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The kathrikka (brinjal) curry was bubbling in a large aluminium pot, sending up the smell of fried onions and spices into the narrow lane outside Kalaivani’s one-room home. She chopped another handful of onions, stirred the curry, and checked the flame, moving between the chores without pausing.
Around her, dirty water trickled through the lane. A few metres away, tiny, dark rooms that stored animal hides filled the air with a heavy stench. Further ahead stood a large cattle shed, where women worked on the hides left behind after slaughter.
This is Puliyanthope in North Chennai, where generations of families, many of them Dalit and Muslim, live alongside slaughterhouses, tanneries, and the waste that comes with them.
But for Kalaivani, the hardest part of living here is not the filth or the stench.
It is the heat.
“In summer, it is not possible to go to work or sit at home. It is boiling hot inside my house. At night, I am not able to sleep properly. I wake up multiple times and pour water all over my body,” she said.
By morning, she is exhausted.
“The next day, I don’t even feel like getting up. Since I work for daily wages, I cannot afford to skip work,” she said.
For Kalaivani, a domestic worker, there is no choice between resting and working, as missing a day’s work means losing that day’s income.
Her husband drinks every day, she said. When he runs short of money, he asks her for some. If she refuses, he becomes angry.
“At times, I lose control and shout back at him. With all this sleeplessness and pain, I am not always able to hold back,” she said.
Then came the sentence that stayed in the room long after she had said it.
“He hits me sometimes,” Kalaivani said, smiling apologetically, as though explaining something that was somehow her fault.
Her mother Selvi interrupted.
“Not sometimes. Whenever he is angry, he hits her,” Selvi said.
The mother and daughter continued talking as life in the lane carried on around them. Cows nosed through plastic waste. Children moved through the narrow passage.
For women like Kalaivani, the heat is not simply endured outdoors. It follows them from the workplace to the household, affecting their bodies, their incomes, and sometimes, their safety.
TNM spoke to 35 women from parts of urban and coastal Chennai to trace the link between climate stress and rising instances of domestic violence.
At least 20 of the 35 women TNM interviewed spoke about experiencing domestic violence, often speaking only after multiple visits and prolonged conversations to build trust. TNM found that extreme heat and disruptions to livelihoods appeared to aggravate the violence experienced by at least 14 of the women.
Of these 20 women, 11 had been rescued by NGOs from abusive situations and were staying in shelter homes.
The women did not describe the violence as being caused by heat. But detailed conversations about their daily lives revealed how extreme heat, water scarcity, declining or disrupted incomes, reduced work opportunities, heat-related health problems, and migration were feeding into tensions within their households. For some women, these pressures led to more frequent or severe episodes of violence.
The findings do not establish a direct causal relationship between extreme heat and domestic violence. Neither was climate stress found to be the sole cause of domestic violence. Instead, the interviews pointed to a more complex relationship: extreme weather and climate-related livelihood pressures can worsen existing inequalities and vulnerabilities, leaving women with fewer resources, less economic security, and greater exposure to violence.
This pattern deserves closer scrutiny as Chennai experiences increasingly frequent and intense heat.
