The Snow Memories

The sweetness and the pleasures of reminiscing the moments always fill the heart with exciting and riveting experiences. The states of pleasure and pain in their extreme levels refresh the scenes back to the fore. The seasonal, behavioural, transient and the immediacy of the events always have the recreating and reinvigorating feelers as Aristotle has said it.

In Kashmir, memories have been on the spectrum of harsh to mesmerising on the levels of happenings we have been witnessing down the memory lane. They are mostly bruised with sustained pattern of hushed breaths barbed to the core. The colors and the hues of the memories have been changing in the fractions of seconds. A wail in a second and the smile in a minute. The clocks of the emperor are designed to rule the ticks of an ‘individual’ and thus the memories. We cannot even remember the gloomy shades of our past and the doomed shadows of our present. This is the darker side of our memory chests we own.

   

On the other hand Kashmir being the garden of seasonal darling to the nature lovers owing to its unique geographical and scenic marvels. Every season has its distinct fervour and signature. The newness of the springs, comforting breezes of the summers and the rekindling flamed colors of the autumn. The winters then start afresh the seasonal calendar with whiteness of the snow. This season has always been the paradox for Kashmiris. The exotic and the transcending effects of snowfall can never be ignored, it has always been there. The meditating reverberations on the every spell we are welcomed with leaves the people awed. On the other hand the usual disparities in the levels of societal and economic development lay bare the inequalities to the fore. The microcosm of this scene can be discerned from the simple fact as in how in the same society one person enjoys the dancing of the snow flakes and the other struggling for the day end to have their sleep. These glaring facets of the Kashmir exist in almost every theme that comes under the vocabulary of social and political formations.

Kashmir has always been abreast with extremes, the element of homogenous and the uniting strands have always been missing. The voice that supports the ‘truth’ today turns out to be the frontrunner for ‘untruth’. The moment these double standards and contradictions fall we will see the rise.

In all of these bittersweet moments memories are made and these become the mainstay of existence sometimes. Memories compromise the heart and soul of anything that has to exist. We have memories therefore we exist.

In Kashmir the whiteness of the snow never remains the same and we have ‘faced’ it changing colors from gloomy red to sad black. The hexagonal dimensions of the snowflakes too have been reduced to the single word of ‘silence’.

If we dive in through our memories we have always found out how not being silent is the motto for having the feeling of completeness.

Meanwhile the grandma tales, steamed Nun chai and the warmth of broken skulled kangris peppered with the pickles over the dried delicacies have always been the feast of winter for Kashmiris. This memory is there as we are. It will never fade away if anything else does. Then we were and will always be. Aeis aeis’ tei ruzu tei  – the chant of our existence which basically is the emblem of our hope in every phase of our history and future.

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