Of Sweaters and Scarves

I'm a Bombay girl. Winters for us mean a much awaited reprise from the stiffling heat and humidity, without it being cold in the true sense. So convinced we are that it doesn't get cold cold in Bombay,  that even when it did go sub 15 deg Celsius one year, no one really understood how to dress warm, wearing more fashion appropriate winter wear as opposed to functional ones. What? You know it's true. Those flimsy things arent really jackets you know. 

Then i got married to a Shimla boy. And learnt, for the first time, how to dress warm. I also finally figured out how women wear sweaters over kurtas and sarees  - when it's really cold, you stop caring about how you look and just want to stay warm. And then, as if the universe was making up for the all the time i spent in Bombay with fake winters, i got to experience two winters in Rajasthan - the cold making up for the terrible summers there. And suddenly, a whole new section in apparel was open to me now - winter wear. Heavy coats, jackets, sweaters, mufflers, wraps. I could buy them without any guilt and questions of where would i get to wear them (an important consideration, the guilt). I even (finally) bought a pair of boots that i could wear without worrying about the heat rotting my feet (as is very likely to happen in the mugginess of Bombay). 

Anyway. We're in Pune now, where the winters are moderate. Definitely no need for heavy winter coats and brightly coloured mufflers knotted in place. But does that stop the winter shopping? For anyone else, maybe. Not for me. I can still go into a shop and browse through silk scarves and brightly coloured sweaters, knowing that, wherever the fauj might send us, we'll always have Shimla. 

I've been here a day, and even with my extremities already cold (its a condition i shall discuss soon), i'm smug.