The shades of March

This year, we got them a month late, at least in the upper reaches of Punjab, where I live. Most of March was lost to Donald Trump and his shenanigans in the Gulf when a wider war loomed. Otherwise, February would melt into March, and the birds would sing the arrival of Spring, even if slowly. But the war and Ramazan both occupied the time we have traditionally celebrated to venture outdoors away from the confines of artificially warmed rooms and cosy environs. The rains too spoiled it for us this year, and while there was a brief interregnum, it kept for a week or two, only forcing people to bin their woollies and jump to an early summer. Soon, though, to resurrect the protection of warm clothing against a spate of some fierce weather, rain, hail, and snow on the hills. It made Summer wait a bit longer.

At one time, as an air force instructor responsible for teaching an academic, flight-related subject to budding flying instructors at a specialised school, I took up teaching Meteorology. This involved advanced study of how weather forms and the forces that shape it. If you have indulged in flying as a career, and know the wind, earth and air well, and physics and geography somehow caught your fancy at school, you will not only know your Meteorology and weather well, but you will also enjoy teaching it to those who you wish will learn it with as much passion. As a boy from a farming family over lands which were barani, or groundwater-fed, the feel to me of the elements came naturally. I have wallowed in the senses these stir, having lived the elements in my early years.

In my career in the air force, understanding flight was as essential as undertaking it. You had to be good at both. In instructional schools, like the one I mentioned above, or in others which equate to 'graduate' level learning stints – Top-Gun, since all know it – a mature, responsible, mid-tier leader is put through the grind of learning not only the art but essentially the postgraduate science of combat. I am not digressing; just highlighting the essence of March and how it impacts moods. That I write in April is because March was late in coming. Climate change, they say, but to me, we need to keep our bearings right by calling March by its shades. That may entail a revised lexicon, too complex to be undertaken, especially after the likes of Augustus and Julius, and their ilk, don't make the world any more. They could name months of the calendar after them; the ones we have now will do well only if they remember the names of the months in a year.

Civilisations nurture on great men, common heritage, and a superior sense of being blessed with what makes your world. Enrichment is adding to these assets that nature bestows upon us, forming the foundation of our comfort and contentment. Among those is getting back to the roots of who we are as people and what shapes us. So March and Meteorology forever interlink in my personal make-up. I finally got to sit in the shade of March on a quiet Monday afternoon in April. The Americans and the Iranians had held the world on tenterhooks over the weekend as they parleyed in Islamabad to find a way out of a quagmire that these apparently well-read, well-groomed, educated, mature leaders of nations had gotten themselves into. That you can get into one, but not out, is strange. But then that is when the primal takes over from the rational, and education and nuance take a back seat.

One other thing about combat flying is that there is little time for fluff and the superfluous. What matters is the bare bones. The price one pays, otherwise, is with one's life. Hence, the wooliness and the circularity that goes for peeling the layers off what is described as complex and intricate beats my sense of existential reasoning. Just as true as the warmth of the breeze in March or April, and its instant cooling in shade, must arise the sense of right and wrong in men who deal with people's lives. The warm wafts of these months not only knit the need for nature's assistance to the farmer to separate the kernel from the chaff; it also purifies the spirit that resides within. Men must let the breeze do its work on them. They must sit in the shade and feel the breeze before deciding mankind's future.

The time in the shade on Monday for me was thus a moment of reflection and disappointment in human failings. Even if the mix of sun and shade juxtaposed well to bring comfort to tiring bodies, and the birds chirped in the shade as the day warmed, it seemed to me that we had mingled our purpose in a medley too complex to discern. Many decades back, in March of that year, I was faced with the weight of appearing in my Board's Matriculation examinations – not yet fourteen, I had galloped ahead of my age, and was now finding it difficult to match the expectations. I found refuge in walking out with books to open fields where I would seek solitude under a tree to pore over them in undisturbed preparation. The Jujube trees nearby were ready with the crop, and I could not resist availing the yield. The preparation thus remained fractious and disturbed. The lure of the earth, air, and its products was too precious to disregard. Fortunately, life turned another corner, and I found myself in a Boarding School, where others were now responsible for making certain that I did what was important at times when it was needed.

Last week, I, along with my colleagues from the air force days, found the opportunity to travel out to a friend's farmhouse at the confluence of the Rivers Kabul and Indus. The three of us, together after forty years, did not seem to have missed a day between, as we joined a dozen other Air Force veterans. We had shared our lives and times, flying on each other's wings in war and peace. A few had fought the 1965 war. We did not crib or cry, or lament, but only relished the opportunity to be together again. And relive the times past. There were no pretensions, nor apprehensions. We spoke the same language and understood the other. Our esteemed host had arranged for us to sit in a shaded promenade. The April breeze warmed the hearts and cooled the senses in the shade of March that had been late in coming.

Go, feel the sun. It opens closed pores.