Selim was pulling his rickshaw through Tejgaon in the middle of a May afternoon, and he had begun to believe the heat would kill him. He said to the interviewer: some days he cannot eat, his head cannot rest, and he feels his life might end soon. He is not being dramatic. He is describing, in the plain language of a man who works under the direct sun. He was describing what it feels like to live inside a machine that has been built, brick by brick, to trap heat and hold it against our bodies and skin. That machine is our city.

We like to blame the sky. When the temperature climbs and the air turns into something you can almost chew, we speak of global warming as though the fault lies entirely somewhere else, in the factories of distant countries. But the cruellest part of Dhaka’s heat is the part we made ourselves. This is not only weather happening to us. It is a wound we have inflicted on our own city, and we are only now beginning to realise how deep it goes.

Consider what we have done to the water. In the 1980s, wetlands covered a fifth of this city, including ponds, canals, and low green fields that drank the rain and breathed out cool air at night. Today, barely 2 percent of those water bodies remain. We are now filling them with sand and selling them as plots for economic gain. Water holds nearly five times more heat than concrete; a single pond can pull the night-time temperature down by two or three degrees while you sleep. We once had thousands of them, and we buried them under our own ambition to create megacities. A recent study from BUET found that, because of this loss alone, Dhaka is now heating up some 60 percent faster than the rest of the planet. We did not just fail to cool the city; we deliberately destroyed the natural cooling system that once kept it cool for free.

Moreover, concrete does what concrete does. It soaks up the sun all day and exhales it back at us long after dark, which is why the worst of the urban heat island effect is felt at night. The heat peaks not at noon but at nine in the evening, when a village a few kilometres away has already cooled and Dhaka still has not. Over the past few decades, the land surface temperature of this city has climbed by more than six degrees. We built ourselves an oven and then wondered why we could not sleep.

Heat, like everything else in this country, is not shared equally. That is the part we are most reluctant to say aloud. The man in an air-conditioned car crossing Gulshan and the woman stitching garments in a tin-roofed factory in Mirpur are living in two different climates on the same afternoon. It is the rickshaw puller, the construction labourer, the street vendor, and the four million people packed into Dhaka’s slums beneath tightly packed metal roofs who absorb the heat we have manufactured. Roughly a third of our rickshaw pullers now work at a level of heat exposure that doctors would call dangerous. Around two in five outdoor workers lose hours of labour, and their wages with them, to afternoons that have simply become unworkable. The heat reaches into their bodies, their earnings, their sleep, their tempers, and their marriages, costing the country dearly. Some estimates suggest that, because of these conditions, hundreds of millions of workdays are lost in a single year.

There is a quiet injustice in this situation that ought to trouble us more than it does. The people suffering most from Dhaka’s heat are the people who were least responsible for causing it. They did not fill the canals, raise the towers, or run the air conditioners whose exhaust warms the alley outside a slum. They cannot buy their way into a cooler room. When we speak of climate change as a great equaliser, we are lying to ourselves; the heat finds the poor first, and it lingers with them the longest.

The cruel irony is that our escape only deepens the trap. As the water vanishes and the city bakes, those who can afford it reach for more machines to cool a single room, and every one of those machines pushes its heat back out into the street and consumes power that warms the planet further. The rivers that once flushed the city’s air have lost nearly a third of their flow in fifteen years. Humidity has risen with their retreat; that is why the number on the thermometer no longer tells the whole story of how the air actually sits on your chest. We are cooling our bedrooms by heating our own city. It is a bargain that cannot hold.

None of this was inevitable, and for this reason the city itself is taking its toll on us. Other cities in different countries have done better, to some extent, by protecting water bodies, planting real tree canopies rather than decorative plants, writing building rules that leave room for wind to move between towers, and enforcing those rules. We know what a pond does and what a tree does. We know that a city needs to breathe. We simply decided, plot by plot and permit by permit, that a little more concrete was always worth more than a little more air.

So the task before us is not really a mystery. It is to stop the filling of the water bodies that remain and bring back the greenery. It is to plant for shade rather than for appearance. It is to build our infrastructure in a way that lets the wind pass through, so that people who work in the heat, like Selim, no longer feel they are the unwanted population of our country. A heat plan for Dhaka is no longer a luxury for some greener, richer future. It is an emergency measure to help the city cool faster and heat up more slowly, so that people like Selim can live with dignity.

Selim will climb back onto his rickshaw again tomorrow because he has no other choice, and he will pull it through streets the city has designed to punish him. The heat pressing down on him is not fate, and it is not only the fault of the sky. It is a choice we have been making, quietly, for the last forty years. We forget that a city, like a person, also has to breathe. The question is whether we still remember how to let it.

Reun Tanzin Oshru is a Researcher at the ICDDR,B.

[The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Daily Bonik Barta or the organisation they work for.]