In the middle of June, I am dreaming of snow. Snow that is qanik — big, almost weightless crystals that fall in stacks and cover the ground with a layer of pulverised frost. It’s a word I learned from Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow , Peter Høeg’s strange, quietly beautiful novel about an Inuit-Danish woman with a profound and instinctual understanding of the element. For many years, I encountered snow only in the pages of childhood books. In Hans Christian Anderson’s story ‘The Snow Queen’, where Gerda must rescue her friend Kay from the Snow Queen’s icy palace, guarded by snowflakes, where inside she sits on a throne on a frozen lake. Sometimes in Enid Blyton’s wintry landscapes (uncommon, though, because her adolescent adventurers seemed on an endless summer holiday.) One of my favourites, The Rat-a-Tat Mystery , part of the Barney Mystery Series, is set in a snowed-up old country house, cut off from the world. Here, the children go tobogganing, indulge in snowball fights, build a snowman, go ice skating, and, inevitably, stumble upon a mystery. In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol , from which we’ve inherited not merely a host of unforgettable characters — Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future — but also our indefatigable ideas of a ‘white’ Christmas. (Clearly, Decembers in 19th-century England were colder and snowier.) In Jack London’s novella Call of the Wild , where Buck, the canine hero, is wrenched from his life in sunny California and put to work as a sled dog during the Klondike gold rush, far away in north-western Canada. Buck sees and eats his first snow and it bites “like fire”. In CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe , the children travel to Narnia, a land cursed by the White Witch into perpetual winter.

All these when I’d only known winter in Assam, with its pleasantly warm days and crisply chilly nights, or Shillong, where the cold did bite yet there’d only be frost, sometimes lying so thickly on our lawn and roof that we liked to believe it was snow.

The first time I saw snow was on a school trip to Tawang, in Arunachal Pradesh. Our night bus gasped its sloping way up at dawn, over a sea of clouds tinged pale pink by the sun, and stopped at Sela Pass, where even in March, snow had fallen. We tumbled out of our seats in sleepy delight, and not all the descriptions I’d ever read could compare to seeing sparkling white slopes ring a frozen lake. When I touched snow, “it bit like fire”. Then, as all children must, we fashioned rough snowballs and pelted each other ferociously. My remaining memories of snow involve London. Once, a friend and I booked tickets (to save money, much in advance) for the musical adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera , on what happened to be the snowiest day in the city in decades. “I have the tickets,” Shalini proclaimed, waving them around as she stamped her way out of Piccadilly station, and promptly slipped into a snow mound. We spent a freezing 40 minutes looking for the lost tickets, and then a good 20 warming up at the theatre bar. Snow was definitely no longer an abstraction.

My last relationship also began in snowy London.

And one particular walk together, in January, from China Town back to Bloomsbury where we both lived, always reminds me of the opening lines of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow: “The silence of snow...If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.” In London’s empty streets, lamplight caught the snowflakes and made them dance. The world was golden and silver. He flicked snowflakes off my hair, my coat, and it felt like the most tender of gestures. Weeks later, I awoke early one morning, after we’d had a conversation about being together, and looked out the window onto rooftops and streets covered with freshly fallen snow. It was pristine. Page upon empty page. Alive, like us, I thought, with infinite possibility.

Now, away from the parts of the world that see snow, and where summers are milder than in this city, I am called to coldness. And since I cannot leave, I bring down books from my shelves carrying winter within them. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars . Henry David Thoreau’s Walden . Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child . Sjón’s weird yet wonderful The Blue Fox . Adalbert Stifter’s magical Rock Crystal . I may even reread Miss Smilla .

This month, I find myself thinking of things that are born in winter and perish in the heat. Snow. Sweet peas. Relationships. Comfort comes, as it usually does, from the oddest of places — from the last frame in Calvin and Hobbes’s It’s a Magical World where Bill Watterson frees the two companions, on a toboggan, into a winter landscape, a page of white. I think of that London morning, a few years ago. Snow will melt and fall again, and with each layer, promise renewal.

Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse; @janicepariat

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