Cold Wave

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914–1987) was a prominent progressive Urdu-English writer, journalist, filmmaker and critic who wrote the scripts for legendary Indian films like Awara and Shree 420. 'Cold Wave' is a realistic, socially conscious story exploring the class divide, the superficiality of romantic ideals, and the ultimate, saving warmth of human solidarity among the poor during a deadly winter in Delhi.

The fall of Baldeo Raj Sharma

The protagonist is Baldeo Raj Sharma, a handsome, athletic twenty-five-year-old graduate from Meerut College and a promising Urdu poet who writes under the pseudonym Nirmal. The son of a wealthy advocate, Pandit Ranbir Raj Sharma, he had lived a life of absolute luxury, surrounded by silk blankets, lihaafs and fine pashmina dressing gowns. However, Baldeo falls in love with Radha, a professional singing girl from the bazaars. When his father threatens to disown him unless he leaves her, Baldeo proudly walks out of the family bungalow in just his shirt and trousers to prove that a poet can sacrifice anything for love.

The bitter rejection

Baldeo arrives at Radha's flat expecting her to share the same romantic fever, but Radha proves a hard, pragmatic realist. When she learns that Baldeo has been disowned and has no money, her warm smile vanishes, replaced by cold hostility. She mockingly tells him: 'What a simpleton you are, Nirmalji! Go, ask for your father's pardon. I have no desire to be the heroine of this Laila-Majnun drama.' She dismisses him coldly, leaving him to wander into the freezing Delhi night.

The freezing night and the warmth of the crowd

Hardly thirty hours after leaving home, Baldeo finds himself jobless, homeless and a vagrant on the streets of Delhi during an unprecedented, lethal cold wave blowing down from Simla. The temperature dips below freezing and Connaught Place is deserted like a dead city; his teeth chatter and his mind begins a slow process of paralysis from the exposure. He tries to find shelter in the crowded Third Class waiting-hall of the Delhi Railway Station, packed with rough-hewn peasants, beggars and labourers huddled together on the cold floor.

Baldeo initially recoils from the smell of the latrine and the crowd, but as he lies down on a torn newspaper he realises that the collective, physical warmth of this 'mass of snoring humanity' is the only thing keeping him alive.

The encounter with the beggar woman

At midnight, Baldeo staggers back to the arcades of Connaught Place and meets a poor, shivering beggar woman huddled behind a column, who asks him for a machis (matchbox) to light her bidi. As the match is struck, Baldeo is initially repulsed by the dirt and ugliness of her face, but as they squat together sharing the bidi, the woman slides close to him and offers him a corner of her torn sari.

As the freezing wind stabs him like a dagger of ice, Baldeo loses all his class prejudice. He collapses into her arms, finding in her embrace a life-saving, fragrant warmth. The story ends with the realisation that the poor, despite their misery, possess the true, saving warmth of humanity that his wealthy family and idealistic love had denied him.