Roses in the Snow

I yanked the last piece of laundry out of the drier and threw myself on the carpet that Avanti and I had spread out on the veranda. She was sitting cross-legged with a puzzle book, her little face puckered up in concentration and her ringlets gleaming in the sun. The sun…I laughed at the sun, it had nothing to do with today’s glorious heat. All the brightness was coming from the lake. The lake was a metal surface shredding sunshine into slivers that went bouncing off the hills painting them golden. I closed my eyes with content.

A little sigh…I half opened my eyelids. My daughter quickly averted her gaze back to her book pretending like she wasn’t trying to catch my attention. Then she sighed louder, this time heaving her shoulders in synchronization. “Look” I pointed “isn’t the lake pretty today!” Avanti cast one disinterested eye towards the lake and pretended not to be impressed.

“It won’t snow this year. It didn’t snow last year either!” she capped the sentence with another sigh. “It might still” was what I’d said to her all winter long, but this time I checked myself. I felt the stinging heat at the back of my neck. The fierce scowl on Avanti’s face made me smile. “My little ogre” was a queer kid…the spirit of a grumpy wise man inside the body of a pretty child—a body incapable of harboring the entire passion of thought generated by its mind, and so it would burst out in dramatic gestures as was the case today.

Personally I didn’t mind the unusually warm winter. The last time it snowed a couple of years ago the electricity lines had gone bust for days. The sky had been a canopy of dancing snowflakes and the hills—a patch of green against an all consuming white. “Happy Snowfall!” our neighbor shouted at the top of his voice, his middle aged face red with cold and joy. Avanti though only seven at that time was embarrassed by his crude joviality. She shrugged off the greeting with nonchalance and said to her cousin visiting from Delhi “It’s no big deal. It snows in Nainital every year.” So proud of her town…proud of the snow, as if the soft whiteness had something to do with who she was. Her brother noticed her irritation and went about shouting “Happy Snow” as well. Later as we gathered to click photographs she wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Instead my peculiar daughter took her wounded pride and moved to the back of the house. From the kitchen window I saw my little ogre priest busy with her own special rituals…softly treading on the virgin snow, observing each thing carefully, patting the snow on the pine tree, almost with reverence, and collecting snow crowned pine cones—wood roses we called them…

“Do the trees know it won’t snow this year? They must be waiting” her question called me back to the present, but I could see it wasn’t addressed to me.

In the evening I discovered a wood rose inside the freezer. “Hope you’re not planning to eat this” I half jokingly half seriously asked Avanti. For a couple of seconds we looked at each other with confusion reigning on our faces. Then I burst out laughing, but she looked at me still confused and hurt by the laughter. I fondled the wood rose, white with frost, feeling a little out of the world her daughter inhabited with the nature alone, and also feeling a little jealous.