Delhi Diary: Inside the Deadly Heatwave Turning India’s Capital into a Furnace

The Heat is On

Lots of things in Delhi make you feel like you are participating in an extreme sport. Surviving the summer, for instance. This year, the heat wave has been relentless. The days are on fire; the nights stubbornly refuse to cool down. Day-time temperatures have soared dangerously close to 50°C at times. At nights, the mercury lingers in the 30s, which, doctors warn, makes it impossible for the human body to cool down. A body that can’t shed day-time heat is under extreme stress. This increases the risk of heart attacks, especially for those suffering from serious health issues.

The heat leaves all of us sluggish. Birds have reportedly been dropping from the sky in parts of the city, too dehydrated to keep calm and carry on. Hundreds of dead fish were found in Trilokpuri’s Sanjay Lake as the sun’s glare turned their home into a graveyard. On the blistering streets, stray dogs and cats search for pockets of shade.

The birds outside my window who burst into song at dawn have gone quiet. Only a lone cuckoo sounds a welcome note when the sun comes up.

This is not an equal heat by any means. Those who work outdoors—construction workers, delivery riders, gig workers, street vendors, roadside mechanics, rickshaw drivers, traffic cops—are the hardest hit. For them, there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to rest. Office-goers in the city complain about long commutes and overcrowded subways. In air-conditioned homes, people come and go, cribbing about frequent power cuts, making plans to head to the hills to recover from summer’s sting. But for those who have to keep slogging in the scorching outdoors to earn a daily wage, survival becomes a deadly challenge in the summer months.

The Drama of Summer

Urban heatwaves may be a modern affliction, but summers have been around to test us since the big bang. The heat and dust, the feeling of constantly being on edge, the langour and the intensity the weather brews, the feeling that an explosion is imminent as the heat builds up: many a writer has successfully mined the dramatic potential of the season for what it’s worth.

“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month,” Arundhati Roy famously informed us in The God of Small Things. “...Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.” In Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, the English-speaking hero is packed off to Madna, the hottest town in the country. Here, he encounters oodles of culture shock, a language barrier that makes him feel like an alien from a distant planet, and the heat, an ever-present entity, guaranteed to make him dazed and confused.

Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day is steeped in summer’s stifling heat, which mirrors India’s complex political and communal tensions as well as the Das family’s emotional dilemmas. In the novel, life, much like the Delhi heat lay “so quiet, so still that you put your fingers out to touch it... Then it leapt up and struck you full in the face so that you spun about and spun about, gasping.” Not everyone despises the summer though. In Booker-winner Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, a character called Leon Tallis gleefully declares, “I love England in a heat wave. It’s a different country. All the rules change.” There is something about summer that sets people free, at least in fictional worlds. Inhibitions evaporate, secrets are spilt, cupboards housing skeletons defiantly flung open. Many humans, otherwise straightjacketed by society’s norms, dare to be themselves in this season.

If there is a list of the top ten heatwave novels of all time (there has to be, we live in an age of lists), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby would surely bag the top spot. In this devastating saga about the death of the American dream, the heat kicks in, tensions rise, emotionally frustrated characters gulp down mint juleps as they curse the oppressive weather; the repressed past returns and temptation rears its head, consumerist fossil fuel culture bares its fangs and drives everybody to the edge of doom.

Future Tense

Delhi summers have started to feel synonymous with doomsday. The Aravallis, once the mighty protective barrier shielding the capital from dust-laden winds, has been whittled away by quarrying and mining. Water scarcity cripples life in many pockets of the city. Power cuts make residents swelter. The mercury is rising with every passing day; asphalt streets, stripped bare of green and shade, burn all day, all night.

So, should we abandon all hope? Or can we find more creative ways to heal the earth and force city planners to tread less ecologically destructive paths?

Vineetha Mokkil is Senior Associate Editor, Outlook. She is the author of the book A Happy Place and Other Stories