It was 98 degrees on Tuesday and I made the mistake of waiting for the 1 train at 96th Street like a person who has never lived through a July heat wave in New York City before.
The platform was a tandoor. I am not exaggerating. My mother used to make rotis on a flame that felt cooler than that station.
The fan that's supposed to be bolted to the ceiling was spinning at the pace of a ceiling fan in an Ahmedabad power cut — slow, wheaving, purely decorative. I stood there sweating through a linen shirt I had genuinely believed was a good idea at 8am.
Here is my hard-won advice for the 1 train during a July heat wave: stand exactly where the front door of the third car opens. That car, for reasons known only to the MTA, is always the coldest. I don't know why. I have simply lived it.
When the doors finally opened, the air conditioning hit me like the first sip of nimbu pani. A man near the door actually said "oh thank god" out loud and three strangers nodded. We were, briefly, a family.
A teenager was eating a whole mango over a plastic bag, very carefully, like it was surgery. A woman fanned herself with a folded New York Post. Someone's speaker played old Kishore Kumar, tinny and soft, and I closed my eyes for one stop.
I got off at 42nd and the heat came back like a slap, but I'd had my four minutes of cold peace.
The July heat wave makes everyone in this city a little feral and a little tender at the same time. We complain to each other. We share the shade of an awning. We become briefly convinced we will die on a subway platform and then we don't.
Stay near the third car. Trust me on this one.
Love,