heat
Heat is pushing most other thoughts out of my mind, the way pain might in another situation. I am the only one staying here at Sambhavna right now. It is dead silent. Maude has gone to Australia, and Sathyu and Bridget are both somewhere else for a few days. So, it's just me, the mosquitoes, and the heat. Heat more than anything.
Bhopal is at exactly the same latitude as Havana, Cuba, but landlocked by the entire Indian subcontinent. No place in India is hotter than the cities up here in the plains, which include Delhi and most of Uttar Pradesh, along with Madhya Pradesh. The infamously hot Mumbai is a cool breeze right now compared to this. So are Chennai and the rest of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. These days the daytime temperature in Bhopal climbs to 106 or 107 F, and goes only as low as 80 in the middle of the night. The heat is neither dry nor wet, just medium. There is no rain before the monsoon, but Bhopal has two major lakes and many more shallow marshes, the nearest one to here being that trash river I posted photos of a couple of months ago. It is those places that create all the mosquitoes here.
There is no air-conditioning here, in case I haven't made that obvious already. There are fans, though. From about noon or 1 until after sunset, I can do little but lie very still and sleep or read. The air is so hot that even indoors in complete shade and under a fan, my skin would swear it was under bright sunlight. All this would be greatly relieved by cold drinks of water. That's where it gets bad, though. There is no cold water. There is only hot water. The water at Sambhavna comes out of a well and there are a couple of UV filters for producing drinking water. All the water is hot. Not warm -- hot. It's hard to make myself gulp it down, but it's very important that I do, of course. Its heat also brings out previously undetectable flavors I'd rather not know about. Nothing terrible, just a sort of earthy taste unsurprising for well water. The other thing that takes the heat over the top are the small bonfires of burning plastic trash that are very common here because there is basically no municipal trash system, at least not in these parts of Bhopal. They add a little extra heat blast as you pass by, to go with the huge plumes of jet black smoke.
Yesterday my computer just shut down all of a sudden. It was about 4 p.m. It occurred to me that it might be because of the heat. I felt underneath and nearly burned my hand. It won't start up again, which is really worrying me. I think I underestimate how hot it really is just because I've been eased into it for so many weeks. Anyway, everything I need to do here is on my laptop, and now I can't do anything until I can get inside the hard drive. First thing in the morning I am going to call Sambhavna's computer expert guy to see if he can help me.
I already have bad diarrhea again. I don't know what I did. I ate a bunch of raw cucumbers with spices at my friend's house. It might have been shower water splashed in my mouth, though. I still have very little appetite after my sickness. My stomach seems to have shrunken to a third of its previous size. Meals that would not have even filled me up a month ago I now keep having to leave half eaten, which makes me upset because I hate leaving food like that. My eyes have not caught up with the new game. I should just become one of these people that always orders appetizers only.
Bhopal is at exactly the same latitude as Havana, Cuba, but landlocked by the entire Indian subcontinent. No place in India is hotter than the cities up here in the plains, which include Delhi and most of Uttar Pradesh, along with Madhya Pradesh. The infamously hot Mumbai is a cool breeze right now compared to this. So are Chennai and the rest of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. These days the daytime temperature in Bhopal climbs to 106 or 107 F, and goes only as low as 80 in the middle of the night. The heat is neither dry nor wet, just medium. There is no rain before the monsoon, but Bhopal has two major lakes and many more shallow marshes, the nearest one to here being that trash river I posted photos of a couple of months ago. It is those places that create all the mosquitoes here.
There is no air-conditioning here, in case I haven't made that obvious already. There are fans, though. From about noon or 1 until after sunset, I can do little but lie very still and sleep or read. The air is so hot that even indoors in complete shade and under a fan, my skin would swear it was under bright sunlight. All this would be greatly relieved by cold drinks of water. That's where it gets bad, though. There is no cold water. There is only hot water. The water at Sambhavna comes out of a well and there are a couple of UV filters for producing drinking water. All the water is hot. Not warm -- hot. It's hard to make myself gulp it down, but it's very important that I do, of course. Its heat also brings out previously undetectable flavors I'd rather not know about. Nothing terrible, just a sort of earthy taste unsurprising for well water. The other thing that takes the heat over the top are the small bonfires of burning plastic trash that are very common here because there is basically no municipal trash system, at least not in these parts of Bhopal. They add a little extra heat blast as you pass by, to go with the huge plumes of jet black smoke.
Yesterday my computer just shut down all of a sudden. It was about 4 p.m. It occurred to me that it might be because of the heat. I felt underneath and nearly burned my hand. It won't start up again, which is really worrying me. I think I underestimate how hot it really is just because I've been eased into it for so many weeks. Anyway, everything I need to do here is on my laptop, and now I can't do anything until I can get inside the hard drive. First thing in the morning I am going to call Sambhavna's computer expert guy to see if he can help me.
I already have bad diarrhea again. I don't know what I did. I ate a bunch of raw cucumbers with spices at my friend's house. It might have been shower water splashed in my mouth, though. I still have very little appetite after my sickness. My stomach seems to have shrunken to a third of its previous size. Meals that would not have even filled me up a month ago I now keep having to leave half eaten, which makes me upset because I hate leaving food like that. My eyes have not caught up with the new game. I should just become one of these people that always orders appetizers only.
posted by Michael M. at 11:24 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home