For anyone maintaining an extreme weather checklist, Mumbai’s got it all. We have catastrophic urban flooding, with every monsoon bringing old and new horrors: landslides killing dozens, people wading miles in waist-deep water in the dark with only phone torches to guide them home. In winter, Mumbai now clocks bad air days to rival Delhi’s – even though, unlike the capital, we have no farmers burning their crop stubble next door to conveniently blame. As oceans warm, intensifying Arabian Sea cyclones inch closer to the city.

Then there’s the heat.

To be clear: Mumbai was not on the list of the world’s hottest 50 cities in April – all of which, cataclysmically, lay in India. Mumbai’s is not the kind of heat that lodges itself in the foreign correspondent’s imagination, or recalls Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future, in which more than 20 million people die in the furnace of a north Indian heatwave.

But the Mumbai heat can be more insidious than the 40C+ weeks that have now been baked into the summers of the Indo-Gangetic plain. Daytime air temperatures are in the high 30s, while wet-bulb temperatures, which measure humidity as well as air temperature, hover around an oppressive 28C. (A WBT of 35C is considered the limit of human survival.) It’s the humidity that gets you. In summer, Mumbai’s air holds up to 90% of all the water it can possibly contain, leaving almost no room for sweat to evaporate – which in turn leads to rapid dehydration, exhaustion and fatal heatstrokes. On a 38C day in April 2023, 14 people died in an outdoor rally attended by India’s home minister. What has come to be expected of millions upon millions of Mumbaikars, no matter how bad it gets, is resilience. But that resilience is coming up against hard limits of survivability.

It’s 16 June. The monsoon is late. A city that should be waterlogged by now is in fact facing the prospect of running out of water in six weeks. I’m doomscrolling X, looking for signs of pre-monsoon showers that could pull drinking water reservoirs back from the brink of ‘day zero’: a critical threshold at which municipal reservoirs and usable water supplies are practically empty. I can’t get my head around the idea that Mumbai, the poster child of the monsoon, could join the ranks of much drier cities – Cape Town, Chennai, Tehran, Bangalore – that are edging close to their own day zero.

I use Google Lens to translate the emergency announcements posted online in Marathi: “Water connections provided for all constructions will be temporarily disconnected, and water connections provided for new constructions have been suspended.” On X, the country’s richest municipality attributes the drought to El Niño, but the replies keep it real, dragging the city for handing out construction and redevelopment permits like candy. Most of Mumbai’s water is piped from seven far-off lakes. The city is so paved over that, when the monsoon hits, the rain usually falls on concrete. Borewells dig deeper, looking for a vein in the water table as gaps between rainy spells grow longer.

This summer could be the longest in Mumbai’s history. Temperatures touched 42C as early as March this year, a season formerly known as spring. What was once a slim window of temperatures in which it is comfortable to do things outdoors during the day is now a blip. Millennials prep for concerts as if they are going to war, carrying tetrapaks of oral rehydration solution and N95 masks for the dust. Showers seem futile; in seconds, you’re returned to a primordial liquid state.

On social media, maps proliferate showing a wash of deep red over the subcontinent. I wince, but I get it. Sometimes, you need these kinds of frightening visuals to validate the circle of hell your climate reality is in. But, as scientists point out, these maps alone say little about local weather conditions, about what is anomalous, or what we can do about it. They might represent the danger of extreme temperatures, but only as an abstract idea of heat. There are no people in these maps: no at-risk groups, no grandmothers or blast-furnace workers, no solutions to adapt to a burning world besides a dupatta (stole) over your face.

The images we’re fed form a big part of how we define climate change for ourselves. They determine how we think, feel and act in response to extreme heat. News outlets in the UK and the EU have often used “fun in the sun” imagery to depict heatwaves as a thing to enjoy. They’re the kind of images that drive people outdoors, putting them at extraordinary risk. Scan the images that pop up when you search “India heatwave” online: it’s either poor kids doing backflips into a polluted river, or a woman in a sari holding an umbrella, hands outstretched in futile expectation of rain.

This project, comprising photos and text, was born out of our frustration at how people are absent from both the visual and written lexicon of heat. We wanted to understand how people on the frontlines of heat across India’s broken cities and countryside are adapting to extreme temperatures. And we wanted to see whether even piecemeal policy interventions like heat alerts are working, and whether heat has seeped into people’s politics.

