'Mornings and nights no longer exist' at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India

By 6am, the sun over Banda had already forgotten it was morning.

The light had the hard glare of a summer afternoon. Shadows were shrinking before breakfast.

In May, this dusty district in India's Uttar Pradesh state spent days at the top of an unenviable national ranking: the hottest place in the country. Temperatures hovered at 47-48C (116-118F) for more than a week, an extraordinary run even by local standards.

Yet what was striking was the way in which people adapted. Banda's more than two million residents - many dependent on farming, construction, transport and other outdoor work - had little option but to endure the heat. They were rearranging their lives around it.

Thirty kilometres from the district headquarters, the vegetable market at Atarra was already winding down before most cities had properly woken up. Farmers arrived at dawn with tomatoes, gourds, chillies, lemons and melons. Everyone wanted to sell their wares quickly and get home before the heat intensified.

"Look at the sun," said Himanshu, a trader standing beside crates of tomatoes. "It's only 6.15am, but it feels like 8-9am."

The heat was shortening the life of his produce as surely as it was shortening the market day. "A box of tomatoes must be sold today or tomorrow. In this weather they won't last."

Where trading once bustled until late morning, activity now faded by 8am. By 10am, the market was almost deserted.

The same compressed timetable governs almost everything in Banda. Between the blazing sky and the scorched ground, people do what Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński once observed in another furnace-hot landscape in Africa: devote their energies to "the search for shade and a breeze".

Pappu Verma, a mason, now works from 7am until noon, then again from 4pm until 7pm. The four hours in between are spent waiting for the worst of the heat to pass.

"You still have to complete eight hours," he said. "Whether you work continuously in the sun or stop and start, the pay is the same." The break saves him from headaches and heat sickness, but stretches his day to 12 or 13 hours. "Otherwise," he shrugged, "whatever I earn would be spent on medicines."

Around 2pm one day last week, when Banda's temperature touched 46C, three women road workers crouched beneath a water tanker on a highway bridge over the Ken river, eating lunch in the sliver of shade cast by its chassis.

One of them, Shanti Devi, walked six kilometres to work every morning and six kilometres back. Her lunch was bread with onion, salt and pickle. "If we bring vegetables, they'll spoil by noon," she said.