By the second week of April, people were talking of nothing but the weather. An arid burning heat had taken control of the land; no one seemed to remember the last time it rained.
Behind shuttered windows, women spent the afternoons roasting raw mangoes to make cooling sherbet. Their children, near diabolical with their sweaty armpits and itchy hair, crowded storefronts, exhausting their allowance buying synthetic fruit concentrates sold in tall glass bottles.
The nights were more pitiless than the day. The searing heat was all around, as if its source had not been the familiar sun but some other-worldly presence. Power supply was fickle. On most nights, the Boses had their dinner by the unsteady flicker of an oil lamp. Reluctant, they went to bed, which was hot like an angry wife or mistress.
Every night they agreed that a thunderstorm was overdue. It was the nor'wester, the sudden havoc of summer afternoons, which could deliver some reprieve before people started dropping dead.
The Bose's daughter was now almost ten. Her worries had always been greater than her age, and that particular night she stayed awake, fearing the worst. She made nothing of her parents' unthinking optimism, the elusive storm troubled her. When Mrs Bose awoke the next morning, she saw the girl sitting near the foot of the bed.
Has such a hot dry spell happened before, the girl asked. Her mother assured her that it had, that people always spoke of the weather in extreme terms because they forgot what the previous years had been like.
Over the next several days, the little girl watched the horizon for dark clouds. It began to seem vain, she had just about resigned herself to watching everyone she knew boil to a slow death when the storm arrived one afternoon.
The sun disappeared behind a sky the colour of dull copper; in the still, sultry air, breathing seemed like an act of penance. At around four in the afternoon, the dead leaves came to life, whirling around in a mad fury. Then the storm broke.
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