Amitav Ghosh's 'Great Derangement' Part 1: Stories PDF

Amitav Ghosh: Great Derangement: Part 1: Stories 1 Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive? As, for example, when an arabesque in the pattern of a carpet is revealed to be a dog’s tail, w...

Amitav Ghosh: Great Derangement: Part 1: Stories 1 Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive? As, for example, when an arabesque in the pattern of a carpet is revealed to be a dog’s tail, which, if stepped upon, could lead to a nipped ankle? Or when we reach for an innocent-looking vine and find it to be a worm or a snake? When a harmlessly drifting log turns out to be a crocodile? It was a shock of this kind, I imagine, that the makers of The Empire Strikes Back had in mind when they conceived of the scene in which Han Solo lands the Millennium Falcon on what he takes to be an asteroid—only to discover that he has entered the gullet of a sleeping space monster. To recall that memorable scene now, more than thirty-five years after the making of the film, is to recognize its impossibility. For if ever there were a Han Solo, in the near or distant future, his assumptions about interplanetary objects are certain to be very different from those that prevailed in California at the time when the film was made. The humans of the future will surely understand, knowing what they presumably will know about the history of their forebears on earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids are inert.  2 My ancestors were ecological refugees long before the term was invented. They were from what is now Bangladesh, and their village was on the shore of the Padma River, one of the mightiest waterways in the land. The story, as my father told it, was this: one day in the mid-1850s the great river suddenly changed course, drowning the village; only a few of the inhabitants managed to escape to higher ground. It was this catastrophe that had unmoored our forebears; in its wake they began to move westward and did not stop until the year 1856, when they settled once again on the banks of a river, the Ganges, in Bihar. I first heard this story on a nostalgic family trip, as we were journeying down the Padma River in a steamboat. I was a child then, and as I looked into those swirling waters I imagined a great storm, with coconut palms bending over backward until their fronds lashed the ground; I envisioned women and children racing through howling winds as the waters rose behind them. I thought of my ancestors sitting huddled on an outcrop, looking on as their dwellings were washed away. To this day, when I think of the circumstances that have shaped my life, I remember the elemental force that untethered my ancestors from their homeland and launched them on the series of journeys that preceded, and made possible, my own travels. When I look into my past the river seems to meet my eyes, staring back, as if to ask, Do you recognize me, wherever you are? Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. To recognize, then, is not the same as an initial introduction. Nor does recognition require an exchange of words: more often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition. The most important element of the word recognition thus lies in its first syllable, which harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge: a moment of recognition occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld. Yet this flash cannot appear spontaneously; it cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other. The knowledge that results from recognition, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself. This, I imagine, was what my forebears experienced on that day when the river rose up to claim their village: they awoke to the recognition of a presence that had moulded their lives to the point where they had come to take it as much for granted as the air they breathed. But, of course, air too can come to life with sudden and deadly violence—as it did in the Congo in 1988, when a great cloud of carbon dioxide burst forth from Lake Nyos and rolled into the surrounding villages, killing 1700 people and an untold number of animals. But more often it does so with a quiet insistence—as the inhabitants of New Delhi and Beijing know all too well—when inflamed lungs and sinuses prove once again that there is no difference between the without and the within; between using and being used. These too are moments of recognition, in which it dawns on us that the energy that surrounds us, flowing under our feet and through wires in our walls, animating our vehicles and illuminating our rooms, is an all-encompassing presence that may have its own purposes about which we know nothing. It was in this way that I too became aware of the urgent proximity of non-human presences, through instances of recognition that were forced upon me by my surroundings. I happened then to be writing about the Sundarbans, the great mangrove forest of the Bengal Delta, where the flow of water and silt is such that geological processes that usually unfold in deep time appear to occur at a speed where they can be followed from week to week and month to month. Overnight, a stretch of riverbank will disappear, sometimes taking houses and people with it; but elsewhere a shallow mudbank will arise and within weeks the shore will have broadened by several feet. For the most part, these processes are, of course, cyclical. But even back then, in the first years of the twenty-first century, portents of accumulative and irreversible change could also be seen, in receding shorelines and a steady intrusion of salt water on lands that had previously been cultivated. This is a landscape so dynamic that its very changeability leads to innumerable moments of recognition. I captured some of these in my notes from that time, as, for example, in these lines, written in May 2002: ‘I do believe it to be true that the land here is demonstrably alive; that it does not exist solely, or even incidentally, as a stage for the enactment of human history; that it is [itself] a protagonist.’ Elsewhere, in another note, I wrote, ‘Here even a child will begin a story about his grandmother with the words: “in those days the river wasn’t here and the village was not where it is... ”’ Yet, I would not be able to speak of these encounters as instances of recognition if some prior awareness of what I was witnessing had not already been implanted in me, perhaps by childhood experiences, like that of going to look for my family’s ancestral village; or by memories, like that of a cyclone in Dhaka, when a small fishpond behind our walls suddenly turned into a lake and came rushing into our house; or by my grandmother’s stories of growing up beside a mighty river; or simply by the insistence with which the landscape of Bengal forces itself on the artists, writers and filmmakers of the region. But when it came to translating these perceptions into the medium of my imaginative life—into fiction, that is—I found myself confronting challenges of a wholly different order from those that I had dealt with in my earlier work. Back then, those challenges seemed to be particular to the book I was writing, The Hungry Tide; but now, many years later, at a moment when the accelerating impacts of global warming have begun to threaten the very existence of low-lying areas like the Sundarbans, it seems to me that those problems have far wider implications. I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older; that they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth.  3 That climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena is not hard to establish. To see that this is so we need only glance through the pages of a few highly regarded literary journals and book reviews, for example, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Literary Journal and the New York Times Review of Books. When the subject of climate change appears in these publications, it is almost always in relation to non-fiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon. Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel. There is something confounding about this peculiar feedback loop. It is very difficult, surely, to imagine a conception of seriousness that is blind to potentially life-changing threats. And if the urgency of a subject were indeed a criterion of its seriousness, then, considering what climate change actually portends for the future of the earth, it should surely follow that this would be the principal preoccupation of writers the world over—and this, I think, is very far from being the case. But why? Are the currents of global warming too wild to be navigated in the accustomed barques of narration? But the truth, as is now widely acknowledged, is that we have entered a time when the wild has become the norm: if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed—and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis. Clearly the problem does not arise out of a lack of information: there are surely very few writers today who are oblivious to the current disturbances in climate systems the world over. Yet, it is a striking fact that when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside of fiction. A case in point is the work of Arundhati Roy: not only is she one of the finest prose stylists of our time, she is passionate and deeply informed about climate change. Yet all her writings on these subjects are in various forms of non-fiction. Or consider the even more striking case of Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake, a much-admired historical novel set in eleventh-century England. Kingsnorth dedicated several years of his life to climate change activism before founding the influential Dark Mountain Project, ‘a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself’. Although Kingsnorth has written a powerful non- fiction account of global resistance movements, as of the time of writing he has yet to publish a novel in which climate change plays a major part. I too have been preoccupied with climate change for a long time, but it is true of my own work as well, that this subject figures only obliquely in my fiction. In thinking about the mismatch between my personal concerns and the content of my published work, I have come to be convinced that the discrepancy is not the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction.  