Death Valley in California is the hottest place in the world and the highest temperature recorded there is 54.4 degrees Celsius, exactly 1.5 degrees hotter than Mungeshpur’s Wednesday reading. The difference is that about three hundred people live the year round in Death Valley while Delhi’s National Capital Region is home to thirty million people.
Last Wednesday, a place in Delhi logged the hottest day in India’s recorded history. The India Meteorological Department’s sensors in Mungeshpur registered a reading of 52.9 degrees Celsius. It sounds even grander on the other scale: 127.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Paatal Lok should have been set in Mungeshpur, not Outer Jamuna Paar.
I looked up Mungeshpur on Google Maps: it’s 63 kilometres away, nearly halfway to Rohtak. Delhi is so monstrous that you can drive for an hour and forty-five minutes without escaping it; the Mungeshpur instance of the city will be waiting for you, its tarred roads melting, its cattle gaunt and parched, its birds falling off the brittle branches of its unslaked trees.
For a day it seemed likely that Mungeshpur would go down in geography textbooks as a meteorological champion. Cherrapunji used to be the wettest place in Hindustan, now Mungeshpur would be its hottest. It wasn’t to be. The egregious Kiren Rijiju, currently minister of earth sciences, sprang to the capital’s defence. It was most unlikely to be as hot as that, he declared. The Met office said Mungeshpur’s reading was an outlier, likely “… due to sensor error or local factors.”
‘Local factors’ suggest some endemic Mungeshpuri tendency to overheat. The reason Mungeshpur and Delhi were sometimes 9 degrees Celsius hotter than they ought to have been this week was — according to the IMD itself — scorching winds blowing in from Rajasthan, superheating Delhi’s north-western periphery. Mungeshpur’s reading might have finally been ascribed to a sensor error but there was nothing local about it: Delhi’s maximum temperatures have been rising inexorably. We’re frogs on a not-so-slow fire, and we’re being boiled alive….
After the truth-shower 