The Arguments for Winter

Winter Sunset, More og Romsdal, Norway

An Open Letter from Dhaka to the People of Norway

To the people of Norway,

I know what you’re thinking: in Bangladesh there isn’t any Winter.  I know this because when I lived in Norway many Norwegians said the same thing about Sydney, a city where Winter is marginally colder than in Dhaka.

I want you to know, things are relative.  It’s not that I don’t remember that first week in Oslo, when I got used to wearing what felt like my entire wardrobe at the same time just to step outside the house; or that I’ve forgotten the preparation: the multiple socks, the boots, the gloves, taking off gloves again from having forgotten to do up shoelaces first, re-putting on gloves…  I recall how, with so many layers of clothing, bending arms and legs conjured the image of a tin man in need of oil and yes, I learnt to tap the snow off boots before drawing them into a vehicle.

There was that morning in the first week when my hosts said in English it was ten degrees outside.  It’d sounded good: occasionally Sydney can be as low as ten and I’d expected worse from a Norwegian Winter.  You know of course they meant minus ten, which I discovered on stepping out the front door; that in your country the minuses are often just assumed. 

Swans on a soon-to-be-frozen River, Oslo

And there was that problem with my hair.  As usual I’d styled it in the morning using a little water.  How was I to imagine that after several outside minutes I’d have a hairstyle of ice?  I remember slipping along the footpaths, trying to find the sprinkled gravel you use in public spaces to create grip.  I remember walking home from school across that frozen river, following somebody else’s footprints.

I learnt the meaning of your temperatures: up to minus ten was okay, towards fifteen meant icicles on the chin and loss of feeling in the cheeks and nose; beyond that the pain in one’s frozen ears really set in.  I don’t remember you having the flies’ eyes like they do in Dhaka; maybe you should.

As said, things are relative.  How else could it be that in my first Australian Winter thereafter I barely bothered with jumpers?  The reverse happened: after most of the year in Bangladesh I once found myself wearing a jumper during the Australian Summer.  It’d been over thirty degrees and I noticed people around me were in shorts and t-shirts; but to me it’d felt a little nippy.  It takes time to adjust, climatically speaking, please understand.

I want you to know that despite the lack of minuses, and the usual Winter sports like skiing and shovelling snow off the roof, the Bangladeshi Winter is real. 

Don’t consider please the middle of the days, without the evening to morning chill in the air, the time of day you might be tempted to label ‘Summer’, if not a particularly warm one.  Forget that it may come to pass in January’s Dhaka that you consider swimming around noon. 

Winter Mountains, More og Romsdal, Norway

Just know that in Sydney, if you made one of your ‘this is not winter’ comments in the middle of August, on one of those gusty, rainy days, nobody would be amused as they slipped on their caveman-inspired Ugg boots, an Australian specialty, and turned up their electric heaters. And neither would people be amused in the Dhaka of January.

For while I am not in the habit of speaking on behalf of Bangladeshis, I would take a risk on this occasion to let you know: we feel cold.  Just look around Dhaka and you’ll see it, the public rugged up in intricately embroidered chadors or shawls, with scarves surgically bandaged about the head; or western-inspired in jumpers and jackets.  There are all those beanies, sometimes gloves and scarves, items that true, aren’t common in Sydney. 

It may look sometimes as though many Dhakaites are prepared for the impossibility of imminent snow; for we who live here, impossible is not how it feels.

Then there are the flies’ eyes, those thermal earmuffs that fit like sunglasses only around the back of the head, and lend a person a look from behind that’s slightly reminiscent of an insect.  I am liking those flies’ eyes: in blue with white polka dots, in tartan straight from the Scottish Highlands, the military camouflage variety or the leopard skin.  And as they’ve multiplied across Dhaka of late we cannot doubt that Winter is with us.  Nor can you.

A Mild Winter in the Trondelag Mountains, Norway

And just on the side, I tell you I bought a pair of fly’s eyes, in urban grey camouflage for thirty taka from a vendor at Farmgate.  I mention this thinking you could pick up a pair or two for home, though the material might not be thick enough for your Januaries.

While it’s true in Dhaka nobody has to change their car tyres to cope with the slippery conditions on Winter roads; while the days are not short and dark as occurs in what you call Winter; and while I understand the reason you talk so much and often about the weather is simply because there’s a lot of weather to talk about; please bear in mind that in Dhaka also, we have our ten degrees, we have our fifteen.  The pluses are assumed, absolutely, and the trees keep their leaves, but of course the CNGs and rickshaws are not enclosed vehicles, remember that, so as we get around there’s a wind chill factor to be accounted for.

