The end of May isn't supposed to have a 45 degree celsius temperature with a 30 percent chance of precipitation which is highly unlikely because the south of the province doesn't have the luxury of a pleasant summer.
The morning was loud and chorous, the crows croaked and sparrows chirped and a pair of myna shrieked right outside our door. Squirrels ran along the bulwarks of houses squeking and jumping at the slightest disturbance.
The sun pushed apart the night curtain right at 5 in the morning, peeking from behind the oaks and ashes in the east, streaking the sky with vibrant strokes of blood orange and golden hues.
We had eggs and tea for breakfast before running off to our chores. Our beds were rumpled and our clothes wrinkled and tea got cold before I could sip it even in such hot weather. It used to be different. Our mornings were always early but there were 10 am teas and an hour of our 20-year-old sooty black television. The mornings used to be clamorous but they carried a certain calm rooted somewhere deep inside them. Now they were just loud mornings, the absence of a hope always got unnoticed among the cries of the mynas and drongoes.
The atmosphere was heavy and burdening and heat seemed to float in large chunks everywhere. The wind vanished so that even the slight pendulum motion of the swings hung in our backyards came to an eerie hault.
The sky was a brilliant blue, cloudless, too bright to see and the air was so heavy that it felt like everyone would suffocate under this blanket of raw heat.
When we first came here, we could see the river from our rooftop, a mere 250 feet away from our house. Less a river, more a flowing swamp. Yet a water body. Someplace to feel a gust of chilly wind in the evenings even in midsummer.
Now when most of our vacant empty plots with weeds and rodents have been replaced by decent houses, we can only see the tops of the tall white poplar trees around the river, their dull green bunch of leaves a contrast against the extraordinary bright sky. Those trees are the drum beaters of our society's tribe with their leaves always making whispering noises before the incoming storms. Yet the leaves were quite now, silently hovering above the black road below, soaking the tyrant sun.
I blasted Arctic Monkeys when I started to scrub the pots and pans with water which seemed to be molten lava at first but then cooled down to a normal temperature. By the time my fingers formed wrinkles, I had finished both, the dishes and my playlist. Sweat trickled down my spine and my temples throbbed, the heat got to my head.
Even when the sun reached the western sky, the heat didn't go down, instead it hung around in a soupy humid unpleasant warmness. Our house turned into a furnace with all surfaces reaching an unbearably hot temperature, baking us all alive,slowly but steadily.
All the men of the place gathered under the large ash tree in the neighborhood. They sat and talked and smoked and played chess and dogs rolled at their feet and dug the ground to find a cool spot to lie down. There were no flies or mosquitoes today. The insects had been one of the first victims of early mean summer.
My mother and I opened the garage gate and sat in the garage, the fading sunlight leaving an amber glow on our faces. Yet the atmosphere remained humid and unbearable. The evening was unsually quite as compared to the morning. The dogs didn't howl nor did the crows cawed unnecessarily neither did the children run around in circles playing their own games.
Somewhere far away, it seemed like a radio was singing a song. A country song whose faint hymn echoed through the place.
A single faint whisp of wind blew carrying the very essence of heat and maybe of hope, hope that wind will blow out and rain will fall. But as the wind faded away, the setting sun mocked us, tickling us, the sweat on our foreheads dropping down.
And the blue hour arrived. The sun was gone. But the sky didn't cool. The stars twinkled alone on the moonless night and we lay under it, gazing at those bright balls of fire with our dry eyes. The night was short and before long, the sun was back at our sky, looking down at us.
The day passed like the previous one. And the next one passed like that too.
And we lived on.
The mornings hollered and we woke and I scrubbed the pots and the evening came silently again. We got good at listening to that old radio. It told us news one evening. And eventually the mynas started to shriek in the evening. And lemonade seemed to become an essential under the community ash tree.
And we lived on and on until the leaves sang one morning. Around 10, we heard the undeniable shushing of the poplar trees, urging us all to quiet down and listen, listen to the incoming rain.
It rained that afternoon. And it rained in the evening. Even at night, it rained. The next morning was not noisy, because the birds were nestled in quietly but it was not silent either because it was accompanied by the transient pitter patter of the drizzle.
The evenings turned chilly, when the winds blew and we slept with a roof between us and the sky.
It rained for a week. In fact, it didn't rain much. It rained for a day or two then there were dark skies and roaring clouds and winds from the north.
A week later the temperature rose up. The start of June isn't supposed to have a 45 degrees temperature with a 70 percent chance of .......
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