4 In his seminal essay ‘The Climate of History’, Dipesh Chakrabarty observes that historians will have to revise many of their fundamental assumptions and procedures in this era of human-induced climate change, in which ‘humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth’. I would go further and add that the Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our common-sense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general. There can be no doubt, of course, that this challenge arises in part from the complexities of the technical language that serves as our primary window on climate change. But neither can there be any doubt that the challenge derives also from the practices and assumptions that guide the arts and humanities. To identify how this happens is, I think, a task of the utmost urgency: it may well be the key to understanding why contemporary culture finds it so hard to deal with climate change. Indeed, this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense— for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination. Culture generates desires—for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings—that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy. A speedy convertible excites us neither because of any love for metal and chrome, nor because of an abstract understanding of its engineering. It excites us because it evokes an image of a road arrowing through a pristine landscape; we think of freedom and the wind in our hair; we envision James Dean and Peter Fonda racing towards the horizon; we think also of Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov. When we see an advertisement that links a picture of a tropical island to the word paradise, the longings that are kindled in us have a chain of transmission that stretches back to Daniel Defoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the flight that will transport us to the island is merely an ember in that fire. When we see a green lawn that has been watered with desalinated water in Abu Dhabi or Southern California or some other environment where people had once been content to spend their water thriftily in nurturing a single vine or shrub, we are looking at an expression of a yearning that may have been midwifed by the novels of Jane Austen. The artefacts and commodities that are conjured up by these desires are, in a sense, at once expressions and concealments of the cultural matrix that brought them into being. This culture is, of course, intimately linked with the wider histories of imperialism and capitalism that have shaped the world. But to know this is still to know very little about the specific ways in which the matrix interacts with different modes of cultural activity: poetry, art, architecture, theatre, prose fiction, and so on. Throughout history these branches of culture have responded to war, ecological calamity and crises of many sorts: why, then, should climate change prove so peculiarly resistant to their practices? From this perspective, the questions that confront writers and artists today are not just those of the politics of the carbon economy; many of them have to do also with our own practices and the ways in which they make us complicit in the concealments of the broader culture. For instance: if contemporary trends in architecture, even in this period of accelerating carbon emissions, favour shiny, glass-and-metal-plated towers, do we not have to ask, What are the patterns of desire that are fed by these gestures? If I, as a novelist, choose to use brand names as elements in the depiction of character, do I not need to ask myself about the degree to which this makes me complicit in the manipulations of the marketplace? In the same spirit, I think it also needs to be asked, What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction? And what does this tell us about culture writ large and its patterns of evasion? In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museumgoers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first, and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.  5 On the afternoon of 17 March 1978, the weather took an odd turn in north Delhi. Mid-March is usually a nice time of year in this part of India: the chill of winter is gone and the blazing heat of summer is yet to come; the sky is clear and the monsoon is far away. But that day dark clouds appeared suddenly and there were squalls of rain. Then followed an even bigger surprise: a hailstorm. I was then studying for an MA at Delhi University while also working as a part-time journalist. When the hailstorm broke, I was in a library. I had planned to stay late, but the unseasonal weather led to a change of mind and I decided to leave. I was on my way back to my room when, on an impulse, I changed direction and dropped in on a friend. But the weather continued to worsen as we were chatting so after a few minutes I decided to head straight back by a route that I rarely had occasion to take. I had just passed a busy intersection called Maurice Nagar when I heard a rumbling sound somewhere above. Glancing over my shoulder I saw a grey, tube-like extrusion forming on the underside of a dark cloud: it grew rapidly as I watched, and then all of a sudden it turned and came whiplashing down to earth, heading in my direction. Across the street stood a large administrative building. I sprinted over and headed towards what seemed to be an entrance. But the glass-fronted doors were shut, and a small crowd huddled outside, in the shelter of an overhang. There was no room for me there so I ran around to the front of the building. Spotting a small balcony, I jumped over the parapet and crouched on the floor. The noise quickly rose to a frenzied pitch, and the wind began to tug fiercely at my clothes. Stealing a glance over the parapet, I saw, to my astonishment, that my surroundings had been darkened by a churning cloud of dust. In the dim glow that was shining down from above, I saw an extraordinary panoply of objects flying past—bicycles, scooters, lamp posts, sheets of corrugated iron, even entire tea stalls. In that instant, gravity itself seemed to have been transformed into a wheel spinning upon the fingertip of some unknown power. I buried my head in my arms and lay still. Moments later the noise died down and was replaced by an eerie silence. When at last I climbed out of the balcony, I was confronted by a scene of devastation such as I had never before beheld. Buses lay overturned; scooters sat perched on treetops; walls had been ripped out of buildings, exposing interiors in which ceiling fans had been twisted into tulip-like spirals. The place where I had first thought to take shelter, the glass-fronted doorway, had been reduced to a jumble of jagged debris. The panes had shattered and many people had been wounded by the shards. I realized that I too would have been among the injured had I remained there. I walked away in a daze. Long afterwards, I am not sure exactly when or where, I hunted down the Times of India’s New Delhi edition of 18 March. I still have the photocopies I made of it. ‘30 Dead,’ says the banner headline, ‘700 Hurt As Cyclone Hits North Delhi’. Here are some excerpts from the accompanying report: ‘Delhi, March 17: At least 30 people were killed and 700 injured, many of them seriously, this evening when a freak funnel-shaped whirlwind, accompanied by rain, left in its wake death and devastation in Maurice Nagar, a part of Kingsway Camp, Roshanara Road and Kamla Nagar in the Capital. The injured were admitted to different hospitals in the Capital. ‘The whirlwind followed almost a straight line.... Some eyewitnesses said the wind hit the Yamuna river and raised waves as high as 20 or 30 feet.... The Maurice Nagar road... presented a stark sight. It was littered with fallen poles... trees, branches, wires, bricks from the boundary walls of various institutions, tin roofs of staff quarters and dhabas and scores of scooters, buses and some cars. Not a tree was left standing on either side of the road.’  The report quotes a witness: ‘I saw my own scooter, which I had abandoned on the road, during those terrifying moments, being carried away in the wind like a kite. We saw all this happening around but were dumbfounded. We saw people dying... but were unable to help them. The two tea-stalls at the Maurice Nagar corner were blown out of existence. At least 12 to 15 persons must have been buried under the debris at this spot. When the hellish fury had abated in just four minutes, we saw death and devastation around.’ The vocabulary of the report is evidence of how unprecedented this disaster was. So unfamiliar was this phenomenon that the papers literally did not know what to call it: at a loss for words they resorted to “cyclone” and “funnel-shaped whirlwind.” Not till the next day was the right word found. The headlines of 19 March read, ‘A Very, Very Rare Phenomenon, Says Met Office’: ‘It was a tornado that hit northern parts of the Capital yesterday—the first of its kind.... According to the Indian Meteorological Department, the tornado was about 50 metres wide and covered a distance of about five k.m. in the space of two or three minutes.’ This was, in effect, the first tornado to hit Delhi—and indeed the entire region—in recorded meteorological history. And somehow I, who almost never took that road, who rarely visited that part of the university, had found myself in its path. Only much later did I realize that the tornado’s eye had passed directly over me. It seemed to me that there was something eerily apt about that metaphor: what had happened at that moment was strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld. And in that instant of contact something was planted deep in my mind, something irreducibly mysterious, something quite apart from the danger that I had been in and the destruction that I had witnessed; something that was not a property of the thing itself but of the manner in which it had intersected with my life.  6 As is often the case with people who are waylaid by unpredictable events, for years afterwards my mind kept returning to my encounter with the tornado. Why had I walked down a road that I almost never took, just before it was struck by a phenomenon that was without historical precedent? To think of it in terms of chance and coincidence seemed only to impoverish the experience: it was like trying to understand a poem by counting the words. I found myself reaching instead for the opposite end of the spectrum of meaning—for the extraordinary, the inexplicable, the confounding. Yet these too did not do justice to my memory of the event. Novelists inevitably mine their own experience when they write. Unusual events being necessarily limited in number, it is but natural that these should be excavated over and again in the hope of discovering a yet undiscovered vein. No less than any other writer have I dug into my own past while writing fiction. By rights then, my encounter with the tornado should have been a mother lode, a gift to be mined to the last little nugget. It is certainly true that storms, floods and unusual weather events do recur in my books, and this may well be a legacy of the tornado. Yet, oddly enough, no tornado has ever figured in my novels. Nor is this due to any lack of effort on my part. Indeed, the reason I still possess those cuttings from the Times of India is that I have returned to them often over the years, hoping to put them to use in a novel, but only to meet with failure at every attempt. On the face of it there is no reason why such an event should be difficult to translate into fiction; after all, many novels are filled with strange happenings. Why then did I fail, despite my best efforts, to send a character down a road that is imminently to be struck by a tornado?  