The Taste of Winter Harvest

“Lambiyaan raatan lang gaiyaan,” my grandfather would say: the long nights have finally ended.

- VERNIKA AWAL

OHRI has always carried the feeling of a Punjab winter nudging toward spring. The solstice slips by, the daylight stretches by mere minutes, and people step out with the quiet conviction that the worst of the cold has passed. As a child, none of this celestial choreography interested me. What I waited for were the rituals that arrived on schedule, unbothered by science.

The music signalled the start of the season. Long before I could decipher Punjabi folk lyrics, I could tap out the pulse of ‘Dulla Bhatti’. When Veer Zaara later turned it into a mass singalong, my cousins and I hummed away without knowing we were echoing the story of a man who rescued kidnapped girls from slave markets. Sundri and Mundri were not just catchy names, but girls who entered folklore and refused to leave. It is remarkable how easily myth blends into childhood, long before history finds us.