Indian Summer

Mothers smeared their children with mud, and men swathed themselves in wet towels. Tar oozed in the streets; ink dried between well and paper. Clerks stayed overtime in their offices, where they could flake out beneath the big black ceiling fans; mounted police began their patrols early, when there was still a sliver of shade. In India last week not even mad dogs or Englishmen went out in the midday sun.

It was not the humidity; it was the heat--the searing, scorching, scalding heat of an Indian summer. Unforgettable in any year, the hot spell of 1958 was worse than any for a decade in New Delhi, half a century in Andhra Pradesh. The thermometer hit 121DEGF.* in the pilgrim center of Bhadrachalam; it hovered around 100DEGF. in Delhi even at night. Except in the cool hills to which only a few could escape, a relentless sun licked the country like a flamethrower. And from the sun came tragedy.

The heat brought drought; the drought brought famine. In Rajasthan state last week men, their crops parched and their cattle killed, were eating slugs, dried grass and flowers. In Bihar 90% of the wells had dried up; rioting broke out among villagers who camped all night at the few wells that still gave water. In Calcutta (top temperature 111DEGF., the highest since 1924) half the railwaymen refused to work in the heat, created such chaos with train schedules that mobs smashed the offices of stationmasters in protest.

Since the hot weather began in May more than a thousand have died in India from the heat. In the days of the British raj, civil servants used to flee from the hot plains to the summer capital in the cool hill town of Simla. But Indian civil servants, afraid of the charge that they are unwilling to put up with what the voters must, have to sweat it out in dusty New Delhi.

As cups of water were poured over screens of khus-khus grass to cool homes, and millions of Indians drank curd milk mixed with salt, the superstitious villagers of Uttar Pradesh put slices of onion beneath their turbans and hung garlic on their fans in the belief it would ward off sunstroke. In Madras black pepper was rubbed on the head of the elephant god to create "such a burning sensation that he will gush forth rain." The prayers were answered last week in some parts of India with the arrival of the welcome monsoon, though not in the hard-hit northern tier states. Rain fell so hard in Bombay that five people drowned in a single day in the flooded streets.

* The highest temperature recorded under standard conditions (i.e., in sheltered and ventilated locations): 136.4DEG F. at Azizia, Libya, on Sept. 13, 1922.

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