In reflecting on this, I find myself asking, What would I make of such a scene were I to come across it in a novel written by someone else? I suspect that my response would be one of incredulity; I would be inclined to think that the scene was a contrivance of last resort. Surely, only a writer whose imaginative resources were utterly depleted would fall back on a situation of such extreme improbability? Improbability is the key word here, so we have to ask, What does the word mean? Improbable is not the opposite of probable, but rather an inflexion of it, a gradient in a continuum of probability. But what does probability—a mathematical idea—have to do with fiction? The answer is: Everything. For, as Ian Hacking, a prominent historian of the concept, puts it, probability is a ‘manner of conceiving the world constituted without our being aware of it’. Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins, born at about the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience. Before the birth of the modern novel, wherever stories were told, fiction delighted in the unheard-of and the unlikely. Narratives like those of The Arabian Nights, The Journey to the West and The Decameron proceed by leaping blithely from one exceptional event to another. This, after all, is how storytelling must necessarily proceed, inasmuch as it is a recounting of ‘what happened’—for such an inquiry can arise only in relation to something out of the ordinary, which is but another way of saying ‘exceptional’ or ‘unlikely’. In essence, narrative proceeds by linking together moments and scenes that are in some way distinctive or different: these are, of course, nothing other than instances of exception. Novels too proceed in this fashion, but what is distinctive about the form is precisely the concealment of those exceptional moments that serve as the motor of narrative. This is achieved through the insertion of what Franco Moretti, the literary theorist, calls ‘fillers’. According to Moretti, ‘fillers function very much like the good manners so important in [Jane] Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the “narrativity” of life under control—to give a regularity, a “style” to existence’. It is through this mechanism that worlds are conjured up, through everyday details, which function ‘as the opposite of narrative’. It is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through ‘the relocation of the unheard-of toward the background... while the everyday moves into the foreground’. Thus was the novel midwifed into existence around the world, through the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday. The process can be observed with exceptional clarity in the work of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a nineteenth-century Bengali writer and critic who self- consciously adopted the project of carving out a space in which realist European-style fiction could be written in the vernacular languages of India. Bankim’s enterprise, undertaken in a context that was far removed from the metropolitan mainstream, is one of those instances in which a circumstance of exception reveals the true life of a regime of thought and practice. Bankim was, in effect, seeking to supersede many old and very powerful forms of fiction, ranging from ancient Indian epics to Buddhist Jataka stories and the immensely fecund Islamicate tradition of Urdu dastaans. Over time, these narrative forms had accumulated great weight and authority, extending far beyond the Indian subcontinent: his attempt to claim territory for a new kind of fiction was thus, in its own way, a heroic endeavour. That is why Bankim’s explorations are of particular interest: his charting of this new territory puts the contrasts between the Western novel and other, older forms of narrative in ever sharper relief. In a long essay on Bengali literature, written in 1871, Bankim launched a frontal assault on writers who modelled their work on traditional forms of storytelling: his attack on this so-called Sanskrit school was focused precisely on the notion of ‘mere narrative’. What he advocated instead was a style of writing that would accord primacy to ‘sketches of character and pictures of Bengali life’. What this meant, in practice, is very well illustrated by Bankim’s first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, which was written in English in the early 1860s. Here is a passage: ‘The house of Mathur Ghose was a genuine specimen of mofussil [provincial] magnificence united with a mofussil want of cleanliness.... From the far-off paddy fields you could descry through the intervening foliage, its high palisades and blackened walls. On a nearer view might be seen pieces of plaster of a venerable antiquity prepared to bid farewell to their old and weather-beaten tenement.’ Compare this with the following lines from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: ‘We leave the high road... whence the valley is seen.... The meadow stretches under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its blond cornfields.’ In both these passages, the reader is led into a ‘scene’ through the eye and what it beholds: we are invited to ‘descry’, to ‘view’, to ‘see’. In relation to other forms of narrative, this is indeed something new: instead of being told about what happened, we learn about what was observed. Bankim has, in a sense, gone straight to the heart of the realist novel’s ‘mimetic ambition’: detailed descriptions of everyday life (or ‘fillers’) are therefore central to his experiment with this new form. Why should the rhetoric of the everyday appear at exactly the time when a regime of statistics, ruled by ideas of probability and improbability, was beginning to give new shapes to society? Why did fillers suddenly become so important? Moretti’s answer is ‘Because they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life. Fillers turn the novel into a “calm passion”... they are part of what Weber called the “rationalization” of modern life: a process that begins in the economy and in the administration, but eventually pervades the sphere of free time, private life, entertainment, feelings.... Or in other words: fillers are an attempt at rationalizing the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.’ This regime of thought imposed itself not only on the arts but also on the sciences. That is why Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant study of the geological theories of gradualism and catastrophism is, in essence, a study of narrative. In Gould’s telling of the story, the catastrophist recounting of the earth’s history is exemplified by Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1690) in which the narrative turns on events of ‘unrepeatable uniqueness’. As opposed to this, the gradualist approach, championed by James Hutton (1726–97) and Charles Lyell (1797–1875), privileges slow processes that unfold over time at even, predictable rates. The central credo in this doctrine was ‘nothing could change otherwise than the way things were seen to change in the present’. Or, to put it simply: ‘Nature does not make leaps.’ The trouble, however, is that Nature does certainly jump, if not leap. The geological record bears witness to many fractures in time, some of which led to mass extinctions and the like: it was one such, in the form of the Chicxulub asteroid, that probably killed the dinosaurs. It is indisputable, in any event, that catastrophes waylay both the earth and its individual inhabitants at unpredictable intervals and in the most improbable ways. Which, then, has primacy in the real world—predictable processes or unlikely events? Gould’s response is ‘the only possible answer can be “both and neither”’. Or, as the National Research Council of the United States puts it: ‘It is not known whether the relocation of materials on the surface of the Earth is dominated by the slower but continuous fluxes operating all the time or by the spectacular large fluxes that operate during short-lived cataclysmic events.’ It was not until quite recently that geology reached this agnostic consensus. Through much of the era when geology—and also the modern novel—were coming of age, the gradualist (or ‘uniformitarian’) view held absolute sway, and catastrophism was exiled to the margins. Gradualists consolidated their victory by using one of modernity’s most effective weapons: its insistence that it has rendered other forms of knowledge obsolete. So, as Gould so beautifully demonstrates, Lyell triumphed over his adversaries by accusing them of being primitive: ‘In an early stage of advancement, when a great number of natural appearances are unintelligible, an eclipse, an earthquake, a flood, or the approach of a comet, with many other occurrences afterwards found to belong to the regular course of events, are regarded as prodigies. The same delusion prevails as to moral phenomena, and many of these are ascribed to the intervention of demons, ghosts, witches, and other immaterial and supernatural agents.’ This is exactly the rhetoric that Bankim uses in attacking the ‘Sanskrit school’: he accuses those writers of depending on conventional modes of expression and fantastical forms of causality. ‘If love is to be the theme, Madana is invariably put into requisition with his five flower-tipped arrows; and the tyrannical king of Spring never fails to come to fight in his cause, with his army of bees, and soft breezes, and other ancient accompaniments. Are the pangs of separation to be sung? The moon is immediately cursed and anathematized, as scorching the poor victim with her cold beams.’ Flaubert sounds a strikingly similar note in satirizing the narrative style that entrances the young Emma Rouault: in the novels that were smuggled into her convent, it was ‘all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves’. All of this is utterly foreign to the orderly bourgeois world that Emma Bovary is consigned to; such fantastical stuff belongs in the ‘dithyrambic lands’ that she longs to inhabit. In a striking summation of her tastes in narrative, Emma declares, ‘I... adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in Nature.’ ‘Commonplace’? ‘Moderate’? How did Nature ever come to be associated with words like these? The incredulity that these associations evoke today is a sign of the degree to which global warming has already disrupted many assumptions that were founded on the relative climatic stability of the era that nourished human civilization: the Holocene. From the reversed perspective of our time, the complacency and confidence of the emergent bourgeois order appears as yet another of those uncanny instances in which the planet seems to have been toying with humanity by allowing it to assume that it was free to shape its own destiny.  Unlikely though it may seem today, the nineteenth century was indeed a time when it was assumed, in both fiction and geology, that Nature was moderate and orderly: this was a distinctive mark of a new and ‘modern’ worldview. Bankim goes out of his way to berate his contemporary, the poet Michael Madhusudan Datta, for his immoderate portrayals of Nature: ‘Mr. Datta... wants repose. The winds rage their loudest when there is no necessity for the lightest puff. Clouds gather and pour down a deluge, when they need do nothing of the kind; and the sea grows terrible in its wrath, when everybody feels inclined to resent its interference.’ The victory of gradualist views in science was similarly won by characterizing catastrophism as un-modern. In geology, the triumph of gradualist thinking was so complete that Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, which posited upheavals of sudden and unimaginable violence, was for decades discounted and derided. It is worth recalling that these habits of mind held sway until late in the twentieth century, especially among the general public. ‘As of the mid- 1960s,’ writes the historian John L. Brooke, ‘a gradualist model of earth history and evolution... reigned supreme.’ Even as late as 1985, the editorial page of the New York Times was inveighing against the asteroidal theory of dinosaur extinction: ‘Astronomers should leave to astrologers the task of seeking the causes of events in the stars.’ As for professional palaeontologists, Elizabeth Kolbert notes, they reviled both the theory and its originators, Luis and Walter Alvarez: ‘“The Cretaceous extinctions were gradual and the catastrophe theory is wrong,”... [a] paleontologist stated. But “simplistic theories will continue to come along to seduce a few scientists and enliven the covers of popular magazines”.’ In other words, gradualism became ‘a set of blinders’ that eventually had to be put aside in favour of a view that recognizes the ‘twin requirements of uniqueness to mark moments of time as distinctive, and lawfulness to establish a basis of intelligibility’. Distinctive moments are no less important to modern novels than they are to any other forms of narrative, whether geological or historical. Ironically, this is nowhere more apparent than in Rajmohan’s Wife and Madame Bovary, in both of which chance and happenstance are crucial to the narrative. In Flaubert’s novel, for instance, the narrative pivots at a moment when Monsieur Bovary has an accidental encounter with his wife’s soon-to- be lover at the opera, just after an impassioned scene during which she has imagined that the lead singer ‘was looking at her... She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength, as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out, “Take me away! carry me with you!”’ It could not, of course, be otherwise: if novels were not built upon a scaffolding of exceptional moments, writers would be faced with the Borgesian task of reproducing the world in its entirety. But the modern novel, unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable: the concealment of its scaffolding of events continues to be essential to its functioning. It is this that makes a certain kind of narrative a recognizably modern novel. Here, then, is the irony of the ‘realist’ novel: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real. What this means in practice is that the calculus of probability that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same as that which obtains outside it; this is why it is commonly said, ‘If this were in a novel, no one would believe it.’ Within the pages of a novel an event that is only slightly improbable in real life—say, an unexpected encounter with a long-lost childhood friend—may seem wildly unlikely: the writer will have to work hard to make it appear persuasive. If that is true of a small fluke of chance, consider how much harder a writer would have to work to set up a scene that is wildly improbable even in real life? For example, a scene in which a character is walking down a road at the precise moment when it is hit by an unheard-of weather phenomenon? To introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence; it is to risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house —those generic outhouses that were once known by names such as ‘the Gothic’, ‘the romance’, or ‘the melodrama’, and have now come to be called ‘fantasy’, ‘horror’, and ‘science fiction’.  7 So far as I know, climate change was not a factor in the tornado that struck Delhi in 1978. The only thing it has in common with the freakish weather events of today is its extreme improbability. And it appears that we are now in an era that will be defined precisely by events that appear, by our current standards of normality, highly improbable: flash floods, hundred-year storms, persistent droughts, spells of unprecedented heat, sudden landslides, raging torrents pouring down from breached glacial lakes, and, yes, freakish tornadoes. The superstorm that struck New York in 2012, Hurricane Sandy, was one such highly improbable phenomenon: the word unprecedented has perhaps never figured so often in the description of a weather event. In his fine study of Hurricane Sandy, the meteorologist Adam Sobel notes that the track of the storm, as it crashed into the east coast of the United States, was without precedent: never before had a hurricane veered sharply westward in the mid-Atlantic. In turning, it also merged with a winter storm, thereby becoming a ‘mammoth hybrid’ and attaining a size unprecedented in scientific memory. The storm surge that it unleashed reached a height that exceeded any in the region’s recorded meteorological history. Indeed, Sandy was an event of such a high degree of improbability that it confounded statistical weather-prediction models. Yet, dynamic models, based on the laws of physics, were able to accurately predict its trajectory as well as its impacts. But calculations of risk, on which officials base their decisions in emergencies, are based largely on probabilities. In the case of Sandy, as Sobel shows, the essential improbability of the phenomenon led them to underestimate the threat and thus delay emergency measures.  Sobel goes on to make the argument, as have many others, that human beings are intrinsically unable to prepare for rare events. But has this really been the case throughout human history? Or is it rather an aspect of the unconscious patterns of thought—or ‘common sense’—that gained ascendancy with a growing faith in ‘the regularity of bourgeois life’? I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism—a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell’s, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability. It is a fact, in any case, that when early tremors jolted the Italian town of L’Aquila, shortly before the great earthquake of 2009, many townsfolk obeyed the instinct that prompts people who live in earthquake-prone areas to move to open spaces. It was only because of a governmental intervention, intended to prevent panic, that they returned to their homes. As a result, a good number were trapped indoors when the earthquake occurred. No such instinct was at work in New York during Sandy, where, as Sobel notes, it was generally believed that ‘losing one’s life to a hurricane is... something that happens in faraway places’ (he might just as well have said ‘dithyrambic lands’). In Brazil, similarly, when Hurricane Catarina struck the coast in 2004, many people did not take shelter because ‘they refused to believe that hurricanes were possible in Brazil’. But in the era of global warming, nothing is really far away; there is no place where the orderly expectations of bourgeois life hold unchallenged sway. It is as though our earth had become a literary critic and were laughing at Flaubert, Bankim, and their like, mocking their mockery of the ‘prodigious happenings’ that occur so often in romances and epic poems. This, then, is the first of the many ways in which the age of global warming defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense: the weather events of this time have a very high degree of improbability. They are not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction.  