Sleeping melon

It’s really hot in Delhi at the moment. 46 degrees kind of hot. That same self-combusting sort of heat I talked about last year plus a few degrees as last year it only hit 42. When it gets this hot your single minded mission becomes to find ways to cool down. Showering in your clothes before you go to bed, sprinkling water over the room with the ceiling fans on, I’d already tried a number of remedies to minimal effect. Last week a friend told me that she’d been told that holding or more specifically hugging a watermelon to your body was supposed to help cool you down. She told me this as an amusing anecdote; I laughed but at the same time thought to myself, ‘I wonder?’ Earlier in the week, desperate and sleep deprived I decided to buy a watermelon on my way home. I got home, put it in the fridge and forgot about it for a few hours whilst I went to meet a friend. Later that night as I got into bed hugging my watermelon I felt and no doubt looked truly ridiculous. For the first five minutes I couldn’t sleep because I was laughing out loud at the image of myself in bed hugging a watermelon. But it worked. I slept more soundly than I have done in days. And what was at first a ridiculous act in a desperate moment has now become part of my daily routine. Every morning I replace the watermelon in the fridge and in the evenings carry it to bed with me. Yes I feel ridiculous but I sleep so much more soundly at night. 

Now that I’ve started in this vain I should mention that I also solved the mystery of the onion in the pocket the other day. It turns out that keeping an onion on your person does not in fact on its own keep you cool (no, I hadn’t been trying this method as well). The reason is that apparently laying crushed onion on the skin is a remedy for heat stroke. So, carrying an onion with you at all times during the hot weather ensures that if you are struck down by heat stroke and somewhere where there are no onions (admittedly an unlikely scenario in India) then you will have one on your person that you can use as a remedy.

A six month absence from this blog and on my return I choose to write about hugging watermelons. I don’t suppose you really expected anything less though. I apologise readers of three for the longer than usual absence from this blog but I intend to get back to blogging once again.