Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Fever

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/10418385-4208469

1938-8020

Pierre Alféri, Victoria Bergstrom,

Climate Change and Health Impacts

Witness statement from Udhayasûriyan Kurmagati, age 47By the time you notice it, it’s already been there a while. A weight added onto each thing. The fatigue of the legs, the irritation around the neck. And the lightest of sleep. I had to pant while opening a window to suspect it. And to admit it, I had to suffer a startling sweat while standing in line at a peddler’s handcart.I step out of the line, careful not to brush up against anything, to keep my shirt or pants from coming into further contact with my drenched skin. I can feel fat, warm drops rolling down my temples and neck. A repugnant stream starts to flow down my spine. Symmetrically, sweat runs down to my belly button. I’m even sweating from the crown of my head. Its ridge marks out my watershed.Seeing all around me wet triangles getting bigger on chests, under armpits, at the top of butt cheeks, does nothing to diminish my shame. Hearing the passersby panting, sighing, fanning themselves makes me all the hotter. And the looks we give each other, more horrified than compassionate, seem to say: do something! This exasperation has not subsided. It has taken some surprising forms.At first, we think we’re equipped. We adapt. Ventilation. Fewer solid foods, more sugary drinks. Nap. Bath. Nightwalking. It’s not that the nights are cool. But sleep drags around its waste. Soon it begets baffling nightmares. Fragments in yellow, red, fluorescent orange. Off-screen shouts and blows. Incomprehensible words. Fire and Water.I’m twenty-two, twenty-three, at the time. I speak Hindi, but my first language is Kannara. I still live in the southern suburbs of Bangalore, in Bellandur, in a hut in the back garden of the house I was born in. My mother lives on the second floor. Since the death of my father, my oldest sister lives with her husband and kids on the ground floor. I’ve never had steady work. I’ve never “known” a woman, nor a man. But from now on there’s nothing in the world that could make me let someone I respect, or someone I like, come into contact with my stickiness.Time stagnates. I do nothing. The mercury swells upward.The animals are collapsing. A camel lay down in the middle of the street. A sleeping dog is panting. A dream stirs it. I’m living its dream.The nights are seeming shorter. And upon waking, hotter than yesterday, less hot than tomorrow? The sun, however, doesn’t bloat. It seems like it has Sirius as reinforcement, its celestial pup. The neighbor who finishes hosing off his front steps finds the corner where he started already dry. By morning, the smells come on. It starts with a honeyed whiff of a blooming bush. As I get closer to the market, it’s the spice cones, the attars, the incense. Turmeric, sandalwood, vetiver.But on my way, less pleasant odors pierce the envelopes, sting the nose, pinch the throat. The fermentation of a garbage can whose lid yawns open. The filthy alcohol that evaporates from the juice of vegetable skins enriched with the fat of melting meat. Multicolored vomit.Week by week, it gets imperceptibly worse. At one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, there’s an amniotic pause. In the bath of the air, one can no longer feel one’s limits.The truce doesn’t last long. The baking resumes, hotter than ever. When you go out now, it’s a hairdryer trained on your face, it’s an oven with its door left open. Walking around is out of the question. In parks, walkers are dropping like flies. The stretcher carriers with red cheeks come pick them up unconscious. Their air-conditioned vans fill up from one street to the next like elementary school buses. They administer fluids intravenously to rehydrate. If they wait too long, the pavement sticks to their skin, which burns with an odor of tarry fried chicken. The authorities finally recognize two victims of this heat wave in the form of American tourists struck down in the greenhouse of Lal Bagh. They order it shuttered in the afternoons.Those who withstand the heat have cramps and dizzy spells. The slightest effort and the slightest emotion produce a brutal acceleration of the heart rate. Dripping with sweat a second later. Already sweaty stepping out of the shower. Sweaty from waking till bedtime, from bedtime till waking, stuck to a moist sheet.The noxious fumes become more concentrated, thickening the stagnant air. Stench of the butchers’ stalls, salami men, oyster sellers. Clinging odors of vitiated blood, of rotting flesh. Green flies make their home in the gaping gills and the wide-open eyes of fish, in the eye sockets of skinned sheep’s heads, in their nostrils. The train cars, the crowded buses smell all at once of a locker room and a rotisserie.After six months like this, you start to see the first refrigerated clothing items, designed just around the corner in the Electronics City of Anekal, but produced in China. “Smart textiles,” they say. Slips. Hats, socks, and gloves, hermetically sealed. They are distributed to the employees of tech firms. Over there, they keep eight or nine degrees cooler.The next year, it’s wearable air conditioning’s turn, designed in England. Components factory-produced in Pakistan, finished locally. I nearly got a job on the assembly line. Circulation of liquid nitrogen