Lessons from the heat

Here is the ‘more’ I promised in my earlier post. Be warned, if you have a strong imagination which enables you to smell smells over the net, it may be safer not to read on.

I stepped off the air-conditioned plane June 8th into a 39 degrees C hot Delhi night. I asked my friend who came to pick me up from the airport how bad the heat was during the day & he said “We’re burning”. Not an exaggeration as I found out myself pretty soon.

And to add to that record heat in the day. Quote from “The Hindu” (edited for brevity):

New Delhi, June. 11 (PTI): The national capital today experienced sweltering heat with maximum temperature shooting up to 43.6 degrees Celsius, the highest in over a month… (which is) four notches above normal during this time of the season…

There is no respite in sight from the searing heat in the coming days with the weatherman predicting the maximum temperature to hover around 44 degrees Celsius.

The high temperatures were further intensified by the fact that the place I was staying at in Faridabad had electricity only about 50% of the time (if that). I spent the first night in utter agony feeling like I was burning from the inside and I may spontaneously combust or something…

You people are spared much pain -I took pictures of the sheet & pillow I was sleeping on - it was a single sheet on a rexene thingie supposed to be a matress - both sheet and pillow were drenched with my sweat. Returning home I find out that my cable (forget what it’s called) to upload the pics seems to be missing. As such you lot are spared the gruelsome sight.

One evening having less work & intense heat, I decided to try out an experiment. I filled a bucket full of water & brought it into the room. I threw the bucket of water on the (concrete) floor at 6.15pm. By 6.19pm there was no evidence that any such bucket of water had been thrown. I also do not know if it made any difference to the heat in the room.

Once I wet a towel and wrapped it around myself on the bed, it dried up before I fell asleep (honest to God). Another night, I was tempted to sleep in the bathroom. The fact that one of my dogs had died of bronchopneumonia after doing exactly this stopped me, but only just.

I came up with some reasoning that probably goes against most sensible sweatologies (or whatever they’re called) and this is it - it’s not that you don’t sweat in Delhi. It’s that it’s so hot, that you’re sweat dries up on your body before you realise you’ve sweat.

The heat also caused me to drink some riduculous number of bottles of water per day (or should I say per hour). I don’t know the effect this has had on my bladder but I doubt it would be a good thing.

But I dwell too much on the negative… The dry heat without sweat is good in this respect - there’s no Body Odour. Anyone who has travelled by local train in Bombay City can understand how positively arduous such a thing can be.

There were may things that happened to me, many experiences I had during this trip. It was overall a mightily blessed trip. Why then do I choose to sit & only grumble about the heat for this long? I don’t know - perhaps I am a sad sorry ungrateful thing - who lives in aircon so much that I don’t really know what the world is suffering like around me.

The poor in our country really undergo such suffering due to the extremities in weather alone (all other thing forgotten at this moment).

Conclusion: I am ever so blessed! I am grateful for any unpleasantness I faced due to the heat which makes me realise how easy my life usually is. And I hope it will remind me to pray for all the souls who don’t have it so easy.

Rain, rain, don’t go away,
Don’t come again another day.
Little Johnny doesn’t want to play.
He prefers to live.