What it’s like living through a 121 degree day
If you ask Ansar Khan, he will tell you that the heat killed his baby daughter Ina. She didn’t wake up from her afternoon nap in late May, on the dusty scrap of land she knew as home, with only a blue plastic sheet to shade her.
It was the hottest day he’d ever experienced, and a hot wind blew. It was 121 degrees in New Delhi that day.
“She was crying a bit, so we gave her milk and we all napped. When we woke up, we tried waking her up,” Khan tells NPR. “It was all over in half an hour.”
Heatwaves have been roiling swaths of South Asia since April, including southern Pakistan, where temperatures went over 125 degrees. In New Delhi, one of the world’s largest cities, with a population of over 30 million people, that 121-degree day was the peak. [Continue reading…]