Feeling cold, are you?

Here’s a quick quiz: How to spot a South Asian male in winter?

Simple.

He’s that guy who’s wearing a minimum of six layers above the waist and four layers below, his head is wrapped around in two thick woolen caps, a muffler, earmuffs, he also has a woolen neck warmer, and he’s wearing fake Ray Bans.

He’s also wearing two pairs of gloves on each hand, and two pairs of socks on each foot, he’s inserted toe warmers in the boots. This guy lives and works in the GTA, where the winters are generally not as severe as they are in other parts of Canada. He wears this external shield for almost six months in a year.

In the morning, before leaving for work, he’ll check CP24 not for news, but for the temperature, and then take immense pride that “it’s minus 1 today, but it feels like minus 7.” He instructs his wife to also bundle up like him, but she is a South Asian wife, she is more sensible and better acclimatized, and she’s no longer in South Asia, so she totally ignores her husband.

At the workplace, he needs 15 minutes each in morning and evening to take off and put on the multiple layers of warm clothes. Throughout the day, he continues to wear an ugly sweater that his mother knitted for him and sent it to him through his neighbour’s aunt’s cousin’s daughter-in-law who is from the same town, and who was coming to Brampton. 

Although he’ll complain about “how cold Canada is” for eight months in a year,  but when he calls his mother “back home” once every other day, he’ll boast, “it is very cold now, you know, minus 20, and there is snow everywhere.  You’re better off in Sawai Madhopur.”