We shot in May in Chennai, followed by Mumbai, Telangana and Punjab. Granted, heat is hard to shoot. Unlike viral videos of a flash flood punching through a dam, the impact of heat can be hard to see with the naked eye, let alone capture on camera. But thermal imagery tells a story that ordinary pictures can’t. The colours reveal where infrastructure is failing: hot tin roofs, bus engines, fans that blow hot air down. Given that some of the most at-risk groups are children, work in precarious jobs, or are unhoused, thermal imagery allows us to show vulnerability while respecting their dignity and anonymity.

Unlike many megacities where inequality is hidden away in ghettoes, Mumbai’s heat disparities are in your face. The blue tarps and asbestos sheets that form the roofs of shanty homes are visible from planes as they approach the city’s international airport, which is operated by the coal baron Gautam Adani.

Both photography and planting tall trees are prohibited on the famous plane-spotting hill of Jari Mari in the eastern suburb of Kurla. Part of Mumbai’s notoriously neglected L Ward – where more than half the population lives in informal settlements – Kurla is an urban heat island: heavy traffic, high-density housing and a lack of open spaces mean that surface temperatures are several degrees higher than the city’s average.

Jari Mari is a crazy mosaic of the city’s extremes. Migrant, working-class Muslim and Dalit families live in tin sheds and one-bedroom concrete blocks stacked behind the high-security walls that seal off runway 27. The housing is so dense that the narrow lanes see no sun and feel no wind. But the heat still gets through, and the kids are always sick, many of the mothers in these houses told us: everyone has to sleep with their doors open, mosquitoes be damned. No one we spoke to could afford air conditioning.

In Sabiya and Sameer Khan’s one-room house, temperatures touch 49C. When we tell Sameer we’re not here to shoot planes, but to take thermal pictures of his asbestos roof, he looks at us like we’re mad. We show Sabiya how the fan above her stove is pushing hot air back down on her. A couple of blocks away, kids play cricket on concrete that shows a reading of 58.7C.

Historically, Mumbai has always been a fevered construction dream: an impossible city wrested out of the sea. A string of seven islets passed down as a dowry from the Portuguese to the British, the city was leased by the Crown to the East India Company for £10 a year. Over the next century, the Company attempted to fill the gaps by draining marshland, flattening hills and dumping rubble into the sea. It built causeways and embankments, until in 1838, the city was finally one contiguous string.

In the 1960s and 70s, Mumbai went vertical: state-sponsored towers became the city’s response to an exponential growth in population. By the year 2000, more than half the city’s population lived in slums and on pavements, at constant risk of displacement from lucrative redevelopment projects.

Today, more than 20 million people live in a space of around 600 sq km. Since the 1990s, the city’s built-up area has doubled and urban green spaces have halved, while areas with land surface temperatures over 30.5C have tripled. Only 1.7% of the city’s green cover comprises urban parks. In just the five years between 2016 and 2021, the metropolis lost 2,028 hectares of urban tree cover. Mumbaikars have an average of 0.12 sq metres of green space per person. That is roughly the size of a sheet of baking paper.

At the northernmost end of Marine Drive is Girgaum Chowpatty, the only city beach that isn’t covered in trash or tar balls, or where a newly built coastal highway doesn’t splice the horizon. Sure, the waters where Mahatma Gandhi took his first post-protest dip while resisting British sedition laws in 1919 have, in recent times, been shown to contain four times the permissible limit of faecal coliform. But Chowpatty’s proximity to the city and the state’s power centre means it is cleaned by hand twice a day, its sand filtered by vacuum machines. “Not a bottle cap or a fallen branch must be seen,” says a contract sanitation worker who fills a dozen human-sized bags of trash from the water’s edge, in the blazing heat, from 7 AM to 6 PM every day.

A thermal image reading tells us the sand is a scorching 60.8C – enough to give you second-degree burns. Still, some workers prefer to go barefoot, because it helps them work faster. Miss a spot or take off the thick PPE uniform and a stray photo posted online by way of complaint could go straight to their bosses. Of course everyone feels dizzy and complains of kidney disorders from dehydration. But no one can afford to skip a day when they’re on minimum wage.

In a leafy enclave of Bandra, where I live, influencers sweat into their athleisure wear, sipping protein shakes from Stanley cups while dodging dog shit and municipal barricades over open manholes on the way to their air-conditioned CrossFit gyms. At noon, you can order vibrators with your bhindi (okra) and rucola, home-delivered in under 15 minutes so that you don’t have to break a sweat. On a 37C day, I pay a 100-rupee tip to the gig worker bringing me a printout of a visa appointment letter; he rides an electric moped that will count towards the delivery company’s net-zero target.

