Summer used to be my favourite season.
It took me to nani's house, to steel glasses full of Rooh Afza, mangoes sleeping in buckets of water, noisy coolers humming like background music, power cuts that felt like adventure, terrace nights under stubborn stars, and cousins fighting like small constitutional crises over who would sleep closest to the fan. Summer had a smell then - wet khus, aam panna, dust, sweat, childhood, and freedom.
Now it just smells like heat.
Because summer has turned into India's longest-running climate joke and we are both the punchline and the audience. We cut trees, widened roads, worshipped concrete, built glass buildings in cities hotter than ambition, bought bigger cars, installed more ACs, and then looked at the sky like innocent victims and asked, "Bhai, garmi zyada ho gayi kya?"
In 2024, India recorded nearly 20 heatwave days per person. A Lancet-linked analysis estimated 247 billion potential labour hours lost to heat. Mostly agriculture and construction workers, because in this country, the poor experience climate change first, and the rich experience it through better air conditioning.
Of course, the response is flawless. Advisories everywhere: drink water, stay indoors, avoid the sun. Excellent advice - if your life comes with central air conditioning. But what about delivery workers, construction labourers, farmers, traffic police, street vendors - people working inside the slow-burning tandoor our cities have become?
And what do we do? Honestly, nothing. We blame El Niño, global warming, Western countries, bad luck - anything that keeps us from admitting that we built cities that trap heat, erase shade, and punish the very people who keep them running. No one can do much until the government decides that heat is not just weather but a policy failure. And failures need redemption. They need real solutions that are inconvenient. Trees take time. Public transport needs planning. Urban design requires thinking beyond the next election cycle. And none of that photographs as well as a new expressway.
So we adjust. That's what we're good at. We adapt to heatwaves, to water shortages, to air we can chew, to seasons that no longer behave like seasons. We lower expectations until discomfort feels routine and crisis feels seasonal.
I went back to nani's house last summer. The terrace is still there. The stars are not - swallowed by smog the colour of weak tea. The neem tree that shaded half the lane was cut for road-widening and in its place, a transformer hums like it's angry about something. The cooler still works. The mangoes still sleep in buckets. But nobody sits on the terrace anymore. It's too hot, even at night.
That's the thing about a slow disaster with good PR. You don't notice what's missing until you go looking for it.