Winter

Winter announces itself in the mornings. The grass goes stiff and white with frost, the panes fog, and no one is in any hurry to leave the quilt. The sun, when it finally climbs over the ridge, comes thin and golden and welcome — and the whole house tilts toward it.

It is the season the kitchen smells of citrus — malta, nimbu and oranges by the basket, sharp and sweet in the cold — and of heavy, warming sweets: til and gur pressed together, and now and then a chaulai laddu. The sigdi comes out, the coal brazier the whole family draws around once the sun has gone, and the woollens come down from their boxes — caps and shawls and the thick hand-knitted things that still smell faintly of last winter. Overhead the bare branches fill with bright migratory birds down from the high Himalaya, and the children, off on the long winter break, are everywhere underfoot.

Some mornings you wake to find the high ridges have gone white in the night, and the whole valley seems to hold its breath. Mid-January brings Uttarayani and the children's Ghughutiya — sweet dough birds strung and offered to the crows — a little warmth in the cold heart of the year. Properly cold, deeply quiet: the hills at their most still.