Nilanjana Roy: A Ferocious Heat in Delhi
climate change was, incredibly, not even a
side issue in the country’s recent elections. It can be dangerous to question
the flood of often rash development that threatens the country’s remaining
forests, wetlands, and rivers - as environmental activists, human rights lawyers,
and non-profit organizations in India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi
are discovering to their cost.
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. Ram Bilas, the foreman
of an office construction project in the satellite city of Noida, says the heat
this year is beyond anything he’s experienced in his thirty-odd years on the
job. “The boys can’t even stand upright after a few hours in this kind of heat,
but the maliks - bosses - won’t understand this. They say the work must
be completed on schedule,” he says. How do the men manage? He shrugs. “The
stomach can’t go empty. They work.”...
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/08/a-ferocious-heat-in-delhi/