Even thirty to forty years ago, many urban centres in the country, including Dhaka, used to feel the leisurely arrival of winter as early as October. The suburban areas, along with the villages, would begin feeling the soft bites of wintry cold from November. With the country preparing to face the onslaught of winter as days wore on, virtually the whole Bangladesh would be in the clutches of winter by mid-November. By December, full-scale winter would set in.
The season of winter is all but gone. The land now has two distinctive seasons: summer and monsoon. One hardly feels the arrival and exit of the two Bangla autumns -- after monsoon and before winter. Spring is illusory. Pure winter now stays in the country for around a couple of weeks only. Due to its being in the cycle of seasons, winter routinely arrives every year; then takes leave. Coming to the impacts, after a long period of humid heat, people find themselves relieved of the ordeal with the advent of winter. That's how the season appears these days. But gone are the bites of cold.
In the capital, winter makes its presence felt only with its unique garb: people going out in their colourful warm clothes, arrays of open-air festival venues, winter vegetables and traditional delicacies. Besides, winter comes to life in the newspaper photographs of foggy winter-dawns and also in the artistically composed footage on TV channels. The photo series actually begins with the scenes of rural experts placing earthen pitchers at the date-palm tree-top to collect its sweet, aromatic juice.
The period December-January is one of the happiest and most comfortable in Dhaka these days. While life in Europe, North America and parts of Asia goes haywire amid snowfall, blizzards and bone-chilling cold, in Dhaka people bask in a pleasantly cool weather. One can walk long distances without sweating and feeling exhausted. While on a bus ride, commuters remain calm and in their element, not picking a raucous quarrel with a co-passenger or the conductor. The otherwise ill-tempered rickshaw-pullers appear to be quite sober and reasonable, when it comes to fare. Such is the magic of Dhaka-winter in the twenty-first century.
Even many rural areas of the country do not have to go through the hard times of the once-dreaded season of Poush and Magh, the period of winter in the Bangla calendar. In spite of its bounties in the form of special menus of rice-made delicacies and night-long sessions of music, open-air folk operetta and other funs, the poorer section of the people once had to battle with the winter-cold. If they could manage to have a good sleep during the long dreary and wintry nights, they would thank their Providence. Aroma of winter dishes would waft about in the air around their kitchens.
Days have changed. In many winter-stricken rural areas of Bangladesh nowadays, we would find almost everyone comfortably clad in warm clothes. Forty to fifty years back, men clumsily bundled up in thin, cotton blankets (Kathas), or children covered from ankles to shoulders with their adult relatives' lungis tied in a loose knot around the neck were a common sight. Only a handful of affluent people could afford shawls. Now go to a remote village market in winter. You will find rows of hawkers selling second-hand warm clothes. The prices are low. The clothes could last for many winters to come.
That the village people can now fight winter with sufficient warm clothes points to the slow, but steady, march of the economy since the country's independence. Large and small cities wear a cheerful, vibrant look throughout the winter. Being the residents of an overcrowded metropolis, people in Dhaka literally count the days for winter to arrive. Amazingly, during the winter-days Dhaka does not seem that unliveable and stifling. Yet the fact that winter has to be bidden farewell for good in most parts of the country defies credulity. Even in the decade of the sixties, life used to grind to a halt on the nights of December-January, the peak times of winter in those days. The spectacle of people hurrying home by 8-10 in the night, however, comes back in the recent years with the sudden arrival of cold waves. For the newer generations, these spells reenact the winter of bygone days in Dhaka and elsewhere in the country --- especially in the northern and western regions. Cold waves kill the poverty-stricken older people in these areas even today.
Environmental activists point finger at the fast disappearance of forest-lands for the continued lessening of severity of winter in the country. Some would like to add the impact of global warming to the reasons why winter has left Bangladesh so abruptly. Whatever the cause is, the exit of this much-relished season has left behind a plethora of health hazards. In a broader perspective, scientists link the repeated onslaught of many diseases, like the flue, to the erratic climatic patterns. As part of the El Nino impacts, a large swathe of the Pacific Ocean region now experiences strange behaviour of seasons. These include fluctuations in the intensity and duration of monsoon and winter. A major change in the patterns of rainfall, with increased flooding and summer, especially verging on drought, has also taken place.
The headlong plunge in winter-ferocity in Bangladesh threatens the opening of a dreadful phase of winter-related scourges.
The reality is, the original season of post-harvest festivities and urban pageantry has left the country. Winter in all its manifestations will not visit the land in the foreseeable future --- unless nature comes up with an unexpected phenomenon. One could not wish more if the country had a soothingly cool 2-month season, like that in the mild-winter countries.
Shihabskr@ymail.com
Winter comes without its bite
Shihab Sarkar | Published: November 01, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00
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