In this topsy-turvy world, our heatwave and their coldwave are the creation of the same unseen hand. Snow or dust, it is all due to global warming.
We need an AC car, the wife declared with absolute finality as she plonked herself down on the sofa, looking totally exhausted. Then she added with a gesture of immense concession, doesn’t matter even if it is an Alto.
But we already have an AC car, I replied with as much of the meekness of the harried Bengali male as I could muster while engaging with the superior of the species. Her look said that was not funny and it wasn’t. Our car was resting peacefully in the garage in Bangalore and we were in Kolkata trying to debug our new flat before returning to Bangalore.
I know we need not just an AC car but an AC loo too, but what’s the latest provocation, I asked as civilly as possible. She gave me a withering look equal to the withered condition of her being and informed that it had taken her taxi an hour to traverse three kilometres, courtesy a massive traffic jam in high noon, and that she had almost fainted.
I put aside my superciliousness and agreed that this summer was turning out to be particularly bad and it was only March. Even I shuddered at the thought of what would happen in April and May, and the trauma that would follow if the rains failed to come on time was well too traumatic to contemplate.
It’s not as if Kolkata is the sole culprit. Both the wife and the daughter have been to Delhi this last week and the daughter, who has moved around in public transport, asserted that it was near heatwave conditions already, and the rains come to Delhi, when they choose to, much later than in the rest of the country. The wife, of course, didn’t feel it at all as for her it was AC guest house to AC office via AC car and back the same way.
The thought of going back to Bangalore soon filled me with psychological cool and the heat around became a bit bearable. But here also bad news was on hand. A friend called from Bangalore to say that it was hot as usual for this time of the year, a respectable 35.5 degrees maximum temperature in the air-conditioned city, if you please. He didn’t care if it was above or below normal — I don’t like to be ruled by statistics, he declared — but affirmed that like every recent summer, it tends to get hotter every year and, what is worse, there is no sign of the relieving April showers even though April is round the corner.
So, where do we escape from it all, I asked myself rhetorically in silence. I knew the answer of course, the one I was prompting to myself. I will retreat to my favourite Himachal, amidst the deodars at 6,000 ft plus, and smile down benignly at the pitiful mortals who had not yet attained the nirvana of retirement which could enable them to go wherever they pleased, at whatever time of the year they liked. As for earning your pin money, the Internet was there to carry your columns, bless the telephone lines laid in abundance by local boy Sukh Ram who, in local eyes, could do no wrong.
But daydreams do not take away the heat except for a fleeting second and recent news items tumbled out of memory. The apple crop was in poor shape, courtesy low precipitation — it does not snow in Himachal the way it used to — and the excessive heat in recent years has made it difficult to grow apples at sub-6,000 ft.
But then, is there no Shangri-La? Yes there is, in Ladakh. That’s where the apple orchards are migrating, in search of a bit of cool and a drop or two more of snow. I will relocate to Ladakh, I told myself rebelliously, assuming that the doctor would say the heart, which was the heart of the matter, would be able to take the air at 10,000 ft or more indefinitely.
So, when are you getting the AC car, the wife repeated, making me break out of my wonderful reverie of grey slopes and blue skies, trudging monks in orange robes and frozen lakes blue-white in the sparkling sun. You won’t need an AC there, I mumbled, and immediately realised that I had taken one more step towards being certified. Rescuing myself as quickly as I could, I said as evenly as I could, why hang around here, why not go to the hills.
She said something about my going gaga without getting that old and asked which super speciality hospital I hoped to find there if I needed a bypass or even a stent at short notice. Having taken what I thought was more than my due, I decided to fight back with journalistic knowledgeability, and replied airily that she was right.
We could have instead, if we had the money, simple gone to the States to live amidst snowstorms, the staple there earlier this year, to escape the heat. In this topsy-turvy world, our heatwave and their coldwave were the creation of the same unseen hand. Snow or dust, it was all due to global warming.