in ultra lightweight hermetic spacesuits. Narrow wind tunnels, blades of cool air, waterproof films of pulsing gas. You can get the thermostat down to sixty-six. A massive, instantaneous success with the executive class.This translates into an average increase of three and a half degrees to the ambient temperature of the city center. Each happy purchaser gives off as much heat to those around him as he gets coolness within. It’s a vicious cycle, a slipknot we’re pulling on: the more we struggle against it, the surer our defeat. So we backpedal. We limit the use of these spacesuits to firefighters, the police, and ambulance drivers.The nights are shorter and shorter. I now get up at 4:00 a.m. When the temperature climbs back up with the sun, I recite a summer poem. “The truth of suffering: fanning yourself in vain.” I play chess on the Internet, several games at once, some of which last weeks. I leave the house only to go to one of the parks, to the edge of a lake. Luckily, there are many. Because the one in my neighborhood, in Bellandur, is full of chemical waste. It froths like a witch’s cauldron. In certain spots, it catches fire. The air is macerating as well, like stagnant water. Slimness of shadows. Often, forgetting where I was heading, I just stand there, dazed, on mine.But you have to move, you have to ride the heat to keep from succumbing. And people don’t seem to want to let themselves be crushed by it. The city is buzzing. The deliverymen drive their rickshaws at breakneck speeds and wipe their foreheads. Among the onlookers, there are some who are a little quick to anger. Some give in to sudden impulses that make their neighbors jump. For others, you might imagine that they’re indifferent, bearing it nonchalantly, right up to the moment you see them swoon and grope for a handhold.Bets, lotteries, gambling enjoy a surge of popularity, which no one has a good explanation for. In the gigantic malls, enthusiasm catches like fire in front of the screens. One observes, on Vittal Malyar Road and Church Street, as many scenes of euphoria as one does fits of rage. People talk about a correlation between these mood swings and the increased rates of allergies, pruritus, and parasitosis.More worrying is the rise in household accidents—especially burns. Brawls break out with no perceivable cause. Domestic violence and child abuse are experiencing a startling resurgence. Suicides as well. Stories keep circulating of lightning-speed declines, dereliction of duty, runaways, pauperization. Personally, I am catching more and more hostile glances. Not a day goes by now that a stranger doesn’t shout at me.Certainly, all of this puts the state on alert. Note that the society is still functioning quite well, at this point. But the police, militiamen, and paramilitary are ready to go to battle. Their jumpiness, even in mundane encounters, is palpable. The misunderstandings fester. Many officers carry a wooden baton on a leather strap around their wrist, and the blows rain down. The coolheadedness that we thought was etched in their professional charter now seems irremediably lost. Insults, beatings, malicious groping are becoming commonplace.When we have to contact the authorities, the city, or government services, the behavior of their sweat-soaked employees is also becoming unpredictable. I give up trying to claim unemployment. Altercations break out in every line, at every window.Two years after the first waves, I withdraw indoors. I decide to leave my hut as little as possible. A need to escape, close friends and family above all, in my house, those who would touch me. The barest idea of contact throws me into a panic. Against the mounting agitation of molecules I try to oppose a stillness that would also be neural.It is an unprecedented calm. It lasts several months. I play dead, I fast, I sleep, I think of nothing. The nighttime storms fill me up. I repeat to myself that the world is healing with each flash of lightning.But the temperature doesn’t stop climbing. It’s now 113 degrees in the daytime. At the height of a monsoon, the symbolic bar of 120 degrees is passed. The city’s geographical position, on its windy, tree-filled plateau, no longer protects us from the global inferno. The whole Earth is simmering; the subcontinent is dripping.I am haunted, when I see it for what it is, by the grim idea of entropy, against which nothing stands a chance. It starts taking on the sinister forms of baking, of burning, and of combustion. I recite to myself the stages of a terminal torpor:calorrubordolortumortu meurs. You die.The final three years are a blur. The chemical therapy of mourning makes some difference. But there is also the vapor, which rises from everywhere. The haziness is that of a sauna. My whole waking life from before—I imagine it’s the same for the others—crawls along in a stinging, yet soothing, drowsiness. The heat baffles all my senses. I dream often that I’m a lobster boiled alive. My little shrill cries wake me up in extremis. If only it were only a dream.One day, I hear talk of the Intercellular Games through my chess club on FecesBeak. You know the rest. I had to get out of that cauldron no matter the cost. I had to leave as quickly as possible, even if fuel was lacking. I would have climbed, jumped, plunged down anywhere. I would have dissolved myself in the air, in the water, to know peace.Translated from the HindiTranslated from the French