Poetry, on the other hand, has long had an intimate relationship with climatic events: as Geoffrey Parker points out, John Milton began to compose Paradise Lost during a winter of extreme cold, and ‘unpredictable and unforgiving changes in the climate are central to his story. Milton’s fictional world, like the real one in which he lived, was... a “universe of death” at the mercy of extremes of heat and cold’. This is a universe very different from that of the contemporary literary novel. I am, of course, painting with a very broad brush: the novel’s infancy is long past, and the form has changed in many ways over the last two centuries. Yet, to a quite remarkable degree, the literary novel has also remained true to the destiny that was charted for it at birth. Consider that the literary movements of the twentieth century were almost uniformly disdainful of plot and narrative; that an ever greater emphasis was laid on style and ‘observation’, whether it be of everyday details, traits of character, or nuances of emotion—which is why teachers of creative writing now exhort their students to ‘show, don’t tell’. Yet fortunately, from time to time, there have also been movements that celebrated the unheard-of and the improbable: surrealism, for instance, and, most significantly, magical realism, which is replete with events that have no relation to the calculus of probability. There is, however, an important difference between the weather events that we are now experiencing and those that occur in surrealist and magical realist novels: improbable though they might be, these events are neither surreal nor magical. To the contrary, these highly improbable occurrences are overwhelmingly, urgently, astoundingly real. The ethical difficulties that might arise in treating them as magical or metaphorical or allegorical are obvious perhaps. But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.  8 The Sundarbans are nothing like the forests that usually figure in literature. The greenery is dense, tangled and low; the canopy is not above but around you, constantly clawing at your skin and your clothes. No breeze can enter the thickets of this forest; when the air stirs at all it is because of the buzzing of flies and other insects. Underfoot, instead of a carpet of softly decaying foliage, there is a bank of slippery, knee-deep mud, perforated by the sharp points that protrude from mangrove roots. Nor do any vistas present themselves except when you are on one of the hundreds of creeks and channels that wind through the landscape—and even then it is the water alone that opens itself; the forest withdraws behind its muddy ramparts, disclosing nothing. In the Sundarbans, tigers are everywhere and nowhere. Often when you go ashore, you will find fresh tiger prints in the mud, but of the animal itself you will see nothing: glimpses of tigers are exceedingly uncommon and rarely more than fleeting. Yet you cannot doubt, since the prints are so fresh, that a tiger is somewhere nearby; and you know that it is probably watching you. In this jungle, concealment is so easy for an animal that it could be just a few feet away. If it charged, you would not see it till the last minute, and even if you did, you would not be able to get away; the mud would immobilize you. Scattered through the forest are red rags, fluttering on branches. These mark the sites where people have been killed by tigers. There are many such killings every year; exactly how many no one knows because the statistics are not reliable. Nor is this anything new; in the nineteenth century, tens of thousands were killed by tigers. Suffice it to say that in some villages every household has lost a member to a tiger; everyone has a story to tell.  In these stories a great deal hinges on the eyes; seeing is one of their central themes; not seeing is another. The tiger is watching you; you are aware of its gaze, as you always are, but you do not see it; you do not lock eyes with it until it launches its charge, and at that moment a shock courses through you and you are immobilized, frozen. The folk epic of the Sundarbans, Bon Bibir Johuranama (The Miracles of Bon Bibi), comes to a climax in one such moment of mutual beholding, when the tiger demon, Dokkhin Rai, locks eyes with the protagonist, a boy called Dukhey. It was then from afar, that the demon saw Dukhey... Long had he hungered for this much-awaited prize; in an instant he assumed his tiger disguise. ‘How long has it been since human flesh came my way? Now bliss awaits me in the shape of this boy Dukhey.’ On the far mudbank Dukhey caught sight of the beast: ‘that tiger is the demon and I’m to be his feast.’ Raising its head, the tiger reared its immense back; its jowls filled like sails as it sprang to attack. The boy’s life took wing, on seeing this fearsome sight. Many stories of encounters with tigers hinge upon a moment of mutual recognition like this one. To look into the tiger’s eyes is to recognize a presence of which you are already aware; and in that moment of contact you realize that this presence possesses a similar awareness of you, even though it is not human. This mute exchange of gazes is the only communication that is possible between you and this presence—yet communication it undoubtedly is. But what is it that you are communicating with, at this moment of extreme danger, when your mind is in a state unlike any you’ve ever known before? An analogy that is sometimes offered is that of seeing a ghost, a presence that is not of this world. In the tiger stories of the Sundarbans, as in my experience of the tornado, there is, as I noted earlier, an irreducible element of mystery. But what I am trying to suggest is perhaps better expressed by a different word, one that recurs frequently in translations of Freud and Heidegger. That word is uncanny—and it is indeed with uncanny accuracy that my experience of the tornado is evoked in the following passage: ‘In dread, as we say, “one feels something uncanny.” What is this “something” and this “one”? We are unable to say what gives “one” that uncanny feeling.’ It is surely no coincidence that the word uncanny has begun to be used, with ever greater frequency, in relation to climate change. Writing of the freakish events and objects of our era, Timothy Morton asks, ‘Isn’t it the case, that the effect delivered to us in the [unaccustomed] rain, the weird cyclone, the oil slick is something uncanny?’ George Marshall writes, ‘Climate change is inherently uncanny: Weather conditions, and the high- carbon lifestyles that are changing them, are extremely familiar and yet have now been given a new menace and uncertainty.’ No other word comes close to expressing the strangeness of what is unfolding around us. For these changes are not merely strange in the sense of being unknown or alien; their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of non-human interlocutors. Yet now our gaze seems to be turning again; the uncanny and improbable events that are beating at our doors seem to have stirred a sense of recognition, an awareness that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who share elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctively our own: the capacities of will, thought, and consciousness. How else do we account for the interest in the non-human that has been burgeoning in the humanities over the last decade and over a range of disciplines, from philosophy to anthropology and literary criticism. Can the timing of this renewed recognition be mere coincidence, or is the synchronicity an indication that there are entities in the world, like forests, that are fully capable of inserting themselves into our processes of thought? And if that were so, could it not also be said that the earth has itself intervened to revise those habits of thought that are based on the Cartesian dualism that arrogates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being? This possibility is not, by any means, the most important of the many ways in which climate change challenges and refutes Enlightenment ideas. It is, however, certainly the most uncanny. For what it suggests—indeed proves—is that non-human forces have the ability to intervene directly in human thought. And to be alerted to such interventions is also to become uncannily aware that conversations among ourselves have always had other participants: it is like finding out that one’s telephone has been tapped for years, or that the neighbours have long been eavesdropping on family discussions. But in a way it’s worse still, for it would seem that those unseen presences actually played a part in shaping our discussions without our being aware of it. And if these are real possibilities, can we help but suspect that all the time that we imagined ourselves to be thinking about apparently inanimate objects, we were ourselves being ‘thought’ by other entities? It is almost as if the mind-altering planet that Stanislaw Lem imagined in Solaris were our own, familiar Earth: what could be more uncanny than this? These possibilities have many implications for the subject that primarily concerns me here: literary fiction. I will touch on some of these later, but for now I want to attend only to the aspect of the uncanny. On the face of it, the novel as a form would seem to be a natural home for the uncanny. After all, have not some of the greatest novelists written uncanny tales? The ghost stories of Charles Dickens, Henry James and Rabindranath Tagore come immediately to mind. But the environmental uncanny is not the same as the uncanniness of the supernatural: it is different precisely because it pertains to non-human forces and beings. The ghosts of literary fiction are not human either, of course, but they are certainly represented as projections of humans who were once alive. But animals like the Sundarbans tiger, and freakish weather events like the Delhi tornado, have no human referents at all. There is an additional element of the uncanny in events triggered by climate change, one that did not figure in my experience of the Delhi tornado. This is that the freakish weather events of today, despite their radically non-human nature, are nonetheless animated by cumulative human actions. In that sense, the events set in motion by global warming have a more intimate connection with humans than did the climatic phenomena of the past—this is because we have all contributed in some measure, great or small, to their making. They are the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms. All of this makes climate change events peculiarly resistant to the customary frames that literature has applied to ‘Nature’: they are too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein. Indeed, in that these events are not entirely of Nature (whatever that might be), they confound the very idea of ‘Nature writing’ or ecological writing: they are instances, rather, of the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the non-human. More than a quarter century has passed since Bill McKibben wrote, ‘We live in a post-natural world.’ But did ‘Nature’ in this sense ever exist? Or was it rather the deification of the human that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves? Now that non-human agencies have dispelled that illusion, we are confronted suddenly with a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era.  9 In the final part of my novel The Hungry Tide, there is a scene in which a cyclone sends a gigantic storm surge into the Sundarbans. The wave results in the death of one of the principal characters, who gives his life protecting another. This scene was extraordinarily difficult to write. In preparation for it, I combed through a great deal of material on catastrophic waves—storm surges as well as tsunamis. In the process, as often happens in writing fiction, the plight of the book’s characters, as they faced the wave, became frighteningly real. The Hungry Tide was published in the summer of 2004. A few months after the publication, on the night of 25 December, I was back in my family home in Kolkata. The next morning, on logging on to the web, I learned that a cataclysmic tsunami had been set off by a massive undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean. Measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, the quake’s epicentre lay between the northernmost tip of Sumatra and the southernmost island in the Andaman and Nicobar chain. Although the full extent of the catastrophe was not yet known, it was already clear that the toll in human lives would be immense. The news had a deeply unsettling effect on me: the images that had been implanted in my mind during the writing of The Hungry Tide merged with live television footage of the tsunami in a way that was almost overwhelming. I became frantic; I could not focus on anything. A couple of days later, I wrote to a newspaper and obtained a commission to write about the impact of the tsunami on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. My first stop was the islands’ capital city, Port Blair, which was thronged with refugees but had not suffered much damage itself: its location, above a sheltered cove, had protected it. After spending a few days there, I was able to board an Indian Air Force plane that was carrying supplies to one of the worst affected of the Nicobar Islands. Unlike the Andamans, which rise steeply from the sea, the Nicobars are low-lying islands. Being situated close to the quake’s epicentre, they had been very badly hit; many settlements had been razed. I visited a shoreside town called Malacca that had been reduced literally to its foundations: of the houses only the floors were left, and here and there the stump of a wall. It was as though the place had been hit by a bomb that was designed specifically to destroy all things human—for one of the strangest aspects of the scene was that the island’s coconut palms were largely unaffected; they stood serenely amid the rubble, their fronds waving gently in the breeze that was blowing in from the sparkling, sun-drenched sea. I wrote in my notebook: ‘The damage was limited to a half-mile radius along the shore. In the island’s interior everything is tranquil, peaceful— indeed astonishingly beautiful. There are patches of tall, dark primary forest, beautiful padauk trees, and among these, in little clearings, huts built on stilts.... One of the ironies of the situation is that the most upwardly mobile people on the island were living at its edges.’ Such was the pattern of settlement here that the indigenous islanders lived mainly in the interior: they were largely unaffected by the tsunami. Those who had settled along the seashore, on the other hand, were mainly people from the mainland, many of whom were educated and middle class: in settling where they had, they had silently expressed their belief that highly improbable events belong not in the real world but in fantasy. In other words, even here, in a place about as far removed as possible from the metropolitan centres that have shaped middle-class lifestyles, the pattern of settlement had come to reflect the uniformitarian expectations that are rooted in the ‘regularity of bourgeois life’. At the air force base where my plane had landed there was another, even more dramatic, illustration of this. The functional parts of the base—where the planes and machinery were kept—were located to the rear, well away from the water. The living areas, comprised of pretty little two-storey houses, were built much closer to the sea, at the edge of a beautiful, palm- fringed beach. As always in military matters, the protocols of rank were strictly observed: the higher the rank of the officers, the closer their houses were to the water and the better the view that they and their families enjoyed. Such was the design of the base that when the tsunami struck these houses the likelihood of survival was small, and inasmuch as it existed at all, it was in inverse relation to rank: the commander’s house was thus the first to be hit. The sight of the devastated houses was disturbing for reasons beyond the immediate tragedy of the tsunami and the many lives that had been lost there: the design of the base suggested a complacency that was itself a kind of madness. Nor could the siting of these buildings be attributed to the usual improvisatory muddle of Indian patterns of settlement. The base had to have been designed and built by a government agency; the site had clearly been chosen and approved by hard-headed military men and state-appointed engineers. It was as if, in being adopted by the state, the bourgeois belief in the regularity of the world had been carried to the point of derangement. A special place ought to be reserved in hell, I thought to myself, for planners who build with such reckless disregard for their surroundings. Not long afterwards, while flying into New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, I looked out of the window and spotted Far Rockaway and Long Beach, the thickly populated Long Island neighbourhoods that separate the airport from the Atlantic Ocean. Looking down on them from above, it was clear that those long rows of apartment blocks were sitting upon what had once been barrier islands, and that in the event of a major storm surge they would be swamped (as indeed they were when Hurricane Sandy hit the area in 2012). Yet it was clear also that these neighbourhoods had not sprung up haphazardly; the sanction of the state was evident in the ordered geometry of their streets. Only then did it strike me that the location of that base in the Nicobars was by no means anomalous; the builders had not in any sense departed from accepted global norms. To the contrary, they had merely followed the example of the European colonists who had founded cities like Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai), New York, Singapore and Hong Kong, all of which are sited directly on the ocean. I understood also that what I had seen in the Nicobars was but a microcosmic expression of a pattern of settlement that is now dominant around the world: proximity to the water is a sign of affluence and education; a seafront location is a status symbol; an ocean view greatly increases the value of real estate. A colonial vision of the world, in which proximity to the water represents power and security, mastery and conquest, has now been incorporated into the very foundations of middle-class patterns of living across the globe. But haven’t people always liked to live by the water? Not really; through much of human history, people regarded the ocean with great wariness. Even when they made their living from the sea, through fishing or trade, they generally did not build large settlements on the water’s edge: the great old port cities of Europe, like London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Lisbon and Hamburg, are all protected from the open ocean by bays, estuaries, or deltaic river systems. The same is true of old Asian ports: Cochin, Surat, Tamluk, Dhaka, Mrauk-U, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Malacca are all cases in point. It is as if, before the early modern era, there had existed a general acceptance that provision had to be made for the unpredictable furies of the ocean—tsunamis, storm surges and the like. An element of that caution seems to have lingered even after the age of European global expansion began in the sixteenth century: it was not till the seventeenth century that colonial cities began to rise on seafronts around the world. Mumbai, Chennai, New York and Charleston were all founded in this period. This would be followed by another, even more confident wave of city building in the nineteenth century, with the founding of Singapore and Hong Kong. These cities, all brought into being by processes of colonization, are now among those that are most directly threatened by climate change.  10 Mumbai and New York, so different in so many ways, have in common that their destinies came to be linked to the British Empire at about the same time: the 1660s. Although Giovanni da Verrazzano landed on Manhattan in 1524, the earliest European settlements in what is now New York State were built a long way up the Hudson River, in the area around Albany. It was not till 1625 that the Dutch built Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan island; this would later become New Amsterdam and then, when the British first seized the settlement in the 1660s, New York. The site of today’s Mumbai first came under European rule in 1535 when it was ceded to the Portuguese by the ruler of Gujarat. The site consisted of an estuarine archipelago, with a couple of large hilly islands to the north, close to the mainland, and a cluster of mainly low-lying islands to the south. This being an estuarine region, the relationship between land and water was so porous that the topography of the archipelago varied with the tides and the seasons. Networks of shrines, villages, forts, harbours and bazaars had existed on the southern islands for millennia, but they were never the site of an urban centre as such, even in the early years of European occupation. The Portuguese built several churches and fortifications on those islands, but their main settlements were located close to the mainland, at Bassein, and on Salsette. The southern part of the archipelago passed into British control when King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza in 1661: the islands were included in her dowry (which also contained a chest of tea: this was the Pandora’s box that introduced the British public to the beverage, thereby setting in motion the vast cycles of trade that would turn nineteenth-century Bombay into the world’s leading opium exporting