My first snowfall

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:00:00 +0000

If countries have colors, then mine was yellow. I grew up in India in the late '80s and '90s. The roads were dusty, the air humid, the trees dry and wilting. And everywhere, there was the sun, blazing, relentless, spanning our whole world. It cast a bright yellow sheen on everything. The sky over us was the color of daffodils and canaries. I knew this well, even though I had never seen a daffodil or a canary, but had only read about them in my British storybooks.

Our prolonged summers made us long for rain. In our largely agrarian land, farmers prayed for rain to come nurture their crops. Lovers in Hindi movies broke into song when the heavens opened, schools shut early, trees turned green and the sky a gray that would not be considered charming in most places on earth. But for us, rain was a respite. And it was the only form of precipitation most of us would ever see.

Salon.com > Oindrila Mukherjee

My first snowfall