I formed a positive association with rains at a very early age. Summers in Delhi are harsh. By mid-May temperatures hover in the 40-45ºC range in the afternoon, and rarely dip below 30ºC in the nights. All this would be compounded by long, untimely powercuts depriving you of even a fan – in temperatures that otherwise need air-conditioning to cope with. On a number of nights, I would wake up stewing in my sweat and wonder what had I done do deserve this misery.
On other nights I’d lie in my bed listening to songs that had sounds of thunder and rain and pretend that it’s raining outside.
And then the Monsoons would try to make it up to you. The phrase ‘too little, too late’ could be applied to the Monsoons in Delhi with remarkable regularity. Come August, and the wind in Delhi would turn so heavy with humidity, that it would begin to weigh you down. This would make the last days of summer (with maximum temperatures still above 35ºC) quite unbearable. And then one day, the skies would open up. The newspapers next morning would be full of pictures of traffic jams on waterlogged roads. A picture of a bus trapped in water under Minto Bridge would inadvertently be there on the front page. The power cuts would continue and on some days actually become worse. But the temperatures (at least in the evenings) would be pleasant enough for you to sleep through the night without a fan.
When I left Bangalore, the summers there were beginning to get a little warmer, but thankfully, were no where close to being as traumatic as summers in Delhi. Even on hottest of days, a pleasant cool breeze would magically transpire to keep you cool. After sunset, the city would cool down rapidly and I don’t remember a single night when I lost sleep because it was too warm. Still, I carried my pleasant associations with rain to Bangalore. The pre-monsoon showers would begin by March-end and it would rain regularly all the way till October. It was also my favourite time for traveling all over Karnataka but especially to the lush, rainy hills in Coorg and Chikmagalur.
In Amsterdam, it’s Monsoon every day. The city is under a cloud cover for almost the entire year. It’s also very windy. As a result you rarely get something resembling a torrential downpour. Rain here feels as if a barber’s water spray is being blown into your face. My pleasant associations with rains have come with me all the way here. On a Monday morning, when I look through our window at a feeble sunrise through layers and layers of rapidly shifting grey clouds, I actually get excited about my commute to work. On days when it’s freezing cold, and I am outside in the rain with an umbrella that I can’t open because the speed of wind would render the whole exercise pointless, I look at the sky (rain lashing my face, water droplets streaking through my hair) and finding myself unable to contain my joy, laugh like a man possessed.
When I had just started working for Microsoft in Bangalore some 10 years ago, the office had a nice little tradition of giving you a bouquet of flowers for your desk on your birthday. I had never seen a tulip in my entire life, but strangely enough, it was my favourite flower. As my birthday drew near, I politely requested the office manager that I be given a bouquet of tulips. The flower giving tradition was probably being run on a shoestring budget and procuring tulips for me in Bangalore would’ve tipped the scales firmly towards unsustainability. The request was thus politely declined and I got a bouquet of roses instead.
I passed through Schiphol several times after the incident and got my fill of tulips. Still, they weren’t something you could buy in Bangalore on a whim from your local florist’s shop.
We finish a year in Amsterdam today. There have been many perks of having moved here. Being able to procure fresh tulips from the Farmers Market on the Noordermarkt every Saturday, shares the top spot on my list along with 30mbps internet at home.
P.S. The Windows XP wallpaper of yellow tulips would be the first thing I’d switch to after a fresh install of the OS.
P.P.S. African Tulips is the closest I got to tulips in Bangalore. You’ll never find them in a florist’s shop though.
I saw SRT’s tweet this morning but didn’t catch the reference till the wife mentioned it this evening:
Time flies but memories last forever. What a day it was!!! 02-04-2011
Time flies indeed. There we were in a borrowed apartment, on borrowed moments, cheering for the Indian cricket team till our throats went hoarse. I have hardly followed cricket since moving here. I’ve only kept a tab on all the series in which India has played and have been disappointed at the growing tally of losses in the last year or so. It’s as if the team reverted to the dispirited, losing side I used to follow in the 90s.
But it’s been easy to pretend that the Indian cricket team’s losing phase after world cup hasn’t happened. Cricket is neither followed nor broadcast on the ‘regular’ sports channels here. The Netherlands has a cricket team on paper, but I haven’t seen it covered anywhere other than Cricinfo, so the question of cricket stars endorsing products and hogging media doesn’t arise. In fact, it’s quite easy to believe while living here that cricket itself doesn’t exist. The only public reference about cricket I’ve found till date has been this vintage poster in the loo of the Olympic Stadium here:
(Seeing it reminded me of that scene in The Planet of the Apes where the protagonist discovers the archeological remains of a human settlement that has toys and articles implying the humans’ once dominant existence. I felt the same sense of helplessness and being in a long exile.)
Over the last few months I’ve found myself gradually slipping into indifference towards the game. I’ve never followed football (the dominant sport and spelled ‘voetbal’ here), and at my age find it quite impossible to ‘get into it’.
The only sport that I still actively follow is Formula 1, which is quite ironical because I would refuse to even acknowledge it as a sport till 2 years back. I then got involved with the launch of espnf1.com and started following it actively (it’s easier to build a product when you enjoy using it). Ironically still, I sometimes find myself relating to the sense of sorrow and loss portrayed in the novel Netherland.
From a distance, nothing has changed about the trees in Amsterdam in the last 4 months. They remain a skeletal shadow of their summery past.
However, if you stand under one, you’ll realize that spring has already begun working its magic.
The wife pointed out that their reflections in the canals look quite psychedelic.