port). It was only after passing into British hands that the southern islands became the nucleus of a sprawling urban conglomeration. It was then too that a distinct line of separation between land and sea was conjured up through the application of techniques of surveying within a ‘milieu of colonial power’. The appeal of the sites of both Mumbai and New York lay partly in their proximity to deep water harbours and partly in the strategic advantages they presented: as islands, they were both easier to defend and easier to supply from the metropolis. A certain precariousness was thus etched upon them from the start by reason of their colonial origins. The islands of south Mumbai did not long remain as they were when they were handed over to the British: links between them, in the form of causeways, bridges, embankments and reclamation projects, began to rise in the eighteenth century. The reshaping of the estuarine landscape proceeded at such a pace that by the 1860s a Marathi chronicler, Govind Narayan, was able to predict with confidence that soon it would ‘never occur to anybody that Mumbai was an island once’. Today the part of the city that is located on the former islands to the south of Salsette has a population of about 11.8 million (the population of the Greater Mumbai area is somewhere in the region of 19 to 20 million). This promontory, less than 20 kilometres in length, is the centre of many industries, including India’s financial industry; the adjoining port handles more than half of the country’s containerized cargo. This part of Mumbai is also home to many millionaires and billionaires: naturally many of them live along the western edge of the peninsula, which offers the finest views of the Arabian Sea. Because of the density of its population and the importance of its institutions and industries, Mumbai represents an extraordinary, possibly unique, ‘concentration of risk’. For this teeming metropolis, this great hub of economic, financial and cultural activity, sits upon a wedge of cobbled- together land that is totally exposed to the ocean. It takes only a glance at a map to be aware of this: yet it was not till 2012 when Superstorm Sandy barrelled into New York on 29 October that I began to think about the dangers of Mumbai’s topography. My wife and I were actually in Goa at the time, but since New York is also home to us we followed the storm closely, on the web and on TV, watching with mounting apprehension and disbelief as the storm swept over the city, devastating the waterfront neighbourhoods that we had flown over so many times while coming in to land at JFK airport. As I watched these events unfold it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if a similar storm were to hit Mumbai. I reassured myself with the thought that this was very unlikely: both Mumbai and Goa face the Arabian Sea, which, unlike the Bay of Bengal, has not historically generated a great deal of cyclonic activity. Nor, unlike India’s east coast, has the west coast had to deal with tsunamis: it was unaffected by the tsunami of 2004, for instance, which devastated large stretches of the eastern seaboard. Still, the question intrigued me and I began to hunt for more information on the region’s seismic and cyclonic profiles. Soon enough I learned that the west coast’s good fortune might be merely a function of the providential protraction of geological time—for the Arabian Sea is by no means seismically inactive. A previously unknown, and probably very active, fault system was discovered in the Arabian Sea a few years ago, off the coast of Oman; the system is 800 kilometres long and faces the west coast of India. This discovery was announced in an article that concludes with these words, chilling in their understatement: ‘These results will motivate a reappraisal of the seismic and tsunami hazard assessment in the NW Indian Ocean.’ Soon, I also had to rethink my assumptions about cyclones and the Arabian Sea. Reading about Hurricane Sandy, I came upon more and more evidence that climate change may indeed alter patterns of cyclonic activity around the world: Adam Sobel’s Storm Surge, for example, suggests that significant changes may be in the offing. When I began to look for information on the Arabian Sea in particular, I learned that there had been an increase in cyclonic activity in those waters over the last couple of decades. Between 1998 and 2001, three cyclones had crashed into the Indian subcontinent to the north of Mumbai: they claimed over 17,000 lives. Then in 2007, the Arabian Sea generated its strongest ever recorded storm: Cyclone Gonu, a Category 5 hurricane, which hit Oman, Iran and Pakistan in June that year causing widespread damage. What do these storms portend? Hoping to find an answer, I reached out to Adam Sobel, who is a professor of atmospheric science at Columbia University. He agreed to an interview, and on a fine October day in 2015, I made my way to his Manhattan apartment. He confirmed to me that the most up-to-date research indicates that the Arabian Sea is one of the regions of the world where cyclonic activity is indeed likely to increase: a 2012 paper by a Japanese research team predicts a 46 per cent increase in tropical cyclone frequency in the Arabian Sea by the end of the next century, with a corresponding 31 per cent decrease in the Bay of Bengal. It also predicts another change: in the past, cyclones were rare during the monsoon because wind flows in the northern Indian Ocean were not conducive to their formation in that season. Those patterns are now changing in such a way as to make cyclones more likely during and after the monsoons. Another paper, by an American research team, concludes that cyclonic activity in the Arabian Sea is also likely to intensify because of the cloud of dust and pollution that now hangs over the Indian subcontinent and its surrounding waters: this too is contributing to changes in the region’s wind patterns. These findings prompted me to ask Adam whether he might be willing to write a short piece assessing the risks that changing climatic patterns pose for Mumbai. He agreed and thus began a very interesting series of exchanges. A few weeks after our meeting, Adam sent me this message: I have been doing a little research on Mumbai storm surge risk. There seems to be very little written about it. I have found a number of vague acknowledgements that the risk exists, but nothing that quantifies it. However, are you aware of the 1882 Mumbai cyclone? I have found only very brief accounts of it so far, but the death toll appears to have been between 100,000 and 200,000, and one source says there was a 6m storm surge, which is enormous, and I presume would account for much if not all of that! This was in one paragraph of a book that seems to be out of print. I  haven’t quickly found any more substantive sources online—most are single-line mentions in lists of deadly storms. I wonder if you have ever seen anything more in-depth? It is very spooky indeed that this storm is not mentioned in the various academic studies I have dug up on storm surge risk in India. A quick Google search produced a number of references to an 1882 Bombay cyclone (some were even accompanied by pictures). There were several mentions of a death toll upwards of 1,00,000. The figure astounded me. Mumbai’s population then was about 8,00,000, which would mean that an eighth or more of the population would have perished: an extrapolation from these figures to today’s Mumbai would yield a number of over 1 million. But then came a surprise: Adam wrote to say that the 1882 cyclone was probably a hoax or rumour. He had not been able to find a reliable record of it; nor had any of the meteorologists or historians that he had written to. I then wrote to Murali Ranganathan, an expert on nineteenth-century Bombay, and he looked up the 1882 issues of the Kaiser-i-Hind, a Bombay- based Gujarati weekly run by Parsis. He found a brief description of a storm with strong winds and heavy rain on 4 June 1882, but there was no mention of any loss of life. Evidently, there was no great storm in 1882: it is a myth that has gained a life of its own. However, the search did confirm that colonial Bombay had been struck by cyclones several times in the past; the 1909 edition of the city’s Gazetteer even notes, ‘Since written history supplanted legend Bombay appears to have been visited somewhat frequently by great hurricanes and minor cyclonic storms.’ Mumbai’s earliest recorded encounter with a powerful storm was on 15 May 1618. A Jesuit historian described it thus: ‘The sky clouded, thunder burst, and a mighty wind arose. Towards nightfall a whirlwind raised the waves so high that the people, half dead from fear, thought that their city would be swallowed up.... The whole was like the ruin at the end of all things.’ Another Portuguese historian noted of this storm: ‘The sea was brought into the city by the wind; the waves roared fearfully; the tops of the churches were blown off and immense stones were driven to vast distances; two thousand persons were killed.’ If this figure is correct, it would suggest that the storm killed about a fifth of the population that then lived on the archipelago. In 1740, another ‘terrific storm’ caused great damage to the city, and in 1783 a storm that was ‘fatal to every ship in its path’ killed 400 people in Bombay harbour. The city was also hit by several cyclones in the nineteenth century: the worst was in 1854, when ‘property valued at half-a-million pounds sterling’ was destroyed in four hours and a thousand people were killed. Since the late nineteenth century onwards, cyclones in the region seem to have ‘abated in number and intensity’, but that may well be changing now. In 2009 Mumbai did experience a cyclonic storm, but fortunately its maximum wind speeds were in the region of 85 kmph, well below those of a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane intensity scale. But encounters with storms of greater intensity may be forthcoming: 2015 was the first year in which the Arabian Sea is known to have generated more storms than the Bay of Bengal. This trend could tip the odds towards the recurrence of storms like those of centuries past. Indeed, even as Adam and I were exchanging messages, Cyclone Chapala, a powerful storm, was forming in the Arabian Sea. Moving westward, it would hit the coast of Yemen on 3 November, becoming the first Category 1 cyclone in recorded history to do so: in just two days, it would deluge the coast with more rain than it would normally get in several years. And then—as if to confirm the projections—even as Chapala was still battering Yemen, another cyclone, Megh, formed in the Arabian Sea and began to move along a similar track. A few days later another cyclone began to take shape in the Bay of Bengal, so that the Indian subcontinent was flanked by cyclones on both sides, a very rare event. Suddenly the waters around India were churning with improbable events.  