Shimmering Summer: The Grand Champ?

Poona used to be this little haven during the summers. We'd laugh at Mumbai and we'd pity Hyderabad. We'd smirk at Delhi and make bad jokes about anyone else who'd compare their climate with ours (don't even ask what we did to Baroda!) and now, like some sinister payback, all of those cities are taking jibes at US!!

This is getting out of hand! Here, as we delicately simmer and swelter in our posh little oven, we're starting to see the brighter side of life, er, the sun, whatever. When the temp hit 41.7 in APRIL , we knew that there was something terribly wrong. There's just something off with the senior citizens' adda being the tandoor ! How do you justify this? The summer sales are all out to sell bikinis...but wait! Where is the ocean when you need it? As if the heat wasn't enough, there's this constant sense of impending rain that makes the heat radiate off the gound in sauna-hot-and-wet waves and i don't even want to guess what it's doing to the more "perspiration inclined" people.

I don't mind the radiating heat! No no!! I have very few complaints about the weather. I don't mind the hot. I don't mind the cold. I don't mind the wet. "Whether the weather be fine/ Or whether the weather be not/ Whether the weather be cold/ Or whether the weather be hot/ We'll weather the weather/ Whatever the weather/ Wheather we like it/ Or not!"

But this is an outcry on the behalf of all those that do mind. They mind with a vengeance. They're installing air conditioners and they're setting uo these little Actic zones in their baking homes. They are making all the arrangements to be shipped to the icy north, but they refuse to realise that this is not going away! Poona has not had a real Monsoon in a few years now. We haven't had a real Winter in longer. And the Summer affirms all our fears that our little wannabe Darjeeling is dealing with the Heat up! The Burn Out! The Great Bake! The Super Sizzle! And this goes on.

Imagine a drain and thinglets swirling down and out toward this ultimate fate that awaits everything that was once in the tub. We're all swirling away and we're all happily making for this shining orb of heat and light and swirling dust and heat simmering off the road like mirages. We're going to become one giant mirage! At the rate at which we're going, we're sizzling like the potatoes that we love to bake in jackets on once frosty winter barbecue nights. But the frost has turned into the steady sizzle of one indecipherable season. No distinctions. An endless blur of weeks tumbling into one another seamlessly, months ceasing to matter. The heat will reign and then there will be no need for Louis Vuitton to come up with Spring/Summer or Fall/Winter. All we'll need are the tank tops and bum-shorts of a summer that has taken over the world.

Move over Monsoon...
Walk away Winter...

The Summer Scorch is here to stay!

--Karishma Modi