DECEMBER IS THE CRUELEST MONTH

 T. S. Eliot begins The Waste Land with the austere provocation, “April is the cruellest month.” I have carried that line with me for decades. Eliot remains my favourite poet, and this poem my most revisited text, each reading yielding fresh meanings, like sediment stirred by a returning tide. Yet poetry, for all its authority, must sometimes yield to place.

Where I live, in Kolkata, and across much of India, it is not April that deserves Eliot’s epithet. It is December. Here, December is the cruelest month.

In December, the sky sinks low, like a heavy lid. Atmospheric inversion traps air near the Earth's surface, allowing pollution to settle and stagnate. Smoke lingers. Dust drifts but never disperses. Visibility dims, as though the city were seen through breath on glass. The air thickens, turns coarse, almost chewable. Cold does not cleanse. It constricts. To breathe becomes an effort, and then a risk.

Kolkata's Air Pollution in December - photo courtesy https://bit.ly/4qy0ey3

For older adults, the lungs become a battlefield. The medical term is precise and pitiless: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. COPD is not a sudden assailant but a slow strangler. Years of inhaling polluted air inflame and narrow the airways, eroding the delicate sacs that facilitate oxygen exchange. Breath shortens. Cough deepens. Wheeze becomes the body’s reluctant music. What once was effortless becomes exhausting.

The young endure these winters. They struggle, recover, and move on. But time exacts its toll. Metabolism slows, resilience wanes, and the repeated assaults of polluted winters accumulate like unpayable debts. For many older bodies, December becomes the final creditor. They do not outlast the month.

I have watched this pattern unfold within my own family. My father died at the age of eighty-three on the twentieth of December 1979. My uncle followed at eighty-one, on the twenty-third of December 1990. My mother survived December only to succumb on the eleventh of January 1992, aged eighty-seven. My father-in-law, ninety-two, fought through December but fell on the ninth of January 2009. My mother-in-law died at ninety-two on the twenty-third of December 2023. The dates accumulate. The years differ. The season repeats.

These are not statistics. They are presences. Voices that once filled rooms. Hands that steadied mine. Faces I search for when December returns. The month comes quietly, almost courteously, and then carries them away one by one.

Winter is often spoken of as benign. A season of fog, festivity, and repose. Here, it is something harsher. The sky presses down. The air bites the chest—the body tires of resistance. The elders grow weary, as soldiers do when the war never ends. At last, they lay down their arms.

As if that list was not enough. Even now, as I write, my cousin, seventy-six, lies in a hospital bed, weeks into a critical struggle. Machines breathe beside him. A mask delivers air to his lungs that he can no longer summon unaided. The diagnosis is acute COPD. We wait, and hope, and pray that he may yet escape December’s grasp.

Eliot wrote of death and rebirth, of seasons that deceive. Here, December offers no such promise. It comes softly, stays close, and departs, leaving rooms quieter, chairs emptier, and hearts more heavily burdened than before.