No one leaves home unless they have to. We outsource climate exposure to young people who can’t get other jobs: nearly 40% of India’s graduates under 25 are unemployed, while financial barriers limit access to higher education. What policymakers call India’s “new economic ecosystem” is modern manual labour dressed up in a polyester uniform with a high-tech logo: riders don’t get heat alerts, insurance or cooling-down breaks. What they do sometimes get are surge-pricing incentives to go out in cruel temperatures carrying 20-kilogram loads.

At home, getting on a Zoom meeting, I switch on my air conditioner, but it’s so loud that I can’t hear an academic explain why it’s difficult to compute refrigerant emissions from inefficient ACs sold on the secondhand market. I call Elvis, the AC technician. He tells me all of his staff have quit and gone home to their villages or other towns in the face of spiking gas prices following the war on Iran.

Space has always come at a premium in Mumbai. If you’re really lucky – like Bollywood A-list lucky – you get a waterfront view of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link bridge garlanded in smog. There’s no missing the city’s infrastructural ambition. Earthmoving equipment of the kind I thought I’d never see outside India’s mining belt is now present on every street. Bulldozed tenements and chopped-up tree trunks are barely hidden behind tin-sheet fences.

In court, the authorities have made it seem like they’re making hard choices: between the Aarey forest, home to the indigenous Warli community and a leap of urban leopards, and a metro line cutting through the greenery and paid for by climate finance loans; between 45,000 mangrove trees and a 26-kilometre coastal highway that will replace them.

The scale of this new infrastructure even caught the attention of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has warned that Mumbai’s coastal road network will increase rather than decrease climate vulnerability. But politicians tell us we should be grateful for a four-lane highway that suddenly narrows into two, and for undersea tunnels that leak with the first rain. Meanwhile, public buses, cyclists, gig workers on motorbikes and the other millions who travel in the heat are effectively banned from this coastal road network by design or by tolls.

Eighty-five percent of Mumbai’s working population does not own a car. They rely on the urban rail system, which is old and breaks down all the time. It is also dangerous – on average, six people die every day on Mumbai’s railways. Station overbridges collapse, teenagers are electrocuted by live wires, and commuters fall into open manholes.

When we visit Dadar station, two young women walk onto the platform barefoot, selling strings of jasmine. The concrete clocks a temperature of nearly 53C. After 22 people died in a stampede just one station away in 2017, the Bombay High Court banned hawkers from the platform, claiming they worsen congestion. The women tell me it’s easier to run barefoot from the cops on stairs made smooth by 800,000 commuters’ feet every day. The police confiscate their slippers if they’re caught.

“Kalyug aa gaya hai,” (“The age of destruction is here”) says Bashir Ahmed, who drives – and sleeps in – a black-and-yellow taxi. We look through the thermal camera: the metal on the dashboard is 52.6C. “Global warming, cement roads, forests have been cut: where is the heat going to go? Rain doesn’t fall properly… gas prices have increased; everything has become more expensive, but the taxi meter… stays the same.”

Wedged between skyscrapers, the sea and the snaking highways and bridges, Worli Koliwada is where low-rise meets high-rise. It is where Mumbai’s oldest recorded inhabitants, the Kolis, live and fish. The 800-year old fishing village and harbour is a tight labyrinth of low-rise houses, narrow gullies, fish markets and temples, flanked by a British-era fort. Boats named after deities and beloveds bob in shallow jetties as men mend nets in the sun.

For Koli fishers, the heat is a cruel ally. It helps dry bombil fish before the monsoonal fishing ban kicks in. Women sweep and turn fish all day in the sun, until there’s no moisture left in either party.

The men have only just returned from sea after setting out at 3 AM. They are eating takeaway Chinese food with raw onion. The real enemy, they say, stares them right in the face. “The first bridge they started building 26 years ago, they poured concrete in there, right on the breeding grounds,” says Sagar Dombre, who is drinking a beer after a day out at sea. “Where will the fish live? We have tiny boats, but we have to take big risks.” Mumbai’s maladaptive infrastructure and marine heatwaves have made certain kinds of fish disappear, pushing fishermen further and further out into the waters. No more prawns, no more lobster, and always the risk of empty nets after spending 15,000 rupees on diesel. There are fates worse than heatstroke, the women tell me.

In 2022, Mumbai became the first South Asian city to announce a net-zero-by-2050 plan. Journalists in the know rolled their eyes, dismissing the plan as the handiwork of a few kids with sustainability master’s degrees who were close to Aditya Thackeray, the progressive face of Shiv Sena, Maharashtra state’s right-wing regionalist party. His father, Uddhav Thackeray, was then the chief minister of Maharashtra. Months after the plan was announced, a group of Shiv Sena legislators defected and allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party, forcing the Thackerays to step down. One of those kids told me that the net-zero plan has largely been buried since.