Oh, and I almost forgot about the water.  It was actually my grandfather who pointed it out; he was more practical than me.  Back in Sydney after Norway he’d asked how you stop the water from freezing in the pipes during Winter.  I believe you spiral a small copper wire around the pipes and send a low current through it to prevent the water freezing, is it so?  

The Mountains of Trondelag, Norway

And in the mountains I recall such a system can be unavailable such that the water does freeze and it becomes necessary to find fresh snow to boil down for drinking.  But this alone is not the measure of Winter and besides, there are many in Dhaka who know the feeling of turning on the tap and nothing comes out, be it for different reasons.

So don’t mind as we find ourselves rugged up under a blanket at home in the night, in my case with the ceiling fan running on full to keep the mosquitoes away.  They are indeed less at this time of year.

In Bangladesh many people look forward to Winter as their annual hill-station away from the heat, but still, you mustn’t scoff as we shiver at the tea shops holding our tea cups with both hands, as in Christian prayer, to promote heat transfer to our palms, or as we devour those piping-hot chitol pithas or rice-flour cakes from the roadside stalls in the foggy evenings.

Try to understand our Winter in Dhaka, though it may slip in and out of the city as readily as a foot into the bindings of a Telemark ski.  It is Winter.  Perhaps you might even find room for sympathy.  Enjoy your snow, skiing and rømmegrøt or sweet cream porridge; and spare a thought for the people of Dhaka as we face Winter, we too.

Best Regards, Yours Truly, etc. etc.




If you're into seasons, you might like the monsoon. Or you could just take it easy in Barbados, or maybe on a smaller scale in Lilliput.


Also published in Star Magazine, here: The Arguments for Winter

Advent Lights, December, Norway

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In the Northern Room

Norwegian mountain road

From each of three red candles on a table, rises a sinewy line of smoke. Each smoke-line curves ever so slightly, in perfect unison with the other two, bending, turning slowly in a meditative dance choreographed by the opening of a cupboard door, a puff of wind, the slightest movement of people. The table is pine and polished, plain, and there’s a narrow linen runner of red squares down its centre. On it there’s a simple basket of red napkins ready for crumbs and spills, and a few plates with unfinished gingerbread and morsels of home-baked biscuits that dissolve with buttery sweetness on the tongue. There’s a plain sofa in cream, with a blanket folded lovingly over one arm, neat and ready for a nap or to cover cold. Later there’ll be coffee, in petite cups, for it will be filtered, strong and biting; later there’ll be chocolate, quietly removed from that small china dish which is mysteriously always full. The northern room is a little inviting, and warm.

The floor is timber, covered only with the odd rag-rug. The walls and ceiling are wooden too, tightly fitted to ensure insulation, with the miniature eddies and swirls of the elements of nature visible in the grain. There is a white fireplace, angular and straight, with a few logs stacked in formation waiting to be burnt; and the metal instruments of flame-stoking hang from a small iron stand, awaiting the delicate craft of a fire-surgeon. Yet even with the warmth of the fire, we need woollen socks on our feet and slippers: for the Norwegian mountains know the meaning of winter.

The warmth of winter

The fire, the candles on the table, smaller clusters of candles around the room and a few lampshades speak softly: painting the room in dull yellow, radiating shadow-patterns, flickering, fluttering in a conversation of light.

The many ornaments speak of a time before time. There’s that creature of legend the troll, tricky, malevolent and humanlike. Here, it’s a small statue hewn from wood: with a big belly and a foreboding brow, shaggy hair almost as a lion’s mane and oversized furry feet. The many types of troll belong to Norway. They are said to lurk on its hillsides, behind its waterfalls and in its caves: this one wears overalls with basic patches on each leg and a tiny hole at the back to accommodate its stocky fur-tipped tail. One wall is guarded by a witch, a hideous wart on her hideous nose. She sits on a broomstick, riding upwards, looking determined, and on another wall is a tapestry in white and brown, catching in its weave tempting shapes of ancient form.   

The windows each have two glass panes, for halfway up their length, outside, a wavy line of snow exhales silence. Beyond them, in the black thickness, you can just make out the scarred white trunks and scraggily stark fingers of a few bare birch trees. It feels as if the world is not yet born.

