; but how in the world am I going to succeed in describing the texture of snow? How does it sound when it snows, and how does it feel to catch it in one's hands?

Above all, how in the world will I be able to describe how the earth looks after it has snowed for some time? How can I ever bring snow to the world of cocoanut grottos, hybiscus flowers and jasmin bushes? Words are woefully inadequate, I thought.

As I was thus lost in my problem, I heard the brave snow shovellers in the street wading in snow which had them covered up to their hips. I put on all the layers of clothes my friend said I would need, and came out to the doorstep when my heart jumped for joy.

What a sight--and what an opportunity. I was all ready to find our steps buried under the snow. With the great expectations characteristic of an ardent archeologist of ancient sites, I came tooled and ready for a dig.

But alas, the kids had beaten me to that! They had dug out all but two steps. I jumped out and yelled "do not take away my snow!"

They were stunned. The braver of them said, "It is all right! It is all right. There is no reason to be so upset. You still have two steps underneath the snow drift." Will they ever understand what they have taken away from me?

The governor, in his earnestness, asked everyone to remain inside. But does he understand the obligations of a scholar--an exalted Fellow of Harvard--and her promises to the world? My conscience won and I struck out for my office, wading through the snow.

For a few hundred yards I was treading the virgin snow, and then suddenly I saw the mob everywhere. Happy people--children in colorful clothes performing gleeful antics, dogs running wild, and a host of cross-country skiers.

It took me some time to realize I was standing on the main street, a place of vindictive traffic where vengeful folks sit inside their cars and hiss at pedestrians in great ire. Today there were smiling people on the road wishing each other well.

Not used to smiling so much in one day, I even wondered if they ever were going to stop grinning. My jaws were aching. What happened to all the grouches that I used to meet on my way to work?

I was walking with close friends, but whose names I intended to find out at the end of our journey, when I arrived at Harvard Square. It is a place usually busy with vicious traffic to the left of you, to the right of you, in front of you and behind you--but today it was joyously empty except for the same sort of grinning happy folks and delirious children. Suddenly the landscape had been humanized.

I stood precisely at a point where all traffic meets, and stood there enjoying the quiet. But that was my only opportunity to stand there. Suddenly, as if to remind me of what was in store, a car came sailing on the snow and the driver asked that I move to the side.

I looked at him, and asked defiantly, "Do you have credentials to drive?" He looked at me and said he had, and that he was enforcing the emergency. Thereupon I told him he could go around me, but I was going to hold on to what the massive snow storm had won for me.

I, for the first time in my life, had realized what it means to fight inch by inch and achieve one's goals. How mean I have been to discredit war heroes and generals--now I felt as one myself!

This is the winter of my contentment. The winter has come so gloriously that thoughts of spring seem sadistic. If I could pray, perhaps I would say, "Oh, Lady, let spring be far behind."

I made my biggest snowball of the day in the famed Harvard Yard, and approached the black metal statue of John Harvard. Snow adoration, I thought, would be an appropriate tribute to a man who started all that is Harvard.

As I was about to throw the snowball, I found a snow-lady carved beautifully in every detail in the arms of John Harvard, with her bottom resting partly on Harvard's lap and partly on the open book that appears on the statue.

It did not take too much guessing to know that the freshmen in the dormitories were behind this great scene of serene comfort.

Frozen as hell?!? If hell were winter wonderful I know I would like hell.

Mangalam Srinivasan is a Fellow at the Center for International Affairs. She is a consultant to international organizations on international development planning, and a freelance journalist.