Beginning from the middle of January and lasting the whole of February and well into early March is the period we know asblue haze time. The mountains and fields are covered with a blue haze that looks like mist at the wrong period of the year. The blueish colour gives it its name. Coming as it does at the beginning of the year, it is like a herald of Spring and warmer days. It is such a poetic image because the blueness overlays our landscape of stubbled fields and forest cover, or whatever remains of it, like a thin veil. It inspires verse, and brings to mind failed love stories. Blue haze in the month of February gave the month its name of Kezei, or dark month.
Marriages were taboo in this month. Nobody in their right mind gets married in the month of Kezei, an aunt used to mutter angrily when she heard of Christians getting married in the taboo month. Citing premature deaths, she would warn any relative making nuptial plans for their offspring. “Can’t you see that the forests stay dark and the sun can’t pass through the dark in this month?” she would proclaim with a dire look. That was what the blue haze meant to us in our generation, a time when the spirits covered the earth’s surface with their wizardry so they could go about causing distress to humans. The dark month was when people were spirited awayon their wanderings into the woods to gather herbs, hunt, fish on their own. Even at the end of the nineties, our sweeper lady was spirited away when she went herb picking in her part of the woods. Her clansmen found her after three days, and she said that a group of people had come to invite her to go herb-gathering.
In the same month of the blue haze, an uncle, now long dead, was woken up in the wee hours of the morning, by men who he thought were his neighbours. They said they needed him to accompany them to the fields to check on the water sources for their respective fields. Uncle led the way to the fields in semi-darkness. He didn’t get suspicious until even he noticed that the voices of his companions kept alternating between normal conversation, and periods when their voices drifted off and seemed to come from very far away. He stopped in his tracks and looked carefully at his neighbours only to discover he was all alone on the wooded field-path, being spirited away by deceitful spirits. Luckily for him, he was fleet-footed enough to run home and elude the rest of the adventure planned for him.
But in this day and age, blue haze, my geologist friendexplains is actually“caused by a gas called Isoprene which is a common organic compound released by trees andshrubs on sunny days.” He adds, “We mostly have sunny days in January andFebruary hence the blue haze during these months. Isoprene gasmolecules form aerosols that scatter sunlight, the scattering isenhanced at short-wavelengths, which is where the short-wavelengthblue colour comes from. Isoprene reacts with nitrogen oxides presentin air to form ozone.” That’s it then. Science is so effective at taking out the magic from magic.
But what if there was something to all the cautionary tales our ancestors lived by? Why were people warned about going against age-old taboos in contracting marriages? It would be very interesting to follow the fates of February weddings to see if they managed to defy culture and survive. Whichever age it is, things seem to have a knack for happening under cover of blue haze, be it culturally navigated or politically designed. And while we accept the scientific explanation that it is only Isoprene engaging with sun aerosols to manufacture blue haze, it is a bit difficult to brush away the possibility of spirit activity in our day. Could the spirits of yesteryear have been replaced by spirits of division, spirits of blame, spirits of greed and dark mindedness? Even in these days it’s a good thing to recall the cautionary aspect under which wiser folk than us have lived.
