Heat Warp

My mother has been telling me for several summers now that the heat in Kolkata is unlike anything she remembers. Not the familiar summer where you get drenched the moment you step out and need many showers a day to stay sane, people have learned to live with. Lately, its been something far wose and intolerable and beyond the ability of her wall AC unit to handle.

She has always been the kind of person who keeps track of things. Not just family birthdays and which cousin married whom, but the thread of an argument, the inconsistency in a piece of reasoning, the thing you said three months ago that contradicts what you are saying now. Her memory is intact: you only need to press her on it and she will prove it. But there has been a of dimming over the last couple of years, a flattening of the curiosity that used to make talking to her a pleasure. I had been filing this under aging, which is a convenient explanation.

Then I ran into this piece on what heat actually does to the brain. The research is not subtle about it: cognitive performance drops at higher temperatures even in conditions designed to feel comfortable. Heat raises cortisol and other stress hormones, disrupts sleep, and dulls the sustained thinking that shows up in attention and problem-solving. Young adults in non-air-conditioned buildings during a heat wave performed measurably worse on math and attention tests. A study in JAMA Psychiatry found that the hottest days were associated with higher rates of mental health-related emergency visits among adults with health insurance a population, one assumes, with some access to relief.

My mother's flat has cooling with AC and fans, she's not young and not in a study with controlled conditions. She is in a city where April through September has become a different proposition than it was when I was a kid and came to Kolkata in the summer holidays to visit my grandparents. The heat was daunting but there was respite after shower and under the fan.

I don't know what to do with this. What I can do is call more often in the hot months and ask better questions than how is the weather. And stop putting her complaints about the incredible heat in the drawer I have been putting her in because I have no solutions. It may be both things at once. Age and heat. That is possible too.