Boiling Point!

"Its very hot here Ma'am!" A young friend texts me.

"How hot?" I type back.

"Like the inside of a microwave!" Comes the prompt reply.

"You mean oven!"I correct her.

Of the microwave generation, I don't think she is acquainted with the 'oven' as we knew it: a round aluminium vessel that ran on electricity, with a part glass lid through which one kept peeking impatiently every ten minutes or so, to check whether the cake had risen.

"OK, an oven!" replies my accommodating young friend.

"Its really very hot, Ma'am." I can feel the distress in her voice.

"No AC?" I ask.

"No." she writes. "Only a desert cooler that starts to wail the moment I switch it on...."

"Oh!" I giggle.

I can sympathise with her. It really is very hot here, very, very hot and bone dry, like in the middle of a desert. AccuWeather says, '45°C, RealFeel  51°C'. With no air-conditioning, no cooler and no refrigerator, RealFeel for me I would say, is closer to 61 than 51, truly the inside of a microwave. And believe me, I am not exaggerating even a little bit.

Its two thirty pm. I step out of the air-conditioned cool of my office and immediately, a blast of dry heat rams into me, almost throwing me off balance with its force. Recovering somewhat, I start my short walk home. It's not even 200 metres but it feels like the Desert Marathon. My legs refuse to pick up speed, paralysed by the heat. And so I trudge on, dragging my reluctant legs behind me, feet squirming in protest inside my hot, sweaty boots. 

In this mid-afternoon with the heat at its peak, there is a depressing silence all around. All souls have retreated indoors, defeated by the heat. Not a leaf stirs and the trees stand unmoving under a weird incandescent grey brown sky that dazzles you if you show the temerity to look up at it.

I am panting as I climb up to my room. My clothes feel as if I've just run a hot iron over them and I can't wait to change into something light and airy and cool. But 'cool' is in serious short supply at present. My comfort clothes feel hot to touch, my dining table is like a lighted stove top and the chair almost sears my bottom when I try to sit.

I seek refuge in the bedroom. But there is no escape even inside it. With two of its walls in direct line of the sun, my bedroom's like the inside of an oven ...or a microwave...or a blast furnace... I switch on the fan and then can only cry with despair as it gleefully churns smoking hot air all around me.

"I'll take a bath!" I try to sooth myself. I turn on the tap and wait for the cool to fall. For a second, nothing happens. Then a great spray of near boiling water drenches me, almost scalding my skin.

Taken by surprise, I barely manage to duck the shower spray and then check whether I've mistakenly left the hot water geyser switch on. But no, the switch is on 'off' and no light glows on the machine. I am so defeated that I can only grind my teeth in despair.

Then I hit upon an idea. I turn the geyser-water tap on. Water that has been lying in the machine has escaped being boiled inside the rooftop tank and hence is cool. I finally stand under the shower, eyes closed in bliss, as cold water floods over me in comforting waves.

But the bliss is short lived for one cannot stand under the shower the whole day long. And the moment I step out, the heat is waiting, ready to pounce.

Lunch is sitting on the table but all that hot daal, red curry and yellow sabji reminds me of more heat and my stomach churns at the thought of consuming them. I make a dash for the cold curd and as I spoon it in, I place its glass bowl against my skin, savouring the coolness.

The afternoon is one saga of restlessness and of waves of heat doing a maniacal voodoo dance around me. Outside, the sun beats down through the dust haze that the 'Loo' has stirred up and to me it appears as if each dust mote is like a mirror, reflecting and magnifying the heat a hundred times. Its unnaturally silent too outside and makes me wonder where the mynahs, the parrots the squirrels and the barbets have hidden themselves. I shift the curtain and peer out at a mango tree just behind my building and catch the eye of a young owl that has taken shelter in the leafy shade of the tree. We stare at each other in empathy,  victims-in-arms of this relentless summer.

Afternoon flows into evening and then into night but there is not a drop of respite from the heat. Sweat trickles down my back and neck and I shiver in its wake. Everything is hot to touch: my phone, the pencil, the bedclothes and even the floor. I keep drinking water like medicine, to ward off falling ill with heat exhaustion or worse, heat stroke. With nothing to do, no place to go in this baking summer day, I take to sending Other Half (now cooling himself in the hills) tortous emojis of flames and burning balls of fire. Of course, no amount of fire ball emojis can warm up his hills or cool my plains.....and so after being consistently ignored and suitably rebuffed, I do the only thing left for me and that is try to sleep. But scared off by the heat, sleep does not seem to want to step this way. I toss and turn, then pace up and down the house trying to search out spots of coolness. And as I do that,  I recall Kuttush's method of cooling himself in the sultry summers of Mumbai when he was a pup. He would take refuge in the bathroom where after having urinated on the bathroom floor, he would spread the liquid all around with his paws and then flip down on the pee cooled floor!!!!!!!!

I can't help but smile at this memory. Kuttush has always been a man with a mind and agenda of his own.

Of course I myself can't take a leaf out of his book but can definitely improvise, I tell myself. 

I remember how at the height of summer during my childhood, my mother would pour buckets and buckets of water on the floor of our home every evening to cool it. I loved this and would in fact, wait eagerly the whole day for evening to fall. I would splash around in that water, pretending it was a lake and even try to sail little paper boats in it. Of course, my boats would soon get grounded in that two inch depth of water! We would then all troop up to the roof top where my mother would again pour water to cool the roof floor. Then on this cooled floor, she would place large reed mats, cover them with thin cotton sheets and we would lie there under the wide -open, clean summer sky, the reeds digging gently into our backs as my father taught me about planets, stars and galaxies, his fingers tracing constellations against the dark air......

I do have a roof here, but of course, I cannot even think of at sleep-in there.They'd surely hand me over to the psychiatry ward of the local hospital if I were to be found wandering on the roof in my nightclothes. 

So, inspired by my childhood summer and in part by Kuttush, near midnight, I pour two buckets of water on my bedroom floor, open the doors to allow cross-ventilation and keep the fan on at full blast. Physics takes charge immediately as in the dry air, the water from my little bedroom lake evaporates, taking with it that terrible heat.

And so, if you were to peek inside my house last midnight, you would have found me sitting in a pool of water on the floor, over a thin cotton sheet, a fifty rupee, handwoven, dripping wet गमछा wrapped turban-like around my head and another, even wetter one thrown over my shoulders like the hermit's उत्तरिय, busy blogging, as the water seeped- up from the floor and down from my गमछाs; and then, in the hot dry breeze churned up by my fan, evaporated, creating the perfect, zero-energy, almost-green AC..............