Winter Dreams

Considering that it’s a Friday, I thought it better to write instead about my love for winters and the oh-so peaceful calmness they are now bringing with themselves.

I've always been a winter child. Ironically enough, I was born in a desert city, but still somehow grew to fall in love with winters and their coldness. When we finally shifted to Pakistan, I remember clearly that it was around mid-November then. Winters in Karachi are nothing like the winters world over. Being a tropical city of sorts, winters never get as harsh as they do in the rest of world. But it does get cold.

Interestingly enough, I get the chills very easily. For me, even the mild winters of Karachi (where the temperatures would barely touch 10°C at minimum) were just as cold as winters anywhere. I guess I was gifted with ‘easy chills’ to be able to enjoy the layers of clothes one would have to don (well, me anyways)

I remember very clearly, it was December-January, when I joined and started attending KU. There was a lot of personal turmoil going on in those days; family issues, the toll of leaving a country where I had been born and raised and countless little issues that I had no idea existed when a woman steps out on the roads of Karachi.

When entering the university gates (commonly known as the Jubilee gate), shuttles and point buses would usually be allowed to drive on in and drop students further inwards. However, this was the year 2002, when we were undergoing the whole Pervez Musharraf fiasco and things were a bit un-decided everywhere. As a result, the point buses or any other regular vehicle (save for the black tinted shiny ones with vanity plates) were not allowed to enter. All students would get off at the main gate, and would need to pass a ranger checkpoint. Our department was kind of set away from the actual cluster of the university’s buildings, more towards the far back left when you entered from Jubilee gate.

There were of course roads and pathways which you could take to reach there. But they were lengthier (passed in front of the Visual Studies department)…. Or, you could just cut across the ‘wild’ and walk past the ISPA observatory in the middle of no-where to reach the department in half the time and with half the effort.

Now, this wilderness was kind of like a man made jungle, or rather forest of low growing shrubs, but the tough desert kind. After all, what kind of plant life could you expect to flourish in the fine sands of the Sindh deserts?

So there would be occasional trees, low growing bushes, and lots of wild shrubbery practically growing in any direction it wanted. The ground would be sandy, the soft desert kind, which made walking in anything other than trainers quiet impossible. Usually, it would be very uneasy to trudge through, with the sun beating down on you, and temperatures easily topping 40°C, not to mention the sand in your eyes and mouth on a windy day…

But during winter time, this very same landscape would transform in to a mystical piece of fairy land. 

Walking with my sturdy satchel thrown casual across my neck, when I’d turn on to this little lane, I’d switch my thoughts of and would let the surroundings take me in. The low lying shrubbery and trees would seem to come to life while shrouded in the most finest of low-lying mist. And the crispness and nippy cold morning air would remind me of how morning must be in a child’s fairy tale. What I remember the most is perhaps the utter silence and how muffled all sounds seemed to become. I guess this was partly due to the mist acting as a sort of ‘sound absorber’ and creating the same kind of acoustics you’d maybe experience in a recording studio. The whole atmosphere would serve to only magnify and clarify my experience; the crispness of the morning, the clear sound of my steps if I stepped on a branch or a leaf, and the play of subdued light because of the mist.

As if to really make my experience even more ethereal, the mist, the crispness, the quietness all would seem to disappear as I would approach the road that lead to my department. Like waking up… From a brief dream

From a sweet feeling

After all, if you don’t wake up…

How would you know you were dreaming?