Summer this year was hottest ever, craziest ever.

44°C summer.
6 air coolers running in the house making it sound like a factory instead of a house.
And I still ended up with a ceiling fan in a slow-dance on speed 2.

Why?

Because coolers don’t just cool. They also go: “RRRRRRR-ghlup-ghlup-ghlup” all day all night long. That doesn’t help, any kinda noise makes me anxious and restless.

That doesn’t mean I don’t feel the melting heat, which, at times, felt like 70°C. One day, a month ago, to be exact, I recalled something.

My chachu used to sleep with a white thin cotton bedsheet on top, and a water bucket next to him. Every now and then, he’d get up, wet his bedsheet, wrinkle out excess water, and sleep under the bedsheet again. My 7-year-old mind never understood what he was doing and why. My old brain does.

So, I picked up an old scarf, worn, torn and tattered, dunked it in water and hung it behind my office desk. It actually helped, almost instantly. Water evaporated, evaporation absorbed heat, nearby air felt cooler.

It’s basically the same principle as an air cooler, just on “silent and budget friendly side quest” mode. You’ve no idea how effective this old-school cooling mechanism turned out to be.

• wet cloth
• air flow
• cotton fabric
• shaded rooms
• Physics quietly doing unpaid labor.

Basically reinvented khus curtains from childhood without realizing it. The only downside was that I manually needed to wet the scarf every 30 minutes or so. But I could live with that. And when I moved the setup near my bed and slept so comfortably I accidentally fell asleep early instead of waking up drenched in sweat.

No cooler noise, no additional electricity. Modern problems really do create ancient solutions.

Shabana Mukhtar