COLUMN ONE : Relentless Heat Sears India’s Soul : The nation struggles against an old enemy--the intense sun that can make life unbearable. Poverty tightens the grip of weather that has killed 558 and sapped water supplies.

In self-defense, or because of the human tendency to put the worst behind us, the mind forgets. But in this season, it again becomes searingly clear that there is nothing new under India’s broiling, skin-stinging sun.

“The climate is amazingly hot, which explains why they go naked,” one visitor said. “There is no rain except in the months of June, July and August. If it were not for the rain in these three months, which freshens the air, the heat would be so oppressive that no one could stand it.”

That suffering foreigner was Marco Polo, who penned his hot-weather impressions in the 13th Century, apparently after visiting the spice-rich Malabar Coast of southwest India.

One afternoon this month in New Delhi, the mercury again had climbed above 113 degrees Fahrenheit--enough to kill the undernourished, exposed street beggar or the overworked woman carrying water home from the village well in a heavy jar on her head.

By that afternoon, one of India’s longest unbroken heat waves in 40 years was well on its way to claiming more than 550 lives, from the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir to Tamil Nadu at the country’s southern tip. Pappu, a parched and panting day laborer taking a moment’s rest on a mound of sand, was fondly daydreaming of his home in rural northern India.

“When we are in the village, we do nothing but sleep under the trees,” said the 24-year-old manual worker, who had knotted his handkerchief around his neck to stanch the streaming sweat. “Here it is different. We have to work, sun or rain.”

“The heat is unbearable, but we work,” chimed in Umed, 60, a construction worker from arid Rajasthan, year in and year out India’s most sizzling state. “To beat the heat, we generally use a hand-held fan. In the evening, we water our roof, so that it becomes cool during the night and we can sleep.”

Heat--debilitating, lung-filling, sometimes murderous heat--is still the defining parameter of human existence and endeavor in India, just as Arctic cold and lack of wintertime sunlight are in Russia. But the grip of India’s long hot season is perhaps more unforgiving and stubbornly eternal, because of widespread, enduring poverty.

In the world’s second most populous nation, after all, hundreds of millions live without refrigerators or are a day’s walk from the nearest ice cube. Countless Indians cannot even afford the 22-cent plastic cups of cold Pepsi sold curbside that have become a ubiquitous sign of the opening up of the economy.

“The heat is so intense in Hindoustan that no one, not even the King, wears stockings,” wrote Francois Bernier, the French physician to the last of the great Mogul rulers, Aurangzeb. “During the summer season, it is scarcely possible to keep the hand on the wall of an apartment, or the head on a pillow. For more than six successive months, everybody lies in the open air without covering--the common people in the streets, the merchants and persons of condition sometimes in their courts or gardens, and sometimes on their terraces, which are first carefully watered.”

That was 300 years ago, but life today is not much different for India’s most destitute--like the half a dozen dirty-haired girls in rags who eke out a living by begging at a traffic light not far from the place where one of Aurangzeb’s forebears, Humayun, built a magnificent garden tomb so that at least his death would be spent in cool repose.

When night falls, the young beggars lie down together on the sidewalk under the trees and try to forget the day. “We pour water over ourselves and go to sleep. Then we do not feel hot,” said Kailashi, 14.

She and the other girls, one of whom is only 4, are too poor to buy slippers. So they run barefoot to the cars across blacktop and melting tar that by 10 a.m. has heated to a griddle-like ferocity.

“I do not feel the heat anymore,” said 6-year-old Sunita as she listlessly watched automobiles zoom by.

To cope with the hot season, Indians have evolved a host of antidotes, from nimbu pani , or lime juice mixed with water and consumed with a generous dose of sugar or salt, to that state of semi-torpor in the shade that used to infuriate the English colonialists.

The turban, that most Indian of headdresses, and one with endless regional variations, can also be considered a primitive form of air conditioner.

Umed, a native of the Sawai Madhopur district of Rajasthan, wears a red one made of a strip of cloth 23 feet long. He laughs at the suggestion that it might keep his pate uncomfortably warm.

“In fact, it makes me feel cool,” he said as he shoveled sand into a tin pan to carry on his head into a building under construction. “The sun does not shine directly on my head and, when the sweat evaporates, it cools me off.”

But India’s heat claims its due, often from the weak, old and malnourished, or from the poor who labor in sun-scoured fields miles from a well or water pump. This year, for 18 straight days, temperatures in north India were 3 1/2 to 9 degrees above normal, with New Delhi’s highs averaging about 113.

The peaks were slightly higher in 1994, but then there were brief respites, a sprinkle of cooling rain, some eye-resting cloud cover or a lukewarm breeze.

This year, until showers doused the sweltering capital on June 19, bringing the temperature down to 102, there were only massive doses of heat, aggravated by dry superheated winds from India’s western desert that bake the skin and fill the nostrils and lungs with hot air and dust.

Across the country, 558 people have died of sunstroke, heatstroke and other weather-related causes, news reports said.

Ironically, the greatest toll came in Varanasi, formerly Benares, an ancient city on the Ganges River that is an honored holy site, and where every good Hindu would like to die. There, at least 194 people succumbed.

Five victims, including a ceremonial drum beater, were accompanying a body to a cremation site when they collapsed in the sun.

On a single day in New Delhi, where the temperature reached a seasonal high of 114 on June 15, eight people died, including three beggars found with their alms bowls in the street. Even in Simla in the southern Himalayas, where people have been fleeing the oven-like summers of north India’s plains since the days of Rudyard Kipling and the British viceroys, there was no true relief.

