I vividly remember the summer of 2003 in London. My life at that time had led to me spending a few months every year in London for over a decade, and I considered myself a veteran of the British summer.
The summer, June to August, would usually begin and end with rain. The hot, dry periods, when they occurred, were periods to be valued, for soon the grey days would return to re-establish their hegemony over the islands. Most summers, you watched the rain and not the sun, evaluating each summer by how much or how little you suffered under the rainy and cold weather, and each sunny day seemed to carry with it a user warning: ‘Don’t get too comfy, freezing weather on the flip side.’
But, 2003 was different. June came and began to behave like a shifty envoy from an enemy camp, like an ambassador who knew their government was about to launch an attack on you. There was rain, but it was unconvincingly thin and scattered, not English summer rain at all; the hot days were really hot, too hot for early to mid-June; you could almost tell the trees, flowers and birds knew something was off-kilter.
With the first week of July, the gloves were off. Instead of manoeuvring to be in the much-needed warmth of the sun, you were shuffling towards the shadows to avoid the discomfort, almost as though you were back in India.
Going out, you were always thirsty, always calculating when and where you could next get a swig of water. In buses, trains, shops and cafes, your thoughts turned to air-conditioning. The normal pleasures of summer fooding, the barbeques and such, seemed too excessive — your appetite had gone into hiding, just as it does in the hot weather back home.
By mid-July, people were collapsing from heat-stroke and reports were coming in from France, of elderly people dying having forgotten to turn off the heating in their apartments. If you had young children, you avoided taking them outside till after 8 p.m. when the slow sunsets would, sort of, begin.
The house I lived in was a teetering old pile that was usually very cold and draughty. Now, the place felt soothingly air-conditioned when you came away from the street outside. I took to wearing shorts, loose T-shirts and sandals one day in early July and could not change back to a warmer outfit till the end of September.
A people in shock
Inside the house or out, the memory is of a people in some shock. Those who remembered the 70s had a clear comparison to a freakish summer towards the end of that decade, either 1977 or 1978, and even older people vaguely reached back to the exceptional summer of 1952; save these two years, there had been nothing like this for half a century.
I was in London in the middle of last year and the summer of 2018 made 2003 look amateurish. This time, the serious heat began by end-May and continued through early September. London underground and buses, normally unbearable on really hot days, were now deemed dangerous. There was a near riot in one train during morning rush hour when staff forgot to switch off the heating. Train tracks melted regularly, signal boxes were fried every day, heat-related violence increased, and general public behaviour in terms of jostling and pushing to get on and off public transport began to resemble that of Calcutta’s or Delhi’s. Reports were coming in of older people dying in their homes even though they had turned off their heating.
As I sit here awaiting the monsoon, news comes in that Europe is bracing for the first of several extreme heat waves expected this summer. In the U.K., France and Germany, records for high temperatures set last year are due to be incinerated between now and the autumn. Public services are on high alert, as if for some emergency or calamity.
No more retreats
Surviving extreme conditions depends on being able to get away from them — either by going inside to a warmer, dryer or cooler shelter, or by going away from the site of the undesirable weather.
Normally, people at the deprived end of the scale have limited options while the wealthy have a choice of both. Classically, the desi rich and middle-classes could sit in their cooled houses or go away to the mountains or go to ‘ phoren ’ for the summer. But this year, I’ve seen air-conditioners go on strike in some of the poshest Delhi homes, there have been forest fires in the Himalayas, and as for going abroad, it’s not exactly cool there either.
Similarly, for citizens of the so-called first world, the planet used to be their oyster; one typical pattern was that they stayed home in the summer and travelled to the tropics in the winter. Now, their home is challenging in the summer and a lot of the tropics are horrifically polluted in the winter. Pulling back a bit you can see that the long-committed sins against the environment are coming back to bite people everywhere. Pulling back a bit you can see that there might be no getting away — for anyone, anywhere.
The author is a writer, filmmaker and columnist.
