Shimla’s snow ‘blues’

Shriniwas Joshi

I started writing Vignettes eight years ago and since then I am a regular writer. On December 20, 2006, I wrote ‘The Wrong Snow’. That year and this year, it had snowed in the second week of December.

Recently I saw a few shivering students going to school (See Photo) and the old question agitated me: “Is it the ‘wrong’ snow?” Not for farmers, because in Uttarakhand a popular adage is ‘Poh pari hyun; kaan dharun gyun’ meaning if snow falls in the second half of December, so much wheat is grown that its storage becomes problematic.

Agriculturists, horticulturists and hoteliers are happy; no less are we because snow settles down the suffocating dust.

My unease is whether the adjective ‘wrong’ for snow is right or not? I had written in 2006: “When rail services were disrupted in Britain in 1991, the then Director of Operations, Terry Worrall, had said it was due to the wrong snow. What he meant was that snow was so dry and powdery that it penetrated all protection that they had on their traction motors and affected their locomotives too. Britons could not digest it and for them ‘wrong snow’ became a part of British folklore as a bureaucratic limp excuse.”

How I wish government offices too adopt this expression and refrain themselves from forwarding ‘wrong’ snows!

I am writing about only two snows of Shimla in this column, one, about which I have read and the second, that I have seen.

The only written record is of the heavy snow of 1903. The first train to Shimla had arrived here on November 9, 1903. Edward Buck writes in Simla-Past and Present: “During the night of December 26th of 1903, an abnormal snowfall occurred, covering the ground, almost down to Kalka, to a depth of two feet, and causing drifts, 6 and 7 feet in many cuttings. Passenger trains were unable to get through for two days and were halted at small stations midway between Kalka and Simla.”

I am a witness to the snow of 1945 — the heaviest I have seen so far. It snowed for 11 days continuously. The doors would not open because there was a seven feet tall wall of snow blocking these. This wall was removed with the help of spades and shovels. Our house was in Pagog panchayat. The difference then and now is that in 1945, our house had no electricity, no tap water and no indoor toilets. We used to go out to defecate in jungles. But how would I, nearly 4 feet tall child, go out in 7 feet of snow to defecate? My uncle, in his twenties, carried me on his shoulders, but could not go far. I defecated on snow and he buried the poop under the white mantle. This practice continued for days. There were only three vehicles in the then Shimla belonging to the Governor General, Commander-in-Chief and the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, all locked safe.

If the 1945 snow repeats today, thousands of vehicles parked on roadsides would be buried. Houses then were made in Pahari style, dhajji walls and gables raised on wooden shafts. Single-storied houses were submerged in the sea of snow. The roofs of double-storied houses, like that of ours, were under the heavy load of snow and the timber-shafts had just started yielding to the load, when my father and uncles made to the top to clear the snow.

Those who procrastinated, their houses caved in. When the snow melted quite a few frozen bodies of humans and animals were found in all corners of Shimla. Today, it reminds me of the short story The snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway, where there was a frozen carcass of a leopard near the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.

The British government had hastened to remove all carcasses from Shimla and dismissed the idea of maintaining any record of the dead. No doubt, the old timers recall it as ‘bloodstained snow’. Sriniwas Srikant says poetically: “Barf mein dafnaaye jaane ke baad bhi/ Shehar nahin maraa.”