On Friday May 22, the 50 hottest cities in the world had something in common. They were all in India. There is a vast heat dome over the Indian subcontinent. 113 degrees at the hottest.
Sweltering in Kolkata we are dreaming of summer vacations in the hills.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
While some of us can only dream about the mountains, writer Anuradha Roy and her spouse Rukun Advani actually built themselves a home in the mountains near Ranikhet in the Himalaya. She writes about it in her book Called by the Hills - A Home in the Himalaya.
It sounds idyllic. Clean air, blue skies, wildflowers, birds.
AR1: So yesterday I was sitting outside and reading and I heard this strange chick, chick, chick chick, new bird call that I couldn't identify. So I put on Merlin and it identified it as a woodpecker, a flame backed woodpecker.
The book is a lovely rumination of dogs and plants and gardens that resist civilisation. And a sense of something unchanging. The Bengali writer Leela Majumdar wrote about a childhood in the mountains almost a century ago. Roy says those lines still make sense to her as she sits among trees that are hundreds of years old.
AR2: And when Leela Majumdar describes the scent of a geranium or the what she looks at when she sees a mountain or a tree that's the same. It's an unbroken kind of line from her to me in that sense.
People like me sweltering in the plains will admire her foresight in restoring a little cottage in the hills but she says in 2000 when they moved there it was no picnic. Especially trying to run a publishing house. She remembers the painfully slow dial up internet in Ranikhet at the local telephone booth where the operator was sympathetic but philosophical.
AR3: actually, if I can tell you in Hindi, the gentleman would say aaj se byte pa ko nahi. So he thought of the bytes were of course the, you know, you'd see zero bytes and one byte, two bytes. So he thought of them as actual things that were kind of trudging up the hill from Haldwani to Ranikhet and helping us to send our messages.
Now the bytes aren’t as slow. But the hills are much too alive with the sound of too much music. Rampant deforestation, haphazard building of resorts and holiday homes have made landslides all too common. And the mountains are changing before Roy’s eyes. Climate change.
AR4: But at this point, when I see the peaks now in December without any snow. I can't tell you how frightening that is. And you know that, as they say, it's now too late already.
A local told her he’s not sure his children’s children will see snow the way he did.
AR5: when we came here in 25 years ago, every year, the month of January and February, there would be sleet, snow flurries and then real snow, right? It would be miserably cold. You'd be shivering even with, you know, five layers on. But now it's very pleasant. There's the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming. It's very frightening.
The groundwater is dropping. There are forest fires in the winter.
AR6: We had seen the foxes and flying squirrels really vanish from our patch completely.
No foxes to prey on leopard cubs. So the leopard population has risen and coming closer to humans looking for prey.
AR7: They have a kind of sawing sound, like a kind of like that.
AR8: They don't call like lions or tigers, but this can be very loud and sometimes they can be circling the house.
And not just at night. Like when she was walking with her dog Jerry with children playing and adults talking loudly.
AR9: All these people heard a sudden yelp, and then Jerry was not there.
She says she never thought a leopard would be so close to humans in broad daylight.
AR10: it's taken many months for me to come to terms with that and to know that it's not the landscape's fault, nor is it the leopards.
Climate change, deforestation, habitat loss all this is now part of the story of the hills. Even the locals talk about climate change now. Except not in Hindi.
AR11: Even if you're speaking Hindi with each other, the word for climate change is just climate change.
Some things just don’t need translation anymore whether in Ranikhet or San Francisco. You just feel the change. Just like the summer temperatures.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW.