Kishore Singh: A 'cool' remedy to beat the heat

Remember the terrible week when the heat broke some neolithic record, and the power kept going off, and the only antidote for your high blood pressure was to overtake the car in front and beat its driver to pulp? When the plants shrivelled up like dry paper, the taps ran dry, and the lobby of the neighbouring hotel seemed to brim with, well, neighbours seeking sanctuary from turning into slow roast? When everyone else, if they weren't in Alaska, or Greenland, whichever is colder, were frying eggs on their car bonnets, thereby saving the environment and earning themselves carbon credit?
 

On such a day, my wife Skyped from somewhere that was presumably cold, since she was wearing a jumper, to ask, "Darling, what have you been up to?" What I had been up to, I told her, was finding a place for my underwear in the fridge, which was one way to stay cool after a scalding shower to which extreme humidity added the torment of being in a sauna. "Tch! Tch!," my wife fretted, "what will the cook think?" I informed her that the culinary wiz had long dispensed with the duty of cooking, preferring to submit a takeout menu by way of family meals.

I explained how her friend Sarla had come over to share a few inventive ways of staying cool in such extreme circumstances. The fridge had been emptied of food and its racks stocked with linen pants and shirts for a frequent change of clothes. My son and I had a brief tussle over shelf space, and he now stocked his shorts and Ts in the freezer, requiring him to use a hammer to let out the creases before he could get into his clothes, and even then he resembled the abominable snowman.

Sarla had other advice for us, all of it centred around the use of bazaar ice. She organised her supplier to deliver large ice boxes of the kind used on long car journeys. She also ordered slabs of ice to be delivered at home every morning. This was chiselled and filled into the ice campers, one each provided to every member of the family. The idea of plunging our feet into individual pools of ice seemed initially debauched but soon proved merely necessary. To avoid frostbite, we were required to thaw our extremities at regular intervals, made bearable by bottles of beer that lay chilling in the same ice. Soon, there was food to accompany the beverage. The fluctuations of electricity no longer mattered when we might sip aam panna laced with vodka from one camper, or a lassi margarita with the help of a straw from another, while caviar dunked in mayonnaise and tomato sauce on a bed of crushed ice became our shortcut to gourmet snacking. The dog managed a lick or two when he got lucky, but my daughter reasoned that you don't throw out the world's most expensive nosh simply because a mutt shared a meal of eggs with you.

One couldn't, however, sleep with one's feet in a tub of ice, so the bedsheets were aired in the fridge, or squeezed through ice water, before being laid over a mattress sprayed with frozen rosewater. Showers were replaced with bucket baths, for which melted ice from the campers was recycled, complete with mint leaves and plum stones in the water. It mightn't have been idyllic, but some dirty decadence was hardly misplaced as a way to fight the solstice.