Totally uncool

Hi, I'm Sayesha and I live on the equator. And today, I have something to say. Something un-cool.

"No Zee/Sony/Star TV subscription for you till the exams are over!" Ian had ordered.

"Okay." I said meekly.

Luckily, Ian does not know that SCV has a cool feature called 'Mosaic' where you can see every possible channel in the form of tiny windows. So as I sit and work on my assignments/dissertation/exam prep, I just put one of the hindi channels on the mosaic - whichever is playing the top ten chartbusters - and pretend that it's hindi radio. Kaam ka kaam, music ka music! Thenga to Ian!

So it was one of those days when I was doing my homework to Kay Kay's 'Kya mujhe pyaar hai' when I stumbled upon a commercial break.

"Vardhman knitting yarn." said the smooth voice.

Vardhman knitting yarn? Vardhman knitting yarn?

OMG VARDHMAN KNITTING YARN!

Realisation hit me like a snowball in the face - it's freakin' winter in India!!!!!!!!!

They say ang mohs (that's "Caucasians" in Singapore lingo) get a 'hardship allowance' when they come to work in Singapore.

Bloody hell. I need a hardship allowance too. Cos I have been facing the hardship of living in the same climate all year round for the last 8 years! That's hardship for me right there!

Eight years ago, when I got notification of the scholarship, Dad asked me "Do you want to go live in Singapore for ten years?" So I decided to take a closer look at the island. I took out the plastic inflatable globe that he'd got me for one of my birthdays, blew it up and looked for Singapore.

Ah, there it was, so tiny that even the letter 'S' wouldn't fit inside the little dot that it was on the globe.

"It's on the equator, Dad." I said.

"Yeah."

"No, it's right ON the equator."

"Yeah."

"So the climate is equatorial."

"Yeah."

It's hot the whole year round."

"Yeah."

"There's no winter."

"Yeah."

Sheesh.

So in July 1998, on a hot humid day, I landed on the land of no winter. The next day was a hot humid day. The day after was a hot humid day. The day after... you get the draft... the hot, humid draft if I may add.

Dad's transfers all over India had given me the good fortune to experience all kinds of winter - the bone-chilling winters in Patna to 'cold' winters in Jamshedpur to the 'pleasant' winters in Hyderabad.

I remember the winters of Patna most vividly. When I was a little girl, Mom told me one morning, "Beta, you can't bathe before going to school today."

"Yipppeeee!" I muttered under my breath and then asked with a serious disappointed face, "Really? Why not?"

"The water's frozen in the pipes. There's no water if you turn on the taps."

I couldn't be happier. Bathing early in the morning in winter (in spite of the water heater) was torturous. But Moms are Moms. She soon found a way out. She'd store water in the buckets overnight and then heat it up the next morning over the gas for me to bathe.

Dammit.

Then there was the crazy knitting. As soon as the monsoons got over, Mom would start knitting. Knitting between cooking sessions, knitting while watching TV, knitting when on the phone, knitting when talking to the neighbour, basically knitting all the time. Sometimes I'd help her wrap the yarns of wool into balls. At other times, she'd even let me knit a little. I'd proudly wear the sweaters she made to school. And then they introduced blazers as winter uniform. I loved it, yes. It looked very smart, yes. But somehow, the blazers lacked something that the sweaters Mom knitted used to have. They were not warm. Literally and otherwise.

Winter was also the time the dosa-wala used to do his rounds in our neighbourhood. He'd hit a large metal spoon against his hot griddle and we'd shout "Aa gaya aa gaya, dosa wala aa gaya!" and flock around him.

And then of course, there was the fire.

There was a lady in our neighbourhood who I'm pretty certain had a name but whom everyone used to refer to as 'Lalli ki mummy' ("Lalli's mother"). In the evening, Lalli ki mummy would set up a huge bonfire and my friends and I would huddle around it and sing "We didn't start the fire." Ooops, wrong song. I meant we'd sing hindi songs in 'test-match antakshari competitions' that would last for days. Sometimes it would get very very very late in the night, like really late, like 8 'o clock (hey, I was six! 8 o' clock was very very very late!) and my Mom would march forth on a one-woman 'Lalli ki mummy, meri beti mujhe lauta do' morcha ("Lalli ki mummy, return my daughter to me"). She'd peel me from the bonfire and I'd shout back to my friends, "Teri baari, la se!" for us to continue the game the next day.

We used to eagerly wait for the winter ads. The ads in India are anyways pretty phenomenal (on sunday evenings, my sister used to watch TV in the ten-min slot just before the movies when they showed the ads, and she'd go to do her homework when the movie started.) but winter ads were always more special. They were soft-focus ads with pretty women in pastel-coloured winter clothes and perfect skin and hair whom I wanted to grow up to be like. The Monte Carlo was one such ad, and so were Nivea moisturising lotion and Ponds cold cream and what not. And of course, Vardhman knitting yarn, the ad that I was watching on that tiny mosaic window.

Perhaps at that moment, somewhere in a house in Calcutta, Mom was knitting a sweater for Dad. Perhaps Dad was retrieving the big suitcase with all the winter clothes from the high shelves in the storeroom. Perhaps they were shopping for winter toiletries. And I'm sure they were thinking of me.

It's strange that I can't remember things from last week, and yet events from twenty years ago are crystal clear in my mind. I guess that's the power of human memory - the best years of our lives are beautifully preserved in the album of time and we can look at them again and again whenever we want.

As I sat there listening to the Vardhman knitting yarn ad on the mosaic, I felt something. On that hot summer day, with my air-conditioner trying hard to make me believe it was winter, I felt the monsoon. In my eyes.

Hi, I'm Sayesha and I live on the equator.

And today, I feel rather cold.