Watch: One of Hyderabad’s hottest days ended with roads covered in ice

Hyderabad: Hours after baking at 43.7 degrees Celsius, South Hyderabad got something nobody saw coming.

A massive hailstorm swept through the Shamshabad-Nadergul stretch on Monday evening, April 27, blanketing the roads in a thick layer of hailstones. 

Residents, still reeling from one of the city’s most brutal April heatwaves, stepped out of their vehicles to find roads that looked and felt like they had been dusted with snow.

The scenes were hard to believe. People walked through crunching ice underfoot, held hailstones up to the light, and did what people do when nature completely catches them off guard – they pulled out their phones.

The hailstorm is part of the same weather system that brought thundershowers to parts of Hyderabad on Monday evening, which weather observer T Balaji had flagged earlier in the day. 

But nothing quite prepares you for hail in April, in a city that was, just hours earlier, competing with the hottest places on the planet.

The Shamshabad-Nadergul stretch bore the full brunt of it.

Telangana’s heatwave is forecast to continue until April 29, but for one evening at least, South Hyderabad got a very different kind of weather story.