Temperatures in the former hot-weather capital of the British Raj, more than 7,300 feet above sea level, soared 13 degrees above normal this year, to a high of 87.

Dholpur in the desert state of Rajasthan set this year’s Indian record of 122 degrees. But in neighboring Pakistan, the sun was even fiercer. One day, the city of Jacobabad in the valley of the Indus River recorded a mind-boggling 127 degrees.

Since late May, at least 190 Pakistanis have died of heat-related ailments. On the religious day known as Moharram--June 10 this year--when Shiite Muslims parade through the streets in a frenzy of sorrow and self-flagellation to mark the murder of one of their sect’s martyrs, hundreds of Pakistanis in various cities fainted from heat and emotion.

“In India, the summer months are the cruelest of the year,” the Calcutta-based Telegraph newspaper gasped in an editorial. “In north India, the dry heat drives one to desperation and in eastern India, the humidity is enervating.”

And in a perverse joke of nature, the rains that end it all can be destructive and deadly. Lashing storms this year swelled the Brahmaputra River and triggered flash flooding and landslides that claimed at least 174 lives in Nepal, Bangladesh and northeastern India. In Bangladesh, the roaring, rising waters marooned as many as 2 million people.

In the never-ending swelter, sleep for many becomes a fitful, sweat-bathed ordeal between sunset and sunrise, without so much as a cooling puff of wind. On one night this June, the temperature in New Delhi never fell below 91 degrees.

Night became the cruelest time of day for Amit, 24, a New Delhi office employee. He sleeps in an undershirt and shorts on a string bed in a third-floor apartment on the east bank of the Yamuna River. His only hint of nighttime freshness comes from a contraption called a “cooler.”

This noisy and common Indian gadget has replaced the colonial-era punkah, or ceiling fan, lazily operated by a servant boy with his big toe. The cooler looks like a biplane motor harnessed to blow air across a pan of tepid water and through a mesh screen of wooden shavings. The evaporating water is supposed to cool the circulating air.

“It hardly works,” Amit said. “Our house at nighttime is like an oven, enclosed in an even bigger oven, with no way out.”

Meteorologists say this year’s intense summer heat in northwestern and central India has nothing to do with the greenhouse effect or global warming. It is simply the way things are, and always have been, in a land one foreign writer has summed up as a place of “heat and dust.”

The highest recorded temperature in New Delhi dates from more than a century ago, on June 2, 1889, when the thermometer hit 118 degrees.

“There is nothing unusual about the heat-wave conditions. This occurs every year. It is just that people have short memories,” said G. S. Mandal, additional director general of the Meteorological Department of India.

Only the arrival of the monsoon truly ends the subcontinent’s hot season, which begins in April. The yearly rains, whose progress Indians monitor as eagerly as Wall Street watches the Dow Jones industrial average, reached Dehra Dun, 147 miles northeast of New Delhi, on Tuesday.

Forecasters now expect the thick monsoon clouds to arrive over the capital sometime during the next 15 days, as much as a week later than usual.

It is during these extremes of heat and rainfall that India’s sorely strained infrastructure sometimes collapses. This year, electricity demand in the capital peaked at an unprecedented 1,971 megawatts, as opposed to last year’s 1,850 megawatts.

The Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking generates less than half that and is supposed to get the rest from the regional power grid, DESU Additional General Manager Y. P. Singh said. That’s the theory.

In practice, the hottest days of the year in New Delhi are a temper-testing series of electricity failures, voltage spikes and brownouts as the overwhelmed power plants struggle to feed an ever-increasing number of air conditioners, refrigerators and coolers. Nightly, the lawn mower-like roar of diesel generators punctures the calm of posh neighborhoods as well-to-do Delhiites make up for DESU’s shortfalls.

The June heat wave, combined with the mushrooming growth that has carried New Delhi’s population to more than 9 million from 1.4 million in 1951, also put the capital seriously at risk of running out of water. This month, taps in some neighborhoods flowed for only an hour a day.

The level in the Wazirabad reservoir fell so low that treatment plants cut back their pumping by 20%.

Officials said only about a three-day supply of water remained.

Thereupon, New Delhi’s top elected official, Chief Minister Lal Madan Khurana, announced that he would go on a hunger strike. “They’ll kill Delhi of thirst,” he said.

His threat, and a personal request from Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, made Chief Minister Bhajan Lal, leader of neighboring Haryana state, renege on his vow to quit before giving up “a single drop of water.” Haryana and Uttar Pradesh opened their valves to slake the capital’s thirst.

Six centuries ago, the Delhi sultans developed a system of runners to bring them fruit from present-day Pakistan to refresh them in hot weather. Under the British, the coming of summer sent an army of pen-pushers and their servants to the cool of the hills, where India’s colonial rulers worked, threw dinner parties and engaged in “poodle-faking,” or sleeping with other men’s wives.

So, like much in India, the weather underlines the great disparities in people’s lives, then and now. Most afternoons these days, the deck chairs around the pool at the U.S. Embassy’s community center are empty. Many American families stationed in New Delhi left when the school year ended May 25 and won’t return until the monsoon or the resumption of classes in August.

For the majority of Indians, fleeing the heat is not an option. Like their ancestors, they must live with it. Pappu, the manual laborer, has bought a small hand-held fan, though the price this year went up to 15 cents because of high demand. And is he doing anything else to beat the heat?

Yes, said Pappu. “We eat onions, so we don’t fall sick.”