Saturday January 14, 2017
Kabul (BNA) Long before, Kabul had hosted harsh winters with heavy snowfall and cold weather as in previous winters snowfall was unprecedented in Kabul and other provinces especially in mountainous places. The snow was too heavy that even young boys had made stairs from snow upon which they climbed to the top roofs of their houses.
The yards and streets of Kabul were full of snow. When the people cleaned snow of their roofs, the snow formed a small hill. All the streets were closed for vehicles and pedestrians. Despite of these situations, the Kabul inhabitants took heavy snowfall as a good omen and cheerfully welcomed it as sometimes the thickness of snow on the ground was over one meter.
The Kabul municipality employees were quite active and alerted despite of their limited resources and snow cleaning equipment and snow sweeping machineries and cleaned snow from all the capital main roads and streets and even often transported it by trucks out of the city. The heavy snowfall seldom affected or disturbed daily activities of Kabul citizens.
On the advent of winter, people called the first snow as the dried snow. Youth and teenagers had made snow effigies and played with them. When the weather was changing and warming, fall of wet snow was started that often affected plants and broken branches of trees, cut power cables. When the weather was too cold due to heavy snow, another kind of snow that was called “Brinjak”, was fallen and people called it as “Snow eater” that was the sign of the weather warming and melting of snow on the ground. People became cheerful of dried snow especially if it was Thursday night. People said that tomorrow is Friday, we well organize a collective picnic, make snow man. They conducted snow fighting. The snow man was both from human being or animals. Children were particularly happy when they slipping on the ground covered with iced snow. It seemed that as if they pass over high mountains. Some people made snow tunnels through which they passed in narrow streets. The height of snow was almost equal or higher than the compound walls of houses. Even during heavy snow, the gates of houses remained closed and people had a lot of problems to sweep the snow and open the gate. Sometimes, people had to sweep the snow of their roofs even two or three times a day. They started snow sweeping even at midnight to prevent possible damaging of their houses. The homes were usually made of mud or sundried bricks with high possibility of destruction. Adjacent neighbors had often helped their near residents to clean each other’s roof’s snow.
During snow sweeping days, one of the tradition was this that people cooked an especial food called “Kachi” with animal oil and served it after snow cleaning. On the winter snowy nights, families cooked dried meat or “Landi”, Shoulay Ghorbandi, Kecheri Qoroot and served it together. It was prepared by different families’ respectively family members and their friends and relatives or neighbors sit around and spent the nights with narrating folkloric stories and poetical contests. All those who were invited were sincere to each other and had real friendship with their families even to that extent that if was difficult to distinguish them if they were members of a single family, relative’s friends or neighbors. People of old Kabul used to heat their homes with heaters firewood as fuel or another traditional but cheap heating mean called Sandali which is commonly used in Afghanistan and Iran during winter. It is a wooden cubic shape low table with a height of 50-60cm and sides of approximately more or less 100cmx60cm covered with a big quilt with an area of 3mx4m or something like that. Under Sandali people put an electric stove or some other heater. During telling narrations or poetical contest, they prepared tea both black and green and served walnut, green raisin or pine apples. If there was heavy snow fall on that night, early morning they swept snow of the roofs collectively.
Heavy snow fall was usually welcomed and appreciated by all people and it was believed that snow produces plenty of water for drink and irrigation and harvests will increase and as a result grains prices would decrease. Sometimes the weather was too cold that if someone touched the doors’ handle or chain, it was immediately frozen. Even the snow drops on people faces, beards or mustaches were frozen. But despite of that, people liked snow. During winters, even main roads and highways like Salang tunnel were blocked for several days and traffic flow was stopped. But unfortunately, now for several years we lack heavy snowfall while people expect it like before.
Karima Malikzada
