Heat exhaustion is when the body overheats but can still cool down with shade and water, while heat stroke is a deadly collapse when the body's cooling system fails. Wet-bulb temperature measures how well sweat can cool us, combining heat and humidity—when it's too high, sweat doesn't evaporate. Our official heat death numbers are wrong because many deaths, especially of daily wage workers or the elderly in the *mohallas*, are recorded as heart or kidney failure, never linked to the heatwave. I see this every summer in the reports that cross my desk; the real toll is in the stacks of files from districts where the doctor just wrote "cardiac arrest" for a rickshaw puller found on the street at 45°C.
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