bottledworder

Until just a few weeks ago, the quality of light was different. It was golden, burning to the skin, dazzling and overpowering. If I walked out, the concrete gave off heat and on the rare days that it was humid or the sprinklers had gone off and made the sidewalk wet I could feel the vapor around my feet as I walked in sandals. This summer was hotter than most other summers I remember in this area.

Then, one day when I woke up, the weather had changed all of a sudden. It was cooler. There was a silvery quality to the light and a hint of warmth in it that felt nice but not burning hot if you put your face up to the sun and breathed in the fresh air standing next to the window. The sky was blue with white, pillowy clouds. 

Fall has come to New York. It’s going to be Labor Day next weekend, the official end of summer. 

I have lived in big cities of the world for significant parts of my life. City life separates you from nature in more ways than we can imagine, especially now, especially in the West where a lot of our time is spent in climate-controlled spaces where we don’t need to walk out for large periods of our day. 

Yet, seasons have a way of sneaking in on you. It could just be a short walk to the station that feels more chilly in the morning, a glimpse of a water body through a train window where you notice fewer ducks under the bridges or a striking increase in the sharpness of the New York City skyline due to the colder air. 

The season creeps up on you as you realize you are enjoying the warmth of your teacup.  You prefer holding it with both hands now in the morning. You slide up your window as you start cooking in the evening and suddenly realize that it’s getting darker sooner. You catch a glimpse of a tiny dog outside in a tinier jacket on their customary stroll with their human who is yet to wear his fleece but hugs himself a little because he is cold. 

No matter how separated you are from nature, a little bit of the season slips in. 

I lived a long time in different places. In Florida there was hardly any change all year. In Singapore there were no seasons at all. Life there had its own rhythm. It rained like clockwork in the afternoon in the summer in Gainesville, FL at about 4 pm everyday in the wet season.  In Saint Petersburg, FL, you had to wait until after 9pm if you wanted to take a stroll in the summer. Florida did have seasons but the changes were not so striking. It was always lush green and never too cold and never not beautiful. 

In Singapore, another big city, it was always hot and very humid and the change that is most etched in my memory is the change when I would walk into an AC environment from the heat and humidity outside and feel my sweat suddenly become cold against my skin. 

Don’t get me wrong. I love tropical and sub-tropical climates. 

Kolkata, India where I come from has six seasons: summer (grishma: গ্রীষ্ম), monsoon (borsha: বর্ষা), autumn (sharat: শৰৎ), early winter (hemanta: হেমন্ত), winter (Sheet: শীত), and spring (boshonto: বসন্ত). Being a culture so immersed in poetry and song, we have lyrics welcoming every single season in large numbers. We even name little girls Ritu (ঋতু) meaning season. We are immersed in the symbolic dimensions of natural change.

Yet, words, music or symbols, when heard so far away, can only represent, not fully catch this feeling that one has when you absorb a new season through all your senses. 

It’s Autumn, SharatKaal in Kolkata too. In Kolkata too, the brutal heat of summer gives way via the monsoons to a change in the quality of light right about now. 

I always think of Kashful this season as a reminder of change. Sharatkaal and its harbinger, Kashful (কাশফুল), is a reed which blooms this season in Bengal. Kashful is/are huge tufts of tall, wild grass that bloom everywhere and sway in the breeze in fields and river banks transforming the countryside hailing the onset of the Durga Puja season, the biggest festival in Bengal. 

Kokata, like many other Asian cities, is a huge metropolis. It is an urban sprawl that provided us little opportunity to see a lot of Kashful lining the horizon of the countryside. We mostly imagined its pristine whiteness through the vivid imagination of poets and lyricists talking about SharatKaal or writers reminiscing about their childhood experiences of Durga Puja a generation earlier in Anandabazaar, the predominant Bengali newspaper of our times. These writers always mourned what was lost as nature blended with the innocence of childhood and nostalgia. 

The truth is that Kashful still ushered in the season in the city.  Small tufts of Kashful still grew around tree trunks in the more greener parts of the city that still had trees, or around the field in the Maidan area where you saw youngsters practicing cricket.

I still spot some particularly hardy tufts shooting up and peeking their heads around small grassy patches around the malls these days, usually before you enter their AC environments. Kashful blends in with the growing bamboo scaffolds that emerge everywhere in the city in preparations of the pandals (temporary pavilions) for the oncoming Pujo season to house the Goddesses’ idols. If you look carefully, you see a few strands sometimes growing in the dust around the base of the bamboo inserted into the ground.

Even though gone is our childhood, the light still changes, the heat still retreats, and city people of Kolkata still usher in a change like city people everywhere in the Northern hemisphere. 

There was a time when my two worlds, Kolkata and New York were much more separate. During those times during fall, I saw a distant cousin of Kashful growing here in New Jersey, in Jersey City and New York, mostly in Central Park. This distant cousin grass is taller, fuller, more brown and far less white. Yet, just a vision of that grass growing within the concrete embankments on the Hudson, for example, made me aware of the change in season. It used to make me long for home. This is my blog post from 2012! 

Now, home has changed as it inevitably will with the passage of time. Ironically, my means to travel has improved so that the distance does not feel as much of a separation as it did in the past. Yet, travel now sometimes seems like a bridge to nowhere. At best, it’s an underscoring of what had been and is no more. It is a bridge that leads backwards, towards memories, more so than it does forwards, towards future and hope. 

Yet, there is something about us humans that feels solace in being in tune with nature. It finds meaning in understanding ourselves as a part of inevitable cycles, as the passing of the old and the ushering in of the new until we too shall pass. That is life too. 

So when a little bit of the season peeps in through our windows, or a small bird sits on the electric wire, or a colorful insect creeps on a leaf or the ducks sit puffed up on a sunny patch of water because it is colder now, my day perks up a little with the change.