It's bad now, it will get worse
A Ferocious Heat in Delhi
Nilanjana Roy
Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images
Men napping under a tree during a hot summer day in New Delhi, July 2, 2019
Delhi—In early April, a fire began to smolder inside the Ghazipur landfill, the trash mountain that stands like a brown, stinking sentinel, two hundred feet high, on the outskirts of New Delhi, the district of the larger city that serves as India’s administrative capital. Journalists in India write that it will rival the height of the Taj Mahal in another year, a statistic presented with a tinge of perverse pride. Ragpickers climb the shifting, treacherous slopes of the landfill, which widens into a low range of hills; hawks, black kites, and other birds of prey circle overhead.
Landfill fires break out from time to time. But over the last few years, they have become a signal that summer has arrived in Delhi. Other signs are equally stark—fierce water wars as too many citizens in slums and low-income neighborhoods line up for too few water tankers; temperatures so scorching that if you touch the railing of a city bus you see red blister spots rising on your palm; the thick plume of dust from the Thar Desert that blasts in blinding storms through my burning city.
The trash fires send acrid waves of oily, brown, superheated smoke into the already foul air of the world’s most polluted city. Two days after the April fires start, I’m in the Ghazipur area. I step out of the car with the arrogance of a lifelong Delhiwallah, looking up at the burning garbage mountain, convinced that my lungs, already leathered and mummified by the bad air, can take it. Within seconds, my chest feels aflame. My coughs are ratchety, tubercular—a pathetic display of weakness for someone who thought she’d accustomed to the city’s fetid air by now.
A child runs past, a worn cricket bat in his hand. He looks at me with pity and scorn. I’m just one of the many who are too soft for his part of Delhi.
“Heat wave” feels like too mild a term for the changes sweeping Delhi, much of northern India, and Europe. You expect a hot spell to come and go, but the blistering furnace of this summer is a steady assault on the senses, testing health and sanity. I taste dust in the fiery air, dust at the back of my throat; a thick fur of brown dust coats the windows and peels like fungus off the air conditioner filters, no matter how often you clean them.
On the last day of April, the temperature reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit, the first time in almost fifty years that the city had seen that kind of heat; on June 9, the government issued a red alert, as the mercury reached 118 degrees. At that temperature, your eyes feel sandblasted, your skin feels on fire, the water is hot from the tap, and the leaves on the neem and amaltas trees wither and shrivel.
The worst-affected of the city’s 1.98 million population are those in jobs far from the luxuries of air-conditioning or ceiling fans—construction workers, clerks who cycle for miles to their offices, delivery boys, the women who run pavement stalls. At least 100 deaths across the country have been attributed to the heat, and city hospitals have seen a spike in emergency room visits, mostly for heat stroke, severe dehydration, and lung problems—with parts of the country potentially becoming too hot to be inhabitable....
