Delhi Heatwave: Too Hot To Handle

If you are about to pick a partner, I’m offering some utterly unsolicited advice, woman to woman. Among other things, check your temperature compatibility. Can you sleep the entire night with a mutually acceptable AC setting? This may seem trivial but decades down the line when your hormones are doing a number on you, the fights over the TV remote will be nothing compared to the arguments over the AC remote.

Truth be told, men and women maintain same body temperature but middle-aged women feel warmer and men begin to lose extra muscle mass making them feel cold. Sometimes I feel, global warming is nothing but planetary menopause.

So it’s 2 am on a sweltering morning and I wake up drenched in sweat. Snuggled in his duvet, the husband has switched off the air-conditioning. Again. This illuminating behavioural pattern is not new. We’ve been arguing over the room temperature and television volume for over thirty years. After a scorching night, he wakes up in the morning pumping sunshine, ‘Good morning, slept well?’

A woman’s stare could melt polar ice caps but they don’t get it.

‘What?’ 

‘Nothing.’

Who wants a stormy start on an already scorching day? Plus no man has ever deciphered the code of ‘nothing’ that ranges from why did I marry him to what’s the point of stating the obvious. 

Perils of Delhi summers

Truth be told, I’ve embraced thirty Delhi summers but the summer of 2024 is like hellfire. In the absence of ‘western disturbances’ that bring sporadic rain relief, temperatures have hovered around 45 degrees for more than a month. My plants have shrivelled like drought-stricken crops, my clothes feel freshly ironed, the furniture is just too hot to touch and I receive ‘orange alerts’ from the weather department every day. Even in an AC room, I’m as listless and zoned out as Alambeg from Heeramandi.  

Frankly, now I empathise with the infamous Delhi road rage. Anyone subjected to such incessant ‘heat waves’ is bound to spout flowery lingo of the MC, BC kind. If I were a Delhi judge, I would totally absolve the ‘thoko’ cricket commentator for bashing someone to pulp on the road.

Coming back to my own rage, it all begins with the husband feeling cold and increasing the AC setting. The room frosts as I begin to simmer. But our man is listening to a podcast, failing to realise that in some weird way he’s walking into the trap of multiple cold wars leading to ‘when was the last time you bought me a gift and why can’t we go to the hills like the neighbours? It’s so goddamn hot in this desert called Delhi. Let me go and put some ice cubes in my bathing water. 

Why you ask, why is this woman so grumpy? The entire North India is burning. Plus the monsoon is looming large, almost at the doorstep. Well, I do see a bountiful monsoon but it will convert NCR into a huge sweltering sauna with people wading through sewage water and some being washed away in open manholes. That’s Delhi. Forever messy. 

Views expressed by the author are their own