I might have to come home.

It's way too hot here for me.

By 9am, the heat is already oppressive. Walking to work, I feel that someone is holding a gigantic magnifying glass over my head.

Somehow everyone failed to mention that October and February are the hottest months of the year. And what kind of sense does that make, anyway? I'm used to weather that crescendos into August heatwaves.

This has been more of a heat spike. It just creeps up and clubs you over the head with humidity, leaving you languid and wilted and thirsting for [filtered, then boiled for twenty minutes] water.

At 3pm, when all hints of breeze have disappeared, I have fleeting thoughts of crunchy leaves and crispy October evenings. Enormous harvest moons. I can almost taste the cinnamon in the tart-sweet apple cider that I�m not drinking.

But instead, I get Diwali preparations... we are well into the huge lead-up to the festival of lights. Shopping and sweet-making and house cleaning. It�s all just as commercial as Christmas (�Rama showed Sita he loved her by rescuing her from Rawan (a devil). The least you can do is buy her some diamond earrings�)

Last weekend was Dusseda, which was preceded by a nine-day extravaganza of dancing and some kind of traditional dance with wooden sticks. Troupes of drummers and dancers and midnight parades through the streets. I can�t adequately convey the fun of watching whole families dance along a sidewalk that is normally full of hawkers and rickshaws. The smell of roasted peanuts mingles with the smoke from the firecrackers being set off every three seconds by 12-year-olds with no regard for onlooker safety.

People are praying, puja bells are ringing, sound systems are blaring, hawkers are selling balloons and noisemakers, and the firecrackers sound exactly like gunshots in the middle of the chaos.

Strings of lights everywhere� it�s a massively gaudy circus that transforms the streets into something out of a bizarre fairytale.

So I missed Thanksgiving and I�m melting� things could be worse.

3:45 p.m. - 2003-10-16