At Mumbai’s first climate week – held in a convention centre owned by an oil-and-gas billionaire and built on a floodplain – I meet old friends from environmental movements past. The journalist once barred from naming companies that obliterated coastal buffers and fishing villages is carving out a new life in climate communications. The labour researcher tells me the only safe way to talk about indigenous communities being displaced by coal mining is through the staid language of a “just energy transition”. There is both gratitude and guilt at being able to keep climate work going in whatever shape, even as movements grow more desperate. To survive a hostile state is to know how to soft-pedal climate in the non-confrontational language of “solutions”.

“Even if it’s 52C in June, cover your head with a patta [scarf], put an onion in your pocket and take the name of God (and carry on),” India’s communications minister Jyotiraditya Scindia told a heat-battered nation in April. Mumbai’s famed “spirit” is the proverbial onion in our pockets in a city on the verge of a breakdown. To praise the city’s resilience is to assume that the systemically abused will always find ways to adapt and overcome: cheerful survivors grasping at crumbs of digital payments, recycled “native” wisdom and international validation sold to us as giant leaps of development.

The heat and brazenness of it all – at the cost of the city’s last climate defences – is now pushing politically apathetic Mumbaikars out of their comfort zones.

On an Instagram group called Save Mumbai Mangroves, volunteers keep vigil, geotagging and uploading evidence of every tree-felling site. Bollywood celebrities show up at protests and make reels in solidarity. The politics of these new protests aren’t perfect, or in line with India’s Gandhian protest tradition of individual sacrifice and playing it down. Gen Z protesters complain that there are too many Michael Kors bags for the aesthetics to be on point, and not enough indigenous voices at the forefront. A development economist friend grumbles: “If only the rich loved workers as much as mangroves.” An organiser thanks the cops for permission to rally in front of chainsaws and bulldozers.

Public meltdowns in the heat and memes attacking the Mumbai municipal authority don’t have the drama of Extinction Rebellion’s direct action, the scale of India’s frequent farmers’ protests or the urgency of communities submerging themselves in water in India’s ecologically imperilled zones. But in a country where propaganda rules the airwaves, civil society has been silenced using smear campaigns and tax raids, and my environmental heroes are either dead or in custody, these measures are not nothing.

India may have once been one of the world’s favourite places to park capital and reap returns on undervalued labour. Extreme heat in the Global South shows now that there are limits to that, too: limits that manifest as disruptions to global trade and investments. “Cheap labour has a cost, and that cost is that millions are completely exposed to the elements,” says Aditya Valiathan Pillai, a heat adaptation researcher at King’s College London. All the systems that led to carbon emissions, capital accumulation and integrated markets have now come home to roost, in the form of this intense heat in the Global South’s massive cities, where the world gets its stuff produced and consumed.

Anxieties around mass heat deaths in south Asia might have moved the policy needle in the past, but talk must shift to climate adaptation. If the First World is unliveable without heating, the developing world is now uninhabitable without cooling. “[Heat] deaths are terrible,” says Radhika Khosla, a professor of environmental science and policy at Oxford University, “but there is a lot to be said around morbidity and dignity: the idea of what it is to be living with this, which is a different kind of suffering. There are co-morbidities with health and mental health, the social aftermath of what happens during hot days, the relationship with productivity and economic bottom lines.”

In July, thousands answered the call of a satirically named group, the Cockroach Janta Party, and took to the streets to protest against the government. Students laughed in the face of mass detention, asking the cops for water cannons to relieve them from the heat. Others sat in puddles in the middle of potholes. In Mumbai, school and college students demanding accountability told me they couldn’t imagine a future; others told me they were fighting as much for central India’s forests as for their own overheated or flooded homes. As the protests spread, and as groups of India’s most disenfranchised and heat-exposed – from farmers to gig workers – joined in, Modi’s education minister (formerly an oil minister) quit. It was the first resignation under public pressure in 12 years.

In the climate world, maladaptation is as much about power imbalances as about sweat and floods. The July protests showed that Indians are tired of the bare minimum, and of the lack of accountability when even that bare minimum fails. Their discontent with having to be “resilient” all the time is evident. If Mumbai – these heat islands held together by sweat and rent – is to remain a city that supports life and is worth living in, Mumbaikars are going to have to continue asking for more.