The Sunday a fortnight ago was your typical dreary, rainy Amsterdam day. We had been yearning to pick a couple of Van Gogh prints and couldn’t think of a better day to liven up our white walls. The Museum Shop at Museumplein was our obvious choice. On the way, we passed the Rijksmuseum. The trees in the museum’s courtyard – like the clichéd, in your face, early adopters of shiny things from Apple – had already embraced spring:
The Museum Shop did not have Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The painting is now in the collection of New York Museum of Modern Art and so a shop in Van Gogh’s own country doesn’t sell the prints. I find it quite appalling that the print of a 19th century painting should be withheld by what seems like a museum cartel.
We settled for our second choice – Van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms for the bedroom.
And to make up for the disappointment, we got a print of Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Skaters. May be that’s what the Museum Shop intended – don’t give them the print they really want, and they’ll pick two.
On returning home, we found cries of birds echoing in our courtyard.
The temperatures here might still be below 10ºC, but spring doesn’t seem to care.
In our flat in Bangalore, a print of David Lorenz Winston’s Solitude used to hang on the living room wall. It depicted a tree standing alone in the snow. In a city where the merest hint of temperature falling below 10 ºC would break weather records, it was the unlikeliest of landscapes.
The first time I saw snow was during a brief spell of precipitation in London in 2005. It didn’t linger for long and resulted in no perceptible change to the landscape.
My next encounter with the elusive white substance was in Leh. We woke up on a fine, sunny April morning to find the entire town covered under inches of snow. We also saw all of it melt the very same day. This encounter with snow therefore, was a little unsatisfying. And while we could now brag about having played in snow, we knew that since we had gone all the way to the Himalayas for it, it would always sound a bit disingenuous.
We spent the winters in Amsterdam in anticipation of snow. We gladly put up with shorter days and dull afternoons that were, as the wife would exaggerate (but only just), slightly brighter nights. We took the soaking wet mornings, the chilling, vengeful winds and the inconvenience of putting on layers of clothing before stepping out, in our stride in the hope that it would all culminate in a day of proper snow. But all we got through December and January was a lot of rain with some hail and other indistinct frozen forms that water takes when the mercury dips below 0ºC, which even our untrained eyes knew to be not snow.
In late January, all of Europe came under a sudden cold spell. The phenomenon that goes with the catchy name of Arctic Snap had resulted in snow all the way to Rome. A German colleague had once remarked that while the Dutch were brilliant at dealing with water they didn’t know what to do with it once it solidifies. We had heard all too many horror stories of train disruptions, flight delays and nights spent waiting at the airport, to plan our trip to India at a time when the likelihood of snow was pretty low. While in India, we learned from tweets of friends that Amsterdam was covered in the very snow we so wanted to see and had sought to avoid.
While we were sipping iced macchiato in 27ºC Bangalore afternoons, my colleagues were cycling to work in chilly -3ºC mornings. On the day of my arrival in Amsterdam, the maximum temperature was to be a merry -4ºC. The wife was coming back a week later, so she bid goodbye with the following piece of sound advice:
The Amsterdam I came back to was a city very different from the Amsterdam I had left just days ago. From my plane’s window I could only see a sea of white. The wind turbines, usually the first thing I spot before landing at Schiphol, were well camouflaged. And trees made it seem like I was about to land inside a print of Solitude.
Our house is a 10 minutes brisk walk from Amsterdam Centraal Station. Till I stepped out, I didn’t realise that the footpaths were covered in snow too. Dragging the suitcase over the snow was a lot of work. The suitcase’s wheels were completely useless and I wished they would transform into ice skating blades. The open courtyard of our building was covered in snow too:
On reaching home it occurred to me that I hadn’t checked out my public transport chip-card and would have to walk back to the station again. This time I carried my camera along.
The canals had begun to freeze while I was in India but by now the ice was thick enough that people could walk or skate on it. The inhabitants of the canals – the ducks, the swans and the seagulls looked a touch excited at this development. They would cluster around pools of unfrozen water and would do something that I can only describe as a strange ritual dance.
A few swans chose to sit lazily on the sheets of ice. On seeing one of them I had my heart in my mouth. I thought the poor bird was frozen but to my relief it got up and waddled on the ice.
I could see floating sheets of ice even in the river across the road from our house.
I was returning to Amsterdam on a Sunday and on Monday my office was moving to a new building. The 5th floor cafeteria of the new building offers what they’d called in tourist brochures “breathtaking panoramic views of Amsterdam”. We could see Rijksmuseum from the older office. I would always regret not having been able to click it in snow, but the views from the new office did make the regret a little more bearable.
The week at work was as heavy as a month. By the time the wife returned on Saturday, the whole city was buzzing with excitement. Everyone and their pets had descended on the frozen canals. Half of Amsterdam was skating on the ice. Some were dragging their children on improvised sledges. People living in houseboats on the canals had thrown parties and invited friends and relatives over. A few enterprising souls had setup makeshift stalls selling mulled wine. It was like being at a very unusual picnic.
Amsterdam looks peculiar from the canals below. It’s a perspective you won’t see unless you live in a houseboat or hire a boat.
It was strange standing under a bridge on a frozen canal and watching the traffic pass me by. You can hear me breathe heavily in the video below. The temperature was dipping fast and the cold from the ice below was beginning to creep up my feet.
As I sent of pictures of our adventure that evening to family, my sister wrote back pointing me to this Wikipedia article about artistic depiction of winters in Europe. This 400-year old painting by the Dutch artist Hendrick Averkamp caught my attention. Barring a few minor details, this is exactly how the scene at the canals that day had looked like:
The more things change, the more they remain the same?
P.S. That evening, when shopping for groceries at the neighborhood Albert Hijn, the radio played Madonna’s ‘Frozen’. We’d like to think it wasn’t coincidental.