Among the birch trees

The room is small, with just enough space for a dining table and a sitting area, for the cabin it belongs to, what Norwegians call a hytte, is, by tradition, small. Hytter can have no electricity, a basic water supply and often feature a toilet that is just a hole in the ground with a seat built over it: but of course the bathroom is inside the building because of the winter cold. It’s not that Norwegians can’t afford conveniences – Norway indeed has one of the world’s highest living standards, but in their hytter they choose not to have them. Like Bangladeshis, Norwegians have it easy to remember tradition and the natural world around them: a touch of the essence of where they are from and who they are.

The small hours of night are filled with talk of northern things. There’s discussion of the day’s hiking or cross-country ski trip along the valleys, over the hills, across the frozen lake. Perhaps there were reindeer, or a shy fox. If it were autumn there could have been a brief pause to feast on a small bush of treasured cloudberries, those diminutive clusters of yellow delight. Such discussions are shaped in the undulating melody of the Norwegian language, with its many valleys and hills of accents, enough to rival even the variety found in Bangla. 

There’s a catalogue of life that’s spoken of: the incrementally always-changing seasons, the colour of autumn or the heat of summer; of dinners at the usual 4.30 p.m.; of careers and concerns and absent family members held dear. There’s talk of the world too, from a Nordic perspective, in peaceful mountains even the smallest daily annoyances can’t seem to scale. And of course, there’s always analysis of the weather: colder this year, more snow, less snow, the need to shovel snow off the roof in the morning, and the exact degrees-Celsius right now (minus the minus, which in winter need not be said). Outside the window hangs a thermometer for conversational precision in such matters.

Shades of light

It might sound strange, but even in the northern room it’s easy to remember the Bangladeshi south; it’s easy to think of other rooms back in the gram. For just as Bangladeshis travel to their gramer bari whenever there is time, Norwegians use their hytter in the mountains for memory making, storing family lore, for passing weekends and holidays and festivals, like Easter with its daffodils and decorated eggs, or the freshly cut pine trees and colourfully-wrapped presents of Christmas. For Norwegian families, hytter can create a necklace of tiny precious moments, reminiscent of the long histories of family and community you can find in the gram.

In the gram, conversations can be bright and bold and boisterous, like the Bangladeshi sun, with liveliness and expression to float across the sky, and in the Norwegian hytte, conversations can equally inspire with their subtlety and curiosity: the stillness of a snow blanket across the land.

The Norwegian language is a little overflowing with understatement: great things are ‘a little good’ and moments shared are ‘a bit fun’. For if everything was fantastic, how could it be expressed it if things got even better? Let fantastic hold its strength, a word for rare use, and for all the many good things, those quiet hytte-evenings, let’s keep it small. Hytte-talk is three red candles on a table. It’s a little illumination to turn the coldest night a bit cosy.

The northern room

Some of us are lucky, in the twenty-first century, for we can build a modern house, Bengali style, with the heart. It’s a type of home that rests not on walls of brick or tin or mud; it needs no mortgage or ownership certificate and has a value money cannot measure. With foundations that lie within us, and passports and planes to take us and bring us, the modern house can span continents; it has endless rooms waiting to be discovered and re-discovered. One of the finest rooms in the house, as I have yet found, is the northern room.

Of course there are people who don’t appreciate the modern house. There are those committed to impenetrable walls, who seek self-unity in others’ division. Sometimes they bear slogans like security and national interest, mantra like the ‘clash of civilisations’, but at the end of valid concern remains the usual, age-old intolerance. I suppose it’s a base fear of stepping into an unknown room. It’s a pity, for the beauty of the modern house (with its hole-in-the-ground northern toilet) is great, and it might be a better aim for the world to increase the number of people who can enjoy it.

Outside, if you brave the minuses, wrap yourself in soft jumper, thick jacket, striped scarf, waterproof gloves and woollen hat, if you step out of the hytte, the sky above can dazzle: fifty million stars gaze to Earth in wonder at our smallness. The crunch of snow beneath your feet sounds as a lorry in that place thick with silence, and sometimes the sky grants an added surprise: the aurora borealis, those sheets of Arctic light that curve and twist through the night, slipping away again without notice into the darkness at their desire.

With a dart of breath the candles are out and the hytte is dark. The bedroom windows are open, for the minuses to creep inside and grant sound sleep, under the warmest of blankets. And after the eyelids close, the mountain imagination is a little free to send small and pleasant dreams.

Winter sky

If you like north, see just how far north Norway goes.  Or perhaps a little more haste is in order, in a jaunt across Scandinavia?

This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: In the Northern Room







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