The first snowflake landed on my nose while I was arguing with a vending machine.
It was seven in the morning, my tea had come out without sugar, and the machine had swallowed my last ten-rupee coin. I was preparing a rather detailed insult for it when something cold touched the tip of my nose.
I wiped it away.
Another landed on my sleeve.
I looked up.
For a few seconds, I couldn't understand what I was seeing. Little white bits were drifting down between the buildings, turning slowly in the air. Some fell straight. Others wandered sideways as if they had forgotten where they were going.
I held out my hand.
One landed in the middle of my palm. It had six tiny arms, almost like a drawing someone had made with a very fine pencil. Before I could properly examine it, it disappeared into a bead of water.
I stared at the droplet.
That was snow.
I had seen snow in photographs, on television, and in the backgrounds of countless pictures people posted from their winter holidays. I knew what it looked like. I knew it could bury cars and close roads. I knew people slipped on it and complained about scraping ice from their windshields.
But none of that had prepared me for the absurd fact that a piece of the sky had just landed on my hand and vanished.
I abandoned the vending machine.
By the time I reached the end of the street in Devkhol, the flakes had grown thicker. Devkhol was a small mountain settlement where I had come to spend three weeks helping my uncle catalogue old books in his stationery shop. Until that morning, winter had meant cracked lips, numb fingers, and a kettle that never seemed to stay hot.
Now the roofs were beginning to turn white.
The parked scooters had acquired thin caps. The pine trees beyond the post office looked as though someone had shaken flour over them. Across the road, an old man was standing outside his tailor shop with a measuring tape around his neck, watching the sky instead of the road. A schoolboy had abandoned his bicycle and was trying to catch flakes in his mouth.
I wanted to do that too.
So I did.
I tilted my head back, opened my mouth, and caught absolutely nothing useful. A flake touched my tongue and became water. I tried again, missed again, and started laughing at myself.
A woman carrying a basket of potatoes glanced at me.
"First time?" she asked.
I nodded.
She smiled without stopping. "You'll waste the whole morning looking up."
She was wrong. I wasted the whole morning looking everywhere.
I examined the snow collecting in the grooves of my shoelaces. I watched it settle on the black railing outside the bakery, where every white speck stood out sharply. I pressed my thumb against a patch on a windowsill and discovered that snow could be both soft and surprisingly heavy when squeezed together.
Then I made my first snowball.
It fell apart before I could throw it.
I made another, packed it tighter, and aimed at a wooden signpost.
The snowball hit the post and burst into powder. I felt an unreasonable amount of pride.
A little girl in a yellow raincoat had been watching me from the bakery steps. She marched over, took a fistful of snow, and made a ball roughly the size of a potato.
"Your snowballs are too dry," she announced.
She showed me how to press the snow together without crushing it completely. Her name was Tavishi, and she was waiting for her father to finish delivering bread. Within five minutes, we were conducting a serious investigation into which patches of snow made the best ammunition.
I lost every round.
My gloves were wet, my fingers were aching, and snow had worked its way down the back of my collar. I had never been so cold in my life. I had also never been so reluctant to go indoors.
Then I heard a strange sound.
"Krunch".
I took another step.
"Krunch".
The snow on the pavement was thin, but beneath my shoes it broke with a crisp little snap. I walked in a circle just to hear it again. Tavishi watched me with the patient expression of someone dealing with an adult who had recently learned about spoons.
"Doesn't it snow where you live?" she asked.
"No."
"Then why didn't you come here before?"
I had no answer. It was a perfectly reasonable question.
By late morning, the whole settlement had changed its appearance. The roofs were white, the roadside drains had disappeared beneath little ridges, and the mountains behind the houses had become harder to distinguish from the low clouds. Every now and then, a gust of wind sent loose snow sliding off a branch in a sudden white shower.
I stood beneath a pine tree and watched one of those showers fall over an empty bench.
Somewhere down the hill, a dog barked. A shopkeeper dragged a broom across his doorway. Someone was frying something in a kitchen, and the smell of hot oil drifted through the cold air. The ordinary noises were still there, but they seemed farther away, as if the snowfall had placed a thick wall between me and the rest of the world.
I wondered how long it would last.
Would the snow still be there tomorrow? Would I wake up and find everything white? Could I carry a little home in a jar? Would it survive the journey? What would happen if I lay down in it? Would the cold hurt immediately, or would there be a few seconds when I could simply enjoy it?
I tried the last experiment behind the stationery shop.
The snow was not deep enough for a proper snow angel, but I lay back anyway, arms spread wide, and moved them up and down. My coat soaked through at the shoulders. A small stone pressed into my hip.
I got up, brushed myself off, and inspected the mark I'd left.
It looked ridiculous.
I was delighted.
At lunchtime, my uncle called me inside. He put a steel tumbler of sweet, steaming tea in my hands and asked why my trousers were wet.
"I was making something."
"What?"
"I don't know yet."
He looked out of the window at the snow, then at me. "Ah," he said, as though this explained everything.
I sat beside the heater and watched the flakes through the glass. My tea was too hot to drink, so I held it close to my face and let the steam warm my nose. Outside, Tavishi was being dragged home by her father, still protesting that she hadn't finished building a snow fort.
I thought about going out again after lunch.
I thought about how the cold had crept through my gloves, how my toes had started to hurt, how my wet sleeves clung unpleasantly to my wrists.
I thought about the snowball that had exploded against the signpost.
And I began smiling into my tea.
That evening, the snowfall stopped. The clouds lifted just enough to reveal the dark outlines of the mountains. Under the streetlights, the snow on the rooftops glowed faintly blue, while the patches near the shops had turned grey from footsteps and bicycle tyres.
I went outside one last time.
There was a little mound of snow on the railing beside the door. I scooped it up and squeezed it into a ball, carefully this time. Then I carried it inside, cupping both hands around it as though I had found something precious.
By the time I reached the kitchen, half of it had melted.
I placed what remained in a steel bowl and put it in the freezer.
My uncle found it there the next morning.
"What is this?"
"Snow."
"I can see that."
"I'm keeping it."
"For what?"
I considered the question.
I had no sensible answer. The snow in the bowl was already shrinking, its edges turning to water. Soon it would be gone, leaving behind nothing but a cold patch of steel.
"Just because," I said.
He shut the freezer door.
For once, he didn't argue.
I still remember that first snowfall, though I can't recall what I ate for lunch that day or what I did the day after. I remember the cold dot on my nose, the tiny branching shape in my palm, and the ridiculous pride of hitting a signpost with a snowball.
Most of all, I remember discovering that something I'd spent years seeing in pictures was entirely different when it happened to me.
The snow hadn't arrived with music or any grand announcement. It had simply begun falling while I was annoyed about a ten-rupee coin.
And for the rest of that day, I forgot to be annoyed about anything.