Winter in Mayaghat

 Write a short story about someone experiencing their first winter.

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The people of Mayaghat hadn't seen anything like that. They were confused baffled terrified.

Young children cried all day long, grown men stared about listlessly looking at the fallow lands, women shivered in misery. Nothing anybody could do. The elderly talked of the times from way way back when they were barely toddlers when they had a year like that. All the cattle died, they said, there was famine in the land.

The people of Mayaghat knew of winter of course, they knew what it was to be cold. They had been to cold areas. They thought of it as a constrained experience, like how the market was setup only on Tuesday evenings where everybody from the surrounding towns came to sell their wares, and people went to do their shopping. There was nothing strange about the market day, but it would be strange if a barrage of people showed up on the street a Friday morning, in front of your house. There was a time and place for everything. And there was none for Winter in Mayaghat. Yet the uninvited visitor had showed up, unwilling to leave.

They layered up with clothes, lit the fires and kept the rooms open to let the heat in. They basked out in the Sun, the terrifying sizzling source of light that was now so impotent. They huddled in their houses, and in the public spaces. And yet. There was something about the air that just sucked your energy out. They felt like sleeping all the time, tired and confused. The walls seemed to be sipping the warmth away, anytime the fire went out the cold came growling back in. The Sun, the powerful lord of the skies, was hidden by clouds. Everybody got hungry, all the time. The crops were dying.

They were not afraid of the famine. The government guaranteed a minimum price and grain supplies, they would live. Their cattle too would live for the hay had been made. There was no fear of death from the cold, those who had the money or householders with free time had ample wood to last the season. Those without had turned the buffalo patties into slow-burning bricks that would last over a day. The houses smelled but they would live.

It was not the physical they were afraid of. It was the emotional. The sun couldn't be relied upon. The walls in their own houses had turned against them. There was something in the air that sucked the energy out. There was a famine of emotions. The festivals and gatherings went on but something was something was missing. A sense of impending doom, a fear that things would only get worse. That the world was a cruel unpredictable place, you couldn't could on anybody or anything. The gods had abandoned them finally, and they had nowhere to look to.

The people of Mayaghat were clean people, they washed in the morning and in the evening. The dust and the sweat was intolerable, insects would attack upon a body that hadn't cleared itself of the sweet smell of hard work on skin. In the cold, the showers got more infrequent. People shook in agony, the cold water was like a thosand knives piercing their innocent soft skins.

They lost all the hope.

Until...