Snowflakes On Eyelashes

This is in response to Esther’s Weekly Word Prompt.

This week’s prompt: Snow

Snowflakes On  Eyelashes

In this part of the globe we have extreme winter and extreme summer. Winter is freezing and summer is scorching.

At times the temperature is as high as forty five degrees and above and as low as 2 degrees. But it never snows. Many times we have wished and imagined that maybe one day we will open out our windows to a white street or snow laden parks. But that’s not happened so far.

In this biting cold I hear, from inside my quilt,  the streets being broomed by Ram Sharan, our street sweeper, as early in the morning as 7.00 AM , when it’s still dark outside. The sewers being cleaned by hunched up men , mufflers tied around their heads and bidis held in trembling fingers.

It’s the same time and even earlier that the cars are being cleaned by Suresh. I seldom see him during the day. He comes and leaves before the sun’s weak rays touch the asphalt. Somedays we have to do with a dull, overcast sky. 

At 9.00 AM my house help arrives with chapped lips, calloused hands and a grey face and pounces on the broom, mop and dust pan with an energy which I cannot muster even after a night spent in a well heated bed.

My other house help comes in the afternoon shivering in a bright yellow jacket. Her feet cracked at the heels. She tells me, ” Didi! Today is colder than yesterday.” I tell her not to work too long and leave before dark. The buses are late in winter. The bus stands are deserted by evening.

The guards at the entrance gate of the Block light up a bonfire of waste paper, twigs and sticks to warm their hands and feet. This year, due to hazardous weather, there is a ban on bonfire. Instead they have been given heaters. In the dead of the night, in this crippling climate, I don’t know how effective the heaters are. I hear them whistling past the streets guarding us from unwanted elements.

We do not have a system of central heating. We use heat convectors, oil and halogen heaters. But at times they too fall short. The air pricks the bones. The water cuts into the skin. On the pavement the huddle of homeless people. Outside the high tech jail (yes, we have one nearby) the family and friends of the inmates wait wrapped in course blankets.

I wish I hadn’t imagined snow in the streets, on trees, on the rooftops. I look at the vacant eyes, drawn faces, scrawny shapes , hardened hands … They who work on the ruins of civilization and rebuild it from shambles to castles…snow is an unaffordable luxury. The pale sheen of sunlight is an unheard prayer! The embarrassed heater is a crude joke!  They deserve more – warmer breath, bluer sky, greener hearth.

I wish one day they relish the snowflakes on their eyelashes. Their children sculpt a winking snowman and eagerly wait for Santa ploughing away a path through the white heap towards a promising horizon.

Till then the chill, the fog, the bitter smog remind us spring is far away….very , very far away.