A touchstone in the conversations that generated this issue of Limn was a remarkable story published in September 2023 by The Washington Post, titled “The Inequality of Heat.”¹  The story details life during a late spring heat wave in Kasia Bagan—a working-class, largely Muslim neighborhood in Kolkata, India that abuts Quest Mall, the city’s largest and most exclusive shopping mall. “The Inequality of Heat” uses data visualization to dramatically illustrate the heat generated by bodies in windowless apartments, and the ways that air conditioners create blooms of hot air that accumulate in Kasia Bagan’s narrow and windless alleys. It draws remarkable visual contrasts between the interiors of neighborhoods like Kasia Bagan and those of more wealthy suburban spaces such as Kolkata’s tree-lined Salt Lake neighborhood.

But at the heart of the story are narratives. The first is the story of a peaceful sit-in staged by residents of Kasia Bagan at the air-conditioned Quest Mall. The second is an ethnographic portrait of Sana Mumtaz, a divorced mother of three living in Kasia Bagan. These twinned narratives dramatize not only the challenges for poor and working-class families living through South Asia’s increasingly frequent and intense heat waves, but also the ways in which climate injustice infuses interiors—from the atrium of a shopping center to the intimate space of a family apartment.

A year after “The Inequality of Heat” was published, Limn had a chance to sit down with Anant Gupta, a native of Kolkata and one of the reporters who worked on the story. We discussed his experiences reporting for the piece, his friendship with Sana and others in Kasia Bagan, and the politics of writing about climate change and its various interiors. Our conversation covered a range of themes addressed by other authors in this issue. Rather than edit it into a single narrative, we collected fragments and vignettes from the conversation, accompanied by photos Anant took while reporting this piece.²

Fridge

We were all committed to the narrative spine of the story—and much of that was how compelling Sana was as a person, as a character. Her own story, her family, her energy, her spirit. I think it was just too compelling to look away from. In fact, some of the visuals I remember to this day are of spending time in her house.

Her kids would open the fridge every now and then just to take in the cool air, because they don’t have an air conditioner. They would do it saying that they were looking for Coke or some fruit juice, whatever was in the fridge. But they did it again and again. And every time they did it, all the bottles in the fridge would come tumbling down. And the women in the house would get super cranky about this happening again and again, because the kids would just create that mess and run off, and they had to assemble it all again, put it back in the fridge and shut it. These were ways in which people were cooling themselves throughout the day in the neighborhood and in that home.

Morbidity

Once it became clear that the story was going to be about extreme heat and its impact on people’s health, then I think by instinct I started playing with the limits of what I imagine somebody’s health to be. And again, on the lower end, the limits of what I imagine impact to be. Because the most drastic impact is, of course, death. And there is a preoccupation in journalism with death.

When I was a student of journalism, we were taught about these death equations—how the foreign press calculates whether a story is worth doing strictly by the number of deaths in any place, and the number of deaths [required] increases as you move further and further away from the West. For something to be story-worthy, the number of deaths has to be high enough.

And even with this story, we tried to find evidence of death. People on the ground kept telling us that four people died this summer. This is chatter in any neighborhood in India that you go to. When you ask people at the end of the summer how many people died because of extreme heat, they will say five people died this summer, or six people died this summer. No death certificate will ever spell that out. But this is what people ascribe as the cause of death in their own conversations.

We tried to sit down and have conversations with the families, get them to say to us that it was the heat that caused it. So, there was that traditional journalistic impulse guiding this story to some extent. But we couldn’t find any clinching, compelling narrative about a death that happened because of heat. There was just community gossip.

Why I bring that up is to tell you that those outdated, boring impulses of journalism still guide us very much. The search for morbidity, the search for a very typical, classical story. For me, Sana being on edge multiple times throughout the day was a health impact angle. Just how much energy this extreme heat extracts out of her. How many times she finds herself at her wits’ end, whether it is because of her children, whether it is because of neighbors, whether it is because of road rage—or is it just the physical exhaustion of not having running water available at home?

Water comes into the neighborhood twice a day. She has to go out and fill every container she can find in her house, of every size you can think of. You know, there are those giant barrels that look like they store crude oil, and there are these small, tiny plastic canisters that have been repurposed to store water. And she will find anything that she can get her hands on and fill it up with water and keep it because you never know how much water you need. Even with the limited space that she has, she’s holding as much water as she can, and she’s doing it all alone for nine people.

And that is what drew me to Kasia Bagan. To convince my colleagues that this is also part of the health impact. This is also part of climate, keeping people on their edge. 

