Heat

Amar: Damn it, why do the women in this city look so damn fine to myeyes? The air is heavy with lust I tell you. The nights of othersmust be filled with sexual depravities and pleasurable wrongdoings. What is this association between heat and lust?

This is what an old Frenchman said about this:

The heat of the climate can be so excessive that the body there will beabsolutely without strength. So, prostration will pass even to the spirit; no curiosity, no noble enterprise, no generous sentiment; inclinations will all be passive there; laziness there willbe happiness.

Hmmm… Rushdie articulates much better:

What grows best in the heat: cane-sugar, the coconut palm, certain millets… (given water) tea and rice. But the tropical summer grows stranger fruit as well – the exotic flowers of the imagination blossom… What else grows in heat: passion, desire… … Heat, gnawing at the mind’s division between fantasy and reality… What grows best in the heat: fantasy, unreason, lust.