When it’s 43 degrees Celsius but (as the weather updates on our smartphones would have us believe) it feels like 49 (degrees), something’s got to be wrong with the world we’re living and breathing in. What the ‘feel’ part is telling us is the ‘environmental temperature’ which takes into account the “ambient air, relative humidity and the wind speed.”

This year, summer in Lahore has been rather unpredictable. While April was far from being the ‘cruellest’ month, and the May weather oscillated suitably between hot and pleasant, June — from its second week onwards — was impossibly hot and humid, thanks in particular to the urban planners who’ve rid the city of much of its foliage over the past decade or so. Brief interludes of dust storms followed by mild showers notwithstanding (again, all Met predictions of urban flooding came crashing down), the sweltering June heat combined with humidity to do what even the most stringent of Covid-induced lockdowns couldn’t — empty the city roads and market spaces of public.

Where most people shut themselves indoors, the young and the restless headed out to the good old Canal, for a ‘free’ swim. The birds too disappeared into leafy crowns of old trees and were spotted only around a random pool of water.

July is expected to ring in Monsoon rains, but will it?