Action Plans

Everybody in India is convinced that Kolkata is dying. Kolkata is declining. Kolkata is decaying, right? So that was part of the allure of Kolkata, of locating the story in Kolkata, because Ahmedabad has got a Heat Action Plan. Mumbai has a Climate Action Plan. Delhi’s got a Climate Action Plan. Kolkata has got nothing. This is nowhere close to Kolkata’s priorities. Their concerns are about perennial rains in Bengal, which lead to flooding in Kolkata. But nobody’s talking about extreme heat in Kolkata. And I think that’s because it’s a very humid city, so people tend to assume that it’s never going to be as crazily hot as, say, Delhi.

But the temperatures have been consistently rising. And in fact, when I was there last summer for the story, I noticed the West Bengal government has started sending out these SMS’s whenever it gets too hot—whenever it crosses 40ºC [104ºF], you get an SMS saying, “Don’t go out” in Bangla. That’s all you get, unless you’re a government employee. If you’re a government employee, you might get a day off.

In Kolkata, you don’t have technocrats hovering around writing op-eds regularly, doing podcasts talking about the importance of addressing climate change. The politics of the city is still very different compared to what we see in other cities.

Home and the World

The primary interior that most people think about is the home, obviously. In relation to heat, it’s always air conditioning. More and more time spent in air-conditioned homes, more and more parts of the home that are air-conditioned. I grew up in a house where only one room had an air conditioner. When it got very hot, everybody went to that one room. But now it’s quite commonplace for all rooms to have air conditioners. Even living rooms have air conditioners. Central air conditioning is still not a big thing in India because it’s not very affordable. It’s crazy where people think they can install an air conditioner. Kitchens also have air conditioners now in some homes.

As with most things, the affluent are ensuring that they can insulate themselves from everything else that the world around them has to deal with. And that is a big part of interiority in India, right? It’s inseparable from India being the hyper-segregated place that it is. Interiority will always mean the privileged cocooning themselves, the privileged occupying the core, and the peripheral being left for the marginalized people. It’s how caste is imagined. It’s how most of India’s inequalities are rationalized—as just layers that are separated by distance. And the core is always kept for the most affluent Indians, the most prosperous Indians. I guess interiority excludes those who, by nature of their work or the nature of their circumstances, don’t have access to it and have to spend days outside.

Of course, since we’re talking about Kolkata: in Tagore’s book, Ghare Baire (Home and the World), at home and outside also comes to mind. It deals with gender primarily. Women and their lives being imagined to be more interior, interiorized, more domesticated, and the journey out to the world.

What was compelling about Sana was that she was mostly at home, by any definition, by any economic standard. She’s an at-home mother, raising three kids. But she’s barely at home. That kind of got me fascinated with her, that she was so extroverted, that she struck up this friendship with me. Most of our time together was time outside the house. She was showing me the neighborhood. She was showing me the primary health center where they hang out, which also serves as a cooling center. To me, it’s interesting how ideas of interiority and outside kind of intersect with India’s many inequities, whether it’s caste, whether it’s gender.

Stories

The stories that I get drawn to now are where there is some sense of people mobilizing in the face of institutions, obviously, in the face of power, obviously—but also in the face of the general notions of well-meaning people, even potential allies of ordinary people, like academics, journalists. Sometimes the understanding that we bring to those situations actually works against people. There’s something that people are trying to say to us. There’s something that, for the lack of a better word, the most oppressed are articulating, which we miss because we are looking for something else. Those are the stories that draw me, I think. And it wouldn’t be bad if I managed to say something significant about this in the course of my life.

This approach to storytelling kind of came from the Kolkata story, where a group of people were convinced that the deaths in the neighborhood were because of heat, even though science, hospitals, governments, everybody would convince them otherwise. And they did it. They went into a mall. They didn’t damage anything. They didn’t hurt anyone. There were people coming out of late-night movie shows that night when they went into the mall, I think a couple of cafés were still open, because in India, people still drink coffee very late in the night. So that’s what they saw in the mall. And later, of course, they were accused of trying to steal gifts for Eid, which was approaching, which really affected people deeply in the neighborhood. I think that’s what’s going to stay with me. ⦿

1. Annie Gowen, Niko Kommenda, Simon Ducroquet, Anant Gupta, and Atul Loke, “The Inequality of Heat,” Washington Post, September 22, 2023.
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2. In the print version of Limn 12, these vignettes are interspersed throughout the issue. ↩︎