I had just turned 22 when a friend gave me this poem as a gift. She wrote it out by hand, the words crabby and blue and I imagined her writing it at her desk by night, my mind conjuring a scene from Citizen Kane, as the white of the paper became snow.

There are circumstances in our lives when a poem comes and, finding a particular burr in the mind, catches on and refuses to be dislodged. I read this poem for the first time in 1993 in Bombay, a couple of months after the second devastating round of riots after the fall of the Babri Masjid in December the previous year. The time did not feel far enough away to say ‘the previous year’ with any conviction. I thought of all the things we had heard and read and seen and I repeated to myself like a mantra the words one must have a mind of winter. One must have a mind of winter.

So much heat and passion all around us; so much destruction and movement; and above all, so much fire. What was my friend thinking when she chose this poem? Did she read and want the coldness contained in the poem – the distance, the glitter, the frost and the nothing?

I kept this poem pinned above my desk for years. Even now, it is there somewhere amongst other precious objects pressed between the pages of a book.

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At first read, the poem throws up some clear, unmistakable items: it is one sentence long; its clauses define sense impressions that are primarily visual and aural; almost dead in the middle of poem is the phrase ‘not to think/ of any misery’ – a spanner in the works and the locus of all the tension the poems holds; and the final, unforgettable phrase, ‘beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’, that makes of the word ‘nothing’ both description and object.

But the poem is also a puzzle. The title appears to point us to the kind of mind that might be made of winter – a literal one, the snow itself. Only such a mind might have been cold a long time. Only such a mind can see and hear what it does in the winter landscape and not think of misery, the poem says. But a snow man – and this is obvious – is not any sort of a man; if anything, a snow man is another ‘it’, another object fashioned out of the land through which the wind blows, out of the ice that shags the junipers and glitters in the distant January sun.

So who beholds the things in the poem? Who listens to the ‘sound of the wind’, the ‘sound of a few leaves’ and ‘the sound of the land’? It would appear that the listener must be ‘nothing himself’ in order to be able to perceive both ‘the nothing’ – which could be a void – as well as ‘nothing that is not there.’

In other words, only one who can see and hear without modifying what is seen or heard, can see things as they are. The only quality one must possess is the quality of not overlaying what is external with the cloth of thought – ‘not think’ but merely behold, merely listen. Be both unchanged and unchanging.

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Consider also, the way the poems moves. Until the poem reaches the pivot of ‘not to think’, it deals with visual sense impressions inlaid with adjectives and free from repetitions: you have ‘crusted’, ‘shagged’, ‘rough’ and ‘distant’ to describe the frost/ice, the trees and the sun. Even the apparent imperative of the ‘must have’ in the opening line is softened by the change in tense in the opening line of the second stanza: ‘And have been cold a long time.’ This is not an exhortation so much as an observation.

After the pivot, the sense impressions are aural, repetitive and hypnotic. ‘Sound’, ‘wind’ and ‘land’ shift places; and the word ‘nothing’ becomes several things – a signpost for what isn’t a part of this landscape and the whole of it.

But what is this land? Where are its edges? ‘Distant glitter’ suggests vastness; but the word doesn’t describe the land or the extent of the trees, but the sun which was always distant though not always cold.

The line breaks in the following lines are also complex:

In the sound of a few leaves
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

The line break at ‘land’ seems to indicate that it is the land which is full of sound. And, going back a line, it is the sound of the leaves which is the sound of the land: the one small thing standing in for something large and seemingly endless. In these lines, the one thing is the other. But reading on we find that the land is full of the wind; the wind and the place is ‘same’. Does this mean they are interchangeable? This is a slight shift from the sound of a few leaves ‘which is’ the sound of the land; a recognisable shift, but confusingly ‘the same’. After all, it is the wind and cannot be held to one place, cannot have edges.

*

So once again: what is this place and who can be in it? Who, in fact, is the listener and the beholder? Does he have a location like the spruces and the junipers have a location?

Not to think. Nothing himself. Nothing that is not there. The nothing that is.

Yet another complexity of this poem is that only a person who is as close to object as to be without thought can be all these nothings and see and hear all these things in the way they are, unmodified by language or thought, without the valences of similes and the reshapings of metaphors.

But what the poem asks for and what it does are two different things. This brings me to the final fragment of difficulty: the listener who ‘listens in the snow’.

How can anyone listen in the snow? Does the poem mean, the listener who is standing in the snow? Or listening to the wind in the snow? What kind of a sound does the wind make in the snow anyway? Could it be that the listener is in the snow, moving in the space of a few words from separate intelligence – the ‘listener’ – into immanence, into the snow itself, becoming it; and in this movement is therefore nothing, therefore as undifferentiated as the land, therefore without edges? And is this the reason why ‘the nothing’ is possible – because of the disappearance of the listener?

What, then, of the word ‘misery’? It stands there, alone and in the centre, as a kind of daguerreotype of all that is not in the poem. As long as one possesses a certain kind of mind, one does not think of the word ‘misery’. But the minute one does, the whole landscape melts away and only this word is left.

*

This poem haunts me. It gives me goose-pimples every time I read it. And every time I read it, a totally different land, peopled differently, with different colours and sounds, occupies the edges of the page. This is inevitable; I don’t have the mind of winter I want to have; I think of the word ‘misery’ very easily.

And so the poem has more shadows than its own light throws and is more fragile and unstable than it appears.