Heat is not just a feeling. It strips us naked

It was the middle of the north Indian heatwave, and I was in the middle of a field, with nothing between me and the sky.

The Himalayan sun poured down on me, like acid from a cracked vial, a taste and a sensation both, utterly inescapable. In Delhi, the temperature was 47 degree Celsius. In Dehradun, it was 40 degree Celsius, unheard of in May.

Schools had been shut down in both cities owing to the heat, and in the "Abode of the Gods", as the Himalayas are often known, the unseasonal temperature seemed like the gods had cheated. The closer you are to the mountains, the more harsh the radiation; the sun can burn your skin and lips to a crisp, and blind you silly.

I had a few hours before I had to leave Dehradun, and I was in the atmospheric campus of the Forest Research Institute of India, which once housed the British Imperial Forest Service, and is quite simply one of the most beautiful buildings in India.

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If I had to look around, it had to be now. I had made absolutely futile attempts to protect myself, drinking water, covering my head, skipping between the narrow strips of shade closer to the building. The FRI campus holds some remarkable, idiosyncratic museums. Given the institute researches forests, most exhibits are related to timber, leaves, roots, silviculture - and their "enemies".

Approaching the museum complex, mangoes nodded gently from trees. Dehradun, lush, moist, and cool, was once famous for producing bounties of food crops and fruit. Dehradun Basmati is famous, but almost all paddy fields are converted to houses now.

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Yet campuses like FRI, founded in 1878, once a mango orchard, still hold space for fruiting trees. Mango trees, litchi trees, and fig trees grow in abandon, and without the sprinkle of insecticide. In the morning sizzle, a raptor looked down at me fiercely from the top of the building.

I expected the insides of the building - cavernous, old, high-ceilinged, cave-like, to be cool. No such luck. The museums had high ceilings, much too high for any fans. So there were no fans at all. Entering a museum on the different kinds of wood and timber was like facing dragon breath.

The shade was a tad better than outside, but it was also stuffy, suffused with secrets. It was time then, to give up thinking about myself and cast my mind on other things. I was feeling hot, but this was old news, it was now time to feel other things.

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An exhibit on the "heart rot" in axle wood stared at me. How do trees feel the heat, I wondered. Their leaves wilt, and a wilted tree looks like sorrow personified. Potted plants respond to music and conversation, but do they feel a metaphoric leap of joy when we remember to water them during a hot summer? When trees were being named, did people really think that the "weeping willow" was crying? Did the pale-skinned Britisher want to weep when the mercury soared and the sun swept the sky and air?

The same museum had exhibits on Indian tree diseases. The British had chronicled many of these, being masters at documentation. Animals often surrender to their diseases when feeling very hot or very cold.

In the heat for instance, raptors like black kites and eagles will drop like stones from the sky. In cities, sources of clean water are uncommon, though heat islands are not. If you pick up such a bird and try to revive it, it may not even try to attack you, unlike its normally fierce nature.

This is because heat-stressed animals and birds will often become glassy eyed and limp. A simple act of kindness is giving fresh water for birds and squirrels in cities, which can be placed on verandahs and window ledges.

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Another exhibit in the entomology museum showed beetles and bugs which kill trees. The beetles burrow deep into the wood, creating larval galleries. The insects create filigree like patterns inside the wood, eating it up from within.

The old-fashioned exhibits show insects, and their "enemies". Does a beetle burrow deeper in the wood, its only refuge, when it's horribly hot or cuttingly cold? The beetle does what it has to do, and the tree does what it can to survive. Sometimes, it crashes.

I wonder how many trees have crashed near the red-bricked corridors of the FRI campus. The campus, with its quietude, and its ancient building, takes you back in time. I wondered what one's ancestors thought and felt at exactly the same time of the year in summer.

Heat, I realise, is not just a feeling. We hate the heatwave. It strips us naked. We feel unprotected. It makes us thirsty. Vulnerable. The world seems grey. Sometimes, it seems translucent, as we lose our bearings and become giddy like the raptors that fall from the sky. Heatwaves make us understand our own mortality.

But like that hot morning and many mornings after, I realise heat is not a feeling. It is an experience. And embracing it - grudgingly, as one walks in forests, on roads, on campuses, within rooms - makes it a bit better. Thinking about the cicada, the tree, the mango, the eagle, the person who lived 200 years before me, and how they felt the heat, makes it a bit more interesting, and keeps sanity closer.