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