India, which is home to one in every six people on earth, has emitted just over three per cent of greenhouse gases—and yet it will be among the nations most ravaged by the climate. DhruvKhullar reports on the country’s unprecedented heat wave.
The Bhalswa landfill, on the outskirts of Delhi, is an apocalyptic place. A gray mountain of dense, decaying trash rises seventeen stories, stretching over some fifty acres. Broken glass and plastic containers stand in for grass and stones, and plastic bags dangle from spindly trees that grow in the filth. Fifteen miles from the seat of the Indian government, cows rummage for fruit peels and pigs wallow in stagnant water.
The dusty road leading to Bhalswa is lined with ramshackle shops and gutters full of stagnant water. When I visited, in May, some sections of the landfill were still releasing angry coils of smoke. In the car, I consulted my phone, which told me that it was a hundred and three degrees outside, with thirty-two-per-cent humidity. Still, when I opened the door, I was stunned by the three-dimensionality of the heat. The sun fried my skin but also somehow roasted me from within.
The women described headaches, exhaustion, dizziness, rashes, fever. The stench of the landfill—an acrid mixture of excrement and rotting trash—was sickening, they said, but the heat made it hard to tolerate masks. Outside the hut, children kicked a ragged soccer ball. A scrawny dog panted on a mound of refuse. Flies swarmed a heap of dung.The human body is an exquisitely effective temperature-regulation machine.
Outside, the temperature seemed to have ticked up a few degrees, and the sun felt more intense than before. A line had formed to get into the clinic. On the sidewalk, a slight man leaned against a bright-green auto rickshaw. I caught his eye as I walked past.“It’s been very hard,” he said. “We’re in really tough shape.
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