Summer of truths
- (un)common sense
For most of those who have lived in Chitwan during the summer, the notoriously high temperature levels are an undeniable fact they experience day in and day out. “Chitwan must be ekdum hot during the summer, right?” my aunty in Kathmandu asks me these days as I travel between Kathmandu and Chitwan. It is really only a question in a syntactical sense—the answer already embedded in it, like the journalists embedded with powerful war-mongers. Yet I am unable to simply accept this seemingly established truth at face value. To me there is more to the story of Chitwan’s almost unbearably hot summers. “Well, some places in Chitwan are cooler some times,” I tell my aunt. I am on a slippery slope here but I try to tell a different story. For most of those who have lived here during summer, this truth is what you live day in and day out. Few really like this sweaty summer, but the status of Chitwan as a hot place in summer is not up for question. Then, am I crazy to think otherwise?
We physically experience Chitwan or any place for that matter, through our body. But as I begin to reflect on our body’s location in place—I have come to realize that we do not really live in a place as a whole but in its various components. We live in particular homes (cement homes, mud homes, bamboo homes, homes with vines, homes near mango trees, etc.). We walk on particular paths and streets (tree-lined or not; paved or gravelled or mud). We ride particular vehicles (air-conditioned private cars; air-conditioned tourist buses; crowded buses; tractors; goods-laden trucks; motorbikes; or Vikram tempos with their iron roofs, to name a few). We work in particular fields (rice fields, maize fields, orchards, agro-forests and forests) or particular factories or particular offices. And we do all this during different times (day, night, evening, morning, rainy days, rainy nights, sunny days, breezy mornings, cloudy days, and cloudy nights). If we experience Chitwan as hot and cool place, we do so depending on these very particular moments and places.
What’s in this naturally hot feeling about Chitwan in general then? Well, summer is the time of monsoon—the warm, humid, rain-splashing period that makes plants grow riots. Bamboo plants shoot up several meters in a month. Grasses take over the fields if corn-bean-pumpkins are not planted in time. It is a productive and very sweaty season. But then you stand under a mango tree or bir pipal chautaras, and find it feels cool there.
Where the Chitwan-the-hot-place belief is really experienced daily is inside where most of us spend the majority of our time these days.
In the earlier times, Chitwan was still hot but living there was cooler. One reason for this was the different style of houses. The indigenous Tharus had adobe and reed structures, with beautifully rendered earthen floors insulated with straw at the bottom trapping cool air in summer and warm air during winter. Tharu women worked hard to maintain it, no doubt but the benefits were well worth it. Hill-migrants were new to the area and their homes were not as sophisticated in terms of dealing with the environment. But they carried their mountain home designs with them when they settled and these still served them relatively well.
During the last four decades things have changed dramatically. Nowhere is our march into modernity reflected more viscerally than in our buildings. Our first house in Chitwan had a thatch roof, earthen floor and earthen porches. We had fired-bricks, but still used mud as mortar. We dismantled that house and built another one of fired-brick, cement floors and tin-roofs. This in turn gave way to all cement-sand mortar, fired brick, walls, glass windows, and concrete roofs fifteen years ago. The same changes were happening all around us. But the roofs and walls trap heat, making the rooms like furnaces.
Going around visiting my neighbours these days, I find we often reminisce about how cool it used to be in their old houses. I can see deep sadness in their faces (sweaty, sweaty ones as they sit under heat-trapping concrete roofs) about this change but they have already locked themselves in their high-investment, high-culture modern homes. Tharu village structures have seen the same change from traditional reed-adobe structures to fired-brick, cement and concrete ones. Just like our homes, our school rooms, our factories and our offices have become hot holes. The root of Chitwan’s problem is bad design that only makes the existing heat worse.
Our choice of materials has become the single-largest factor that has led to these hot holes. But a second look at other construction choices needs to be taken as well to solve the heat issue. Are windows designed and placed for good air flow? How is the house located vis-à-vis the larger surroundings? Are there vines crawling on the walls (with a good number of vines on walls and roofs, a house could be many degrees cooler in summer)? Why don’t we look to the shade under a mango tree for inspiration and imagine homes designed to mimic their cooling system? What if people built homes with vents on their roofs that let hot air out like the canopy of a mango tree does while cool air lies at and near the base of the tree?
There are other areas of concern in addition to construction choices. Clothing customs hardly help people cope with the heat. Women feel Chitwan’s temperature more than men because of all the layers of clothing they must wear (I know, I know, things are changing these days). And Chitwan’s badly managed public buses are no less of hot holes than buildings are.
In other words, Chitwan-the-hot-place is as much the product of the natural weather as it is of badly-designed buildings, badly-run public transportation and culturally-enforced rules of modesty. What do you say?
Anil Bhattarai anilbhattarai@gmail.com
Posted on: 2011-06-28 10:18
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