IT RAINED here in Peshawar on the first day of November tempting some to send warm winter wishes to their friends and families. But the wishes appeared to be farfetched since the promised weather refused to set in as the rest of the month saw cloudless skies and the sun still holding some of its bite carried from our sizzling summers in store.

It rained again and quite substantially at that, in the first week of December prompting some more cheery winter wishes from weather watchers. But true to the time-tested adage that weather during the period from mid October to mid December remains indifferent; winters seem to be shying away from settling down in our dusty old town with any good intentions.

The first half of the season is over before one could say Jack Robinson and one is yet to see any credible display of the winter accoutrements to suggest that winters had indeed touched our backyard.

Last year too real freezing and numbness inducing winters paid a mere fleeting visit to our lands before a prolonged moderate spell set in that lingered on well into May and in fact also June when tennis ball size hailstones hit vast parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, not once but several times.

Winters may have lost their consistency and intensity perhaps due to climatic changes, but summers do not seem to be giving in to any sort of extraneous pressures. This is particularly so in respect of Peshawar where summers remain unforgiving, if not blatantly roaring like ravenous predators.

The ferocity of summers in Peshawar was explained most succinctly by Olaf Caroe in his book ‘The Pathans,’ thus: from mid-May to mid-June the temperatures are among the highest in the world, but the heat is dry and burning and therefore not unhealthy; from then on to mid-September it is both hot and humid, and perhaps only surpassed for discomfort by the climate of the Persian Gulf.

Olaf Caroe released a prognosis of our weather with the publication of his book in the early 1950s. Since then much water has flowed under the bridge, but summers continue to be relentless. Winters on the other hand have lost their crispiness and with that their romance.

Autumn which has tickled the imagination of poets for eons is a bland period of the year in Peshawar. One wonders if John Keats’ enduring ‘Ode to Autumn’ could be applied to Peshawar in any conceivable sense of the word, especially when he says: Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too .

There is little to distinguish fall from any other season in Peshawar and the areas surrounding it. Peshawar, as one finds it in old scripts, has been devoured by the morbid imagination of the planners.

To think of a tree lining road or avenue and walking amid a panorama of russet leaves in autumn simply sounds outlandish. If truth be told, Peshawar with its few surviving nearly dead trunks of trees on its landscape looks like a chicken plucked of its feathers.

Considering that the whole of Peshawar remains clouded in haze, dust and smoke during day times, talking of changing seasons hence sounds even more ludicrous.

Peshawar is blessed with a beautiful canal system running through its entire length. The canals were meant to carry waters to our agricultural fields which were famous for their fecundity and for producing the best vegetables rich in tastes and vitamins. It is a miracle of no small proportion that Peshawar is still producing the best quality of green peas found anywhere in the world despite what we have done to our canals which are running thick with refusal of all descriptions including wastes from hospitals, factories and thousands of households.

The villages on the borderlines of Peshawar with their beautiful orchards of peach, apricot and succulent plums have nearly disappeared, eaten away by the ever increasing population and land mafia.

It would be puerile to attribute major climatic changes in the region to the outward disfigurement of Peshawar although it cannot be gainsaid that the vagaries of weathers are made worse by the filth that we have accumulated in our environs. The situation as of present is such that people in Peshawar can enjoy neither rain nor sunshine with any amount of confidence since none of the situations hold any promise for what follows the two.

Peshawar is located on the Persian or Iranian plateau and is said to lie outside the impact of monsoon rains triggered by disturbances in the Bay of Bengal in summers. The amount of rainfall in Peshawar during winters is more than summers, and yet the all times high rainfall in excess of four hundred millimeters in 24 hours was recorded on July 29, 2010 which was followed by biblical floods in major parts of the province.

The winter rainfall in Peshawar comes about as a result of the westerly disturbances. It is quite an interesting fact that Peshawar’s fait accompali is so decisively linked with whatever happens to its west particularly if one has to consider all the invasions, mass exodus of people and even vagaries of weather.

The steady long spells of winter rainfall is called ‘Jarai’ in local parlance. Pashtun poets have variously captured the winter rainfall in their poems with pathos of unrequited love, unfulfilled promises and even grinding poverty. Engineer, sculpture artist and poet, Ghani Khan in one of his poems titled ‘The wintry evening,’ has evoked the charms of the occasion most profoundly that goes on:

O nan da zhami makham Da jarai shpa da

Posth shabnami baran bahar waregi

Ghara da aur o Khayyam shuru qisa da

Da shaer sur o sitar maeen gharegi

Yar shuru kare mata Da gham qisa da

Kala muske she Kala Zharegi

(And it’s a wintry evening; a night of nonstop rain, soft velvety drizzle; falls steadily outside, by the fireside and Khayyam; a saga goes on, a bard’s lyrics and sitar; keeps strumming faintly, my beloved has spun; a sorrowful tale, now she chuckles; now she moans)

Ghani Khan could spring a surprise from nowhere. He lived in our times and remained unequalled, but we could not acknowledge him beyond his verses. His poetry will forever keep stirring our nostalgia for the times gone by when we used to warm ourselves in numerous traditional ways, few of which seem to have survived the battering of times coupled with the woeful fact that even winters in our part of the world have become so fickle.