Delhi in January is grey. Delhi in January is always a snooty, snug, sooty grey. Except when there’s a burst of rain and the smog lifts. Then it’s bright green, even a pallid yellow. That lasts for maybe four or five hours on any given day, but we all know that that’s not really Delhi, that’s just a break from the gloom. I wouldn’t say say I like the grey because I have a tendency to become despondent and lean freakishly into those greyish human moods. But the Delhi grey during its peak winter inspires in me faith to plod on. With AQIs broaching various previous year’s records, and no amount of rum, whisky or brandy doing its work, Delhi does implore me to forge on. Forge on into the literal and metaphorical unknown of our futures. Its greys are the ones that seem to ooze a strange storybookish neo-noir atmosphere. The cold is obviously straight from the novels and short stories and essays of bone-chilling cold we all grew up reading. But there is something more to the patchy, greyish veneer that the city has come to assume this past decade. The sooty stillness, the slatey grey, it all imbues upon you a somewhat dull pall. You half-heartedly wait for it to lift, but you know you won’t be able to exist once the sun screams out. That creates a momentary respite, however breathless. A safe space emanates in the most horrible of corners. Had it not been for the sheer number of people, stalls and strays on the roadsides, and vehicles on the roads, this veneer of the city could somewhat be described as Kafkaesque. A sooty city filled with people clothed in all shades of middle- and lower-middle class blacks to comfort themselves. Ensconced on a roadside a chaiwalla pours you a cup with ilaichi and laung, Kumar Sanu croons from someone’s broken phone speaker “raah mein unse mulaqat ho gayi…”, a cigarette stall sees a surge in sales of loose ones even as the AQI touches an all time high, a ground floor veteran living alone in a south delhi neighbourhood nurses a whisky toddy as a stray cat purrs at her feet. Delhi is immensely potent around this time of the year. Whatever be your poison — the city, its air, the cigarettes, the alcohol, Kumar Sanu’s treacherous numbers or just your own company — you are sure to find some company, a common solace and a lingering malaise in Delhi’s pith in January.

I’ve been gathering old words (and selves, I guess?!?) these last few days. This brief-esque snatch on winters from the December 2017 (or was it 2018) made me pause and think about how self-involved I’ve been through the decades…