Paromita Vohra: Between seasons

Illustration/Ravi Jadhav

There's something so special about in-between weather, when summer and winter cross and say hello-goodbye. It's warm enough to wear summer clothes and feel completely at ease with a winter scarf just for decoration. The smell of haar-singhar, that winter welcoming tree, floats around you like chiffon in a Yash Chopra film. And indeed this in-between, queer mausam is very romantic in the best way - it gives you love but asks for no commitment. Every season brings a cyclical reason to celebrate and complain as well as a meaningless nostalgia for lost weather. In winter you fantasise about summer's crisp fruits and curtained afternoons. In summer you yearn for slanted light and the peekaboo sweet-tart taste of oranges. When you have the season, you curse it for its smog or sweat or lauki meals or too much cauliflower on the menu. You complain it gets dark too soon and makes you depressed or it stays light too long and you end up working more.

It is only in-between that you feel agenda free. It is like the spell when the heart has recovered from a break-up and is full of anticipation of a new romance, but the anxiety of will-he-call-me-or-not, ohmigod two blue ticks but no reply, what does it mean - hasn't begun. It is like being in an airport, after check-in - when your hands are free, the sadness of the place you have left behind has not yet settled into your soul and the requirements of the new place have not yet begun to demand your time and attention and challenge your inadequacies. I suppose one can think of the in-between weather as a holiday from life. Maybe one can think of it as a taste of how you feel when you don't quite define yourself as belonging to any particular persuasion or position. It may symbolise what it is to be always full of possibility, always on the verge of becoming, almost perpetually young.

And yet, this fleeting freedom seems to be possible only with half of you. Committed to nothing, but immersed in nothing either, a window shopper in the bazaar of life. Right now in Delhi, where I am, trees are filling up with spiky almost-blooms. I think they might look beautiful fully blossomed, living it up and therefore, closer to dying. These transitions might be an enervating weather if they were forever, even effete, like supporting the government from outside, like formulaic no-strings-attached affairs, like purity politics which won't risk the corruption of solidarities, like hesitating too long before a grand but scary adventure. Perhaps they're best treated as rest-stops before plunging in without too many caveats into a summer of love, sticky with longing and prickly with heartache. A winter of struggling with a new project, full of sunlit breakthroughs and the gloom of inertia. The monsoon of a fight with friends and comrades, sometimes invigorating sometimes stormy.

With social media's momentariness, and its encouragement to think of life as moments and one minute stories, we sometimes lose our appetite for history and distances and long-term commitments. It's almost as if we fear disappointment more than death. But perhaps it's nice to remember, that the weather is always with us, even as its seasons are always changing, coming kindly back around with second chances.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com