Weather is Cloudy with a Slight Chance of Catastrophic Floods

I realized the other day that I never did a post on weather, which is an odd thing considering that weather can be such a big deal in India, especially when you’re from the Great White North. If I have done one already and just forgot, someone please tell me.

When I first arrived in India, I was surprised to find it very cold. Unlike Canada you can’t get away from the cold in India because they don’t have central heating or insulation in the houses. The houses here are made of bricks. Between late February and mid March the weather was gorgeous, sunny but nice and cool. Then as the season progressed it began to get hot. It was a dry heat, and I think the hottest it reached was about forty-three degrees. A killer when you’re under the sun, but survivable under a fan. Luckily the hottest season was during that teacher-training course which we held in the Bahai Centre, and the Bahai Centre is a very cool building.

In Canada we don’t truly sweat. I never understood what sweating was like, or what it was for. You sweat when you work out, or on those rare ‘hot’ days. In India sweat is your friend. At night you lie on your bed, your blanket discarded on the floor, wearing as little as decency allows and sweating copiously. The fan circulates the air, or a breeze comes through the screen and when it hits your sweat you are, for a brief moment, beautifully cool. Before I came to India I didn’t realize that sweat was salty but there were times when I could have seasoned a meal from my skin.

But Forty-three degrees isn’t really that hot in India. Every one was warning me about forty-eight degrees, telling me horror stories about fifty in the shade. But it didn’t happen. The great cataclysm never came and therefore my novels that take place in the desert will always lack a little something. The monsoon came early this year, and it never really went away. The heat dropped to the thirties, but the humidity sometimes made it feel a lot worse.

My comfort had grave effects of course. Mango season was cut short, and many of the mango blossoms were torn off the trees by incredible down pour. This meant a smaller mango yield and apparently some farmers who were in debt even committed suicide because they didn’t grow enough crops to pay the bills. When things go bad in India its very grim.

In the past month or so the long rains had another, more obvious effect. There was flooding in many parts of India with thousands of people displaced from their homes. In Lucknow the Gomti River flooded over a neighbourhood not far from our own. We went there to visit a family not long after the flood receded and the whole thing smelled of fungus.

However when the rain did disappear the weather quickly became hot and humid. But now autumn is on the way and the weather is cooling down.