Indian Summer

As I’m sure most of you are aware, India is hot. Well, most of India is. In the northern parts, it stretches up into the Himalayas where the altitude makes it a lot cooler. There are also “hill stations” which are high in the mountains and have much lower temperatures. When the English occupied India, the hill stations were where people would go to retreat from the heat in summer. When I was here last year, in the space of an hour we drove from Mettupalayam at 40 degrees to Coonoor at 2000m up where it was a lovely 23 degrees.

Hyderabad though is just 17 degrees north of the equator and in the middle of a large semi-arid desert plateau just 500m above sea level. This makes it a very hot and dry place to be. When I arrived at the end of December, the weather was lovely. Through most of January and part of February, temperatures got up to around 24-26 degrees in the daytime and went down as low as 16-18 at night. It was not too different from New Zealand at the time. But in New Zealand it was the middle of summer and in Hyderabad it was the dead of winter.

Now we are really into summer here. May &ampamp early June are the hottest, with temperatures getting up over 40 degrees most days and only falling to the low 30s in the middle of the night. We had similar weather for the first half of April as well, before it cooled down a bit. It just shows what you get used to – it was such a welcome respite to have daytime temperatures of “only” 35 and night-time temps as “low” as 25. However in the last few days it has heated up again and it is currently 40 degrees at 1pm as I write this.

Here is what we do to cope:

• We usually only go out after sundown. We avoid going out in the afternoon sun unless we absolutely have to.
• We have the ceiling fans on inside (which are connected to the generator so they are always on even during powercuts)
• We have taken the windows out of most of the window frames and put mosquito mesh over them instead
• We drink a lot of water
• We use the A/C at night (but only if we really need to)

It does give me a new appreciation for the body’s cooling mechanisms. Especially when there’s a breeze, you can really feel the cooling effect of evaporation on the skin. It becomes more difficult when the air temperature is actually higher than the body’s temperature of 37 degrees though. But normally being out of direct sunlight and having a bit of a breeze means the temperature the body feels is lower than 37. It also helps here that the air is very dry, very low humidity, so evaporation works well. I’m really looking forward to the start of the rainy season in June though.