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your neighbours to hear?” But there were no neighbours as I looked out of the dining room window, through the verandah and porch to a velvet lawn that was surrounded by an acre of garden bounded by mature trees, their size evidence of the many years my family had been anchored in Kanpur.
    â€œWhat neighbours, Mummy?
    There’s no one there.” “That’s because you’re a very lucky little girl. Now finish your tea and go outside to play. And stay this side of the trees where I can see you.”
    In the distance 6-metre Indian Laburnum trees glowed with vitality and life. It was early May, the start of summer, so they were in full bloom with pendulous gold blossoms. Alongside them neem trees spread their leafy branches up and out, helping the laburnums to give us much-needed shade that was five degrees cooler than the adjacent sunshine.
    It wasn’t possible to survive in Kanpur without respecting the great heat of summer, heat that could melt your muscle and boil your brain in a few seconds flat. The year before I started school the heat killed Mrs Farelli who we knew in that arms-length way we knew most of the Catholic community who attended our church. She had made the fatal mistake of making “a quick dash” to deliver lunch to her son’s workplace when the only way she could see was to screw her eyes up against the glare of that pitiless ball of fire in the sky.
    She returned home trembling, her skin dry and head throbbing. It wasn’t long before she became delirious and fell into a coma.
    Being one of the few families to own a fridge, it was my mother’s task to supply ice to cool her body. “She’s lucky she didn’t collapse on the street where no one would have found her for hours,” my mother muttered to herself as she feverishly filled cones of newspaper with ice. It was so hot the landscape had emptied. Birds, animals, humans, had all sought shelter from the unforgiving sun.
    Efforts to cool Mrs Farelli by wrapping her stick-thin body in soaking wet sheets and laying ice on her forehead were of no avail. She died later that night. At her funeral the following morning even the horse-drawn hearse paid tribute to the heat.
    â€œI couldn’t have done that.” The admiration in my father’s voice was at odds with his bemused expression as he shook his head in disbelief after he and my mother had attended the funeral. “That young chokra , Eric Mullins who is rumoured to be growing up as a wastrel, showed fortitude and compassion. He and his friends carried rubber bags of water and jogged alongside the hearse, ladling water onto the tyres.” No one wanted the rubber tyres to expand, fall off, knock the coffin around and further distress an already bereaved family. “The sweat poured off them but they kept going all the way to the cemetery. I couldn’t have done it.” Bemusement made him shake his head again.
    The shock of Mrs Farelli’s death was a reminder that worse was to come.
    June was hotter – stinking hot, even at 9pm, a good three hours after sunset when the tar on the roads was still molten. The hot dry air was made worse by the loo winds that felt like a blast from a furnace. It exhausted the earth, reducing her to a dry, dejected brown. No amount of water helped. Lawns everywhere curled up their collective toes and became crunchy. Dust reigned supreme and with malicious intent invaded our minds and took possession of our eyes, noses, ears and skin.
    The wooden soundboard in the piano writhed in pain, making ominous sounds, threatening to warp – or worse, crack.
    I watched in wordless dismay, though I knew it was inevitable, as my mother and ayah filled my favourite hiding place behind the piano with chattis of water. These unglazed earthenware containers would sumjhour the wood, soothing it with cool and moist air. Pots of fishbone ferns were added to keep the chattis company and to help pacify the