April is back to being the cruellest month. Calcuttans, spoilt by an unusually pleasant spell over the last week, felt the scorching 36.3 all the more on Thursday.

The high level of humidity — it ranged between 92 and 41 degrees on Thursday — made it even more unbearable. What’s worse is that weathermen warn the mercury is likely to climb further up over the next few days.

“I felt the humidity the moment I stepped out my car near my office on Brabourne Road on Thursday,” said businessman Sanjay Sachdeva. “It was extremely hot too. The weather over the last few days had been cool, which is why Thursday felt so uncomfortable.”

Sagnik Mitra, who teaches Bengali at Jogamaya Devi College, downed a bottle of water during a 45-minute bus ride from Hazra to Garia in the afternoon. “I was still feeling parched as I walked from the bus stop to my house, just five minutes away,” Sagnik said.

If Thursday was bad, it promises to get worse. Satellite pictures and other prevailing weather conditions suggest that the maximum temperature could touch 39 degrees on Saturday and go up to 41 degrees on Sunday — memories of last week’s pleasant weather reduced to a cruel joke.

The average maximum and minimum temperature from April 20 to 24 this year had been around 34.5 degrees Celsius, almost three notches less than the average for the same period between 2009 and 2012. In 2009, the maximum temperature had crossed the 40 degree-mark on four days between April 21 and April 25.

The minimum temperature between April 21 and 24 this year remained around 23.3 degrees Celsius this year, compared with 27.2 for the same period from 2009 to 2012.

The mercury had dropped to 32.1 degrees Celsius last Thursday and hovered around 33 to 34 degrees before soaring gain on Thursday, making it the hottest in the last eight days.

“There had been a pronounced cloud cover over the city and its surroundings over the last week or so. This led to reduced radiation from the sun’s rays that reached the earth’s surface after being filtered by the clouds. But the cloud cover has thinned and hence the rise in temperature,” said an official of India Meteorological Department, Calcutta.

The silver lining? Meteorologists have not ruled out rain or thunderstorm coming to the rescue of Calcuttans. “The city has had rain or thundershowers over the past two days and more could be in the offing. But the rain and storm is unlikely to be very severe because the trough line drawing moisture from the sea at the moment is very weak,” said the IMD official.

April has so far recorded 41mm of rainfall. The average rainfall in April from 1971 to 2000 has been 58mm.