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When I looked out the window on Monday morning the ground was completely white. The white was unbroken by driveways or streets or even patches of green grass and without the familiar landscape I experienced a momentary disorientation as though I had woken up and found myself in some vast winter wasteland instead of in my house at the corner of Colchester road. Then I realized it had snowed. I went downstairs without brushing my teeth and switched on the television. The weather channels were having a great time. There was nothing but talk of the snow that had fallen all night long and now lay eight inches thick. On three separate channels, smartly-dressed women in warm suits pointed their fingers at a huge map of north-eastern America, explaining how the cold air had moved in from the West and caused the first snow of the year. The women were happy that it had come just a week before Christmas and there was much talk of the fairy-tale
‘White Christmas’ that had eluded the region for five years.

I was pleased for another reason. I could stay home from work. When one could not even distinguish the street from the side-walk there was no point in driving out twenty miles. I made a courtesy call to my boss to inform him but he himself had not arrived and I left a message saying I would not be able to make it that day. Then I washed and dressed for the cold and opened my front door to admire the view. Close up it was even more beautiful. Though there was no sun, the white dazzled with a light all its own. Not a blade of grass poked through my small front lawn. Thick clumps of powdery snow bent the leaves of the evergreen shrubs I had planted. A white sheet lay on the porch and the front steps. Beyond the lawn, bare branches of winter trees were heavy with it, as though in the night they had stretched their arms to the sky in greed to collect as much as they could. To my right and left on the winding street, right up to the crest of the hill there was snow. I could not help thinking how grand the colour white was, what a queen of colours in all its purity and how intransient it seemed.

My neighbour who lives across the road from me had come out with her dog. The dog had a little black coat of some kind on its back and she was trying to take it for a walk, but the moment it stepped off the porch its forepaws sank in and it yelped. I waved to her.

A car passed by very slowly. I was still sleepy and the scene brought strange associations of childhood, vague stirring feelings of joy and beauty and honesty and the disconcerting feeling that there was something very important that I had once known as a child and that the snow was now trying to remind me of. These thoughts seemed strange because I had grown up in India, where more than half the year I played barefoot in the hot sun and where winter came softly with gentle breezes to relieve us from the heat for just two months. I stood for a few minutes more then I went in.

After the first thrill of playing truant from work, boredom was already setting in. I wandered about the kitchen thinking of household projects to do. Then I heated milk and made a big jug of hot cocoa and switched on the television again. The weather channels were now vying with each other to point out the snow’s qualities, the number of inches in this place and that, the reaction of little children on seeing it (‘Wow, Mommy, snow!’) and so on.

Into my second cup of cocoa I heard a deep distant rumble. It came nearer and nearer and then it sounded very close. I went to the window. A snow-truck had arrived. It was big, about the size of two pick-up trucks. In front of it was the gigantic shovel that looked like a wide open predatory mouth. It moved slowly, clumsily, plunging its sharp edge into the ground and sending white flying sprays to the right and left of the street. Through the glass window, I saw the driver hunched over the wheel, staring straight ahead, bent on getting as much of the white stuff off the streets as possible.

My house stands on a half-acre plot of land of which about twenty feet just off the street is taken up by the easement where electric wires run between poles and where county workers are always digging up or repairing something. The driver turned the truck off the road and onto this strip of land and stopped. At first I thought the vehicle had broken down but then he turned the engine off and I saw him stretching his hands. A sudden impulse seized me, perhaps because I had just been thinking about hot summers in India. I poured out the remaining cocoa from the jug into a big china mug, put on my coat and boots and went out, holding the mug high in one hand and stepping gingerly on the snow. The steam from the cocoa mingled with my frosty breath as I walked down my driveway, leaving perfect imprints of my boots behind me. I reached the truck. The driver had opened his side of the door and was half leaning out. He lit a cigarette, put it to his lips and rubbed his hands together for warmth.

‘Hi.’ I said, stumbling towards him.

He gave me a quizzical look and took the cigarette out of his mouth. ‘Hi lady.’

‘Would you like some hot coca?’ I held the mug out as one might hold candy out to a child. He shrugged and jumped down easily and covered the few paces to where I stood. ‘Thank you.’ He took the mug and began drinking, making unabashed slurping noises. I watched him. He was quite a young man, thirty at the most, I guessed. He was thin and tall. But it seemed as though his profession had left a mark on him for his cheeks were like two thick fat flakes of snow, white and smooth and his nose was bulbous and red like the pictures of a child’s snowman. He was bundled in a thick winter jacket that reached his knees. Around his neck was a thick black muffler and from its folds his head rose like a perfectly round snow-ball. Short black hair sprang up from it and stuck out in clumps around a small black cap. The cap shook with every gulp he took. He had very small twinkling blue eyes deep inside a broad forehead. All in all he looked so much

like a story-book snow-man that I laughed.

He finished the cocoa and looked at me and touched his cap. ‘That was just what I needed.’

My own good deed pleased me and I began to feel talkative. ‘So how long do you drive this thing?’ I pointed to the plough.

‘Five, six hours at a stretch.’

‘So long?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Don’t you feel cold and tired?’

‘I do.’

After this I did not know what to say. An absolute hush fell. There was not a car in the street, not a bird in the leafless trees, not a sound from the houses. The man finished his cigarette and crushed it under his heel.

‘I hate this damn winter and the damned snow.’ He said finally, as though he were confessing something private to me. ‘And this job. But it’s the only one I got now and darned if I don’t keep it!’

‘Why?’ I said.

‘I’m tryin’ to save money to go to college.’

‘’I see.’

‘The more it snows the more we get paid, so in a way its good.’ He laughed.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, our job is to remove it almost as fast as it falls. ‘Leave the streets as though it were summer, boys!’ That’s what my boss says. In a big city like this we got more business. We got to see that people miss as little work as they can. We got extra hands this year seein’ as there’s gonna be lots of snow-storms like this one.’

‘Yes, yes.’ I said feeling for some reason very uncomfortable.

He handed me the empty mug and lit another cigarette.

‘Want some more cocoa?’ I said hoping even as I asked that he would say no. The thought of walking back to the house and out again did not now appeal to me.

‘No thanks, gotta go.’

‘Be careful out there.’ I shouted after him and turned around to make my way back to the house. It was getting colder and an icy wind blew at my hat and went into my ears. Inside, I took off my boots and sat down on the sofa shivering. My gloveless fingers were numb. I sneezed twice and I went to the medicine cabinet and swallowed a tablet at once. In a few minutes the rumbling started again and moved further and further away till the end of the street. Then it turned and came back, faster now, the shovel leading the way like a panting dog after a hound. In two hours there was not a flake on the black wet street and cars began going past again. Only on the sides of the street and beyond on lawns and trees, the untouched snow lay, in nature’s ancient mute defiance of man.

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