I am scared of cold. I do fine in summer. I rarely have heatrashes, I never use sunscreen cream, I never wear sunglasses. My excuse for the last one is, I already have thick glasses, and do not want to taint more my vision of the world. But cold? That is another story. So, in middle-October Texas cold, you'll see me wrapped up in three layers—a pullover, a coat and a scarf. Oh yes, I have also been known to wear woollen hats which cover up my ears not just adequately, fully.
It's highly unlikely that I will pass on a paid trip to New York during the Christmas week, or a chance to workshop with Toni Morrison or Amitabha Ghosh in January in Boston, but it's highly unlikely that I will show up for an academic talk after 8 pm by a famous white, East European known-to-be-Marxist male academic star or a mysterious female academic-alchoholic from my own hometown in mid-November Philly. I would rather prefer to stay indoors, curled up in my bed with a cup of tea or cocoa or coffee, reading, writing or yapping about things over which I have very little (read no) control.
And yes, I sleep wrapped up in my inordinately ugly blue blanket at least nine months every year. The three months I spend every year in Kolkata, during the summer, I have been known and seen to wrap myself up in a cotton shawl after 2 am. While the fan revolves over my head in maximum-speed.
I think, the word in Bangla is, sheet-kature.
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