11 What might happen if a Category 4 or 5 storm, with 240 kmph or higher wind speeds, were to run directly into Mumbai? Mumbai’s previous encounters with powerful cyclones occurred at a time when the city had considerably less than 1 million inhabitants; today it is the second-largest municipality in the world with a population of over 20 million. With the growth of the city, its built environment has also changed so that weather that is by no means exceptional often has severe effects: monsoon downpours, for instance, often lead to flooding nowadays. With an exceptional event the results can be catastrophic. One such occurred on 26 July 2005, when a downpour without precedent in Mumbai’s recorded history descended on the city: the northern suburbs received 94.4 cm of rain in fourteen hours, one of the highest rainfall totals ever recorded anywhere in a single day. On that day, with catastrophic suddenness, the people of the city were confronted with the costs of three centuries of interference with the ecology of an estuarine location. The remaking of the landscape has so profoundly changed the area’s topography that its natural drainage channels are now little more than filth- clogged ditches. The old waterways have been so extensively filled in, diverted and built over that their carrying capacity has been severely diminished; and the water bodies, swamplands and mangroves that might have served as natural sinks have also been encroached upon to a point where they have lost much of their absorptive ability. A downpour as extreme as that of 26 July would pose a challenge even to a very effective drainage system: Mumbai’s choked creeks and rivers were wholly inadequate to the onslaught. They quickly overflowed causing floods in which water was mixed with huge quantities of sewage as well as dangerous industrial effluents. Roads and rail tracks disappeared under waist-high and even chest-high floodwater; in the northern part of the city, where the rainfall was largely concentrated, entire neighbourhoods were inundated: 2.5 million people ‘were under water for hours together’. On weekdays Mumbai’s suburban railway network transports close to 6.6 million passengers; buses carry more than 1.5 million. The deluge came down on a Tuesday, beginning at around 2 p.m. Local train services were soon disrupted, and by 4.30 p.m. none were moving; several arterial roads and intersections were cut off by floodwater at about the same time. The situation worsened as more and more vehicles poured on to the roads; in many parts of the city traffic came to a complete standstill. Altogether 200 kilometres of road were submerged; some motorists drowned in their cars because short-circuited electrical systems would not allow them to open doors and windows. Thousands of scooters, motorcycles, cars, and buses were abandoned on the waterlogged roads. At around 5 p.m. cellular networks failed; most landlines stopped working too. Soon much of the city’s power supply was also cut off (although not before several people had been electrocuted): parts of the city would remain without power for several days. Two million people, including many schoolchildren, were stranded, with no means of reaching home; 1,50,000 commuters were jammed into the city’s two major railway stations. Those without money were unable to withdraw cash because ATM services had been knocked out as well. Road, rail and air services would remain cut off for two days. Over 500 people died: many were washed away in the floods; some were killed in a landslide. Two thousand residential buildings were partially or completely destroyed; more than ninety thousand shops, schools, healthcare centres and other buildings suffered damage. While Mumbai’s poor, especially the inhabitants of some of its informal settlements, were among the worst affected, the rich and famous were not spared either. The most powerful politician in the city had to be rescued from his home in a fishing boat; many Bollywood stars and industrialists were stranded or trapped by floodwater.  Through all of this Mumbaikars showed great generosity and resilience, sharing food and water and opening up their homes to strangers. Yet, as one observer notes, on 26 July 2005, it became ‘clear to many million people in Mumbai that life may never be quite the same again. An exceptional rainstorm finally put to rest the long prevailing myth of Mumbai’s indestructible resilience to all kinds of shocks, including that of the partition’. In the aftermath of the deluge, many recommendations were made by civic bodies, NGOs and even the courts. But ten years later, when another downpour occurred on 10 June 2015, it turned out that few of the recommended measures had been implemented: even though the volume of rainfall was only a third of that of the deluge of 2005, many parts of the city were again swamped by floodwater. What does Mumbai’s experience of the downpour of 2005 tell us about what might, or might not, happen if a major storm hits the city? The events will, of course, unfold very differently: to start with, a cyclone will arrive not with a few hours’ notice, as was the case with the deluges, but after a warning period of several days. Storms are now so closely tracked, from the time they form onwards, that there is usually an interval of a few days when emergency measures can be put in place. Of these emergency measures, probably the most effective is evacuation. In historically cyclone-prone areas, like eastern India and Bangladesh, systems have been set up to move millions of people away from the coast when a major storm approaches; these measures have dramatically reduced casualties in recent years. But the increase in cyclonic activity in the Arabian Sea is so recent that there has yet been no need for large-scale evacuations on the subcontinent’s west coast. Whether such evacuations could be organized at all is an open question. Mumbai has been lucky not to have been hit by a major storm in more than a century; perhaps for that reason the possibility appears not to have been taken adequately into account in planning for disasters. Moreover, here, ‘as in most megacities, disaster management is focused on post-disaster response’.  In Mumbai, disaster planning seems to have been guided largely by concerns about events that occur with little or no warning, like earthquakes and deluges: evacuations usually follow rather than precede disasters of this kind. With a cyclone, given a lead-up period of several days, it would not be logistically impossible to evacuate large parts of the city before the storm’s arrival: its rail and port facilities would certainly be able to move millions of people to safe locations on the mainland. But in order to succeed, such an evacuation would require years of planning and preparation; people in at- risk areas would also need to be educated about the dangers to which they might be exposed. And that exactly is the rub—for in Mumbai, as in Miami and many other coastal cities, these are often the very areas in which expensive new construction projects are located. Property values would almost certainly decline if residents were to be warned of possible risks— which is why builders and developers are sure to resist efforts to disseminate disaster-related information. One consequence of the last two decades of globalization is that real estate interests have acquired enormous power, not just in Mumbai but around the world; very few civic bodies, especially in the developing world, can hope to prevail against construction lobbies, even where it concerns public safety. The reality is that ‘growth’ in many coastal cities around the world now depends on ensuring that a blind eye is turned towards risk. Even with extensive planning and preparation the evacuation of a vast city is a formidable task, and not only for logistical reasons. The experience of New Orleans in the days before Hurricane Katrina, or of New York before Sandy, or the city of Tacloban before Haiyan, tells us that despite the most dire warnings large numbers of people will stay behind; even mandatory evacuation orders will be disregarded by many. In the case of a megacity like Mumbai this means that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will find themselves in harm’s way when a cyclone makes landfall. Many will, no doubt, assume that having dealt with the floods of the recent past they will also be able to ride out a storm. But the impact of a Category 4 or 5 cyclone will be very different from anything that Mumbai has experienced in living memory. During the deluges of 2005 and 2015 rain fell heavily on some parts of the city and lightly on others: the northern suburbs bore the brunt of the rainfall in both cases. The effects of the flooding were also most powerfully felt in low- lying areas and by the residents of ground-level houses and apartments; people living at higher elevations, and on the upper storeys of tall buildings, were not as badly affected. But the winds of a cyclone will spare neither low nor high; if anything, the blast will be felt most keenly by those at higher elevations. Many of Mumbai’s tall buildings have large glass windows; few, if any, are reinforced. In a cyclone, these exposed expanses of glass will have to withstand not just hurricane-strength winds but also flying debris. Many of the dwellings in Mumbai’s informal settlements have roofs made of metal sheets and corrugated iron; cyclone-force winds will turn these, and the thousands of billboards that encrust the city, into deadly projectiles, hurling them with great force at the glass-wrapped towers that soar above the city. Nor will a cyclone overlook those parts of the city that were spared the worst of the floods; to the contrary they will probably be hit first and hardest. The cyclones that have struck the west coast of India in the past have all travelled upwards on a north-easterly tack, from the southern quadrant of the Arabian Sea. A cyclone moving in this direction would run straight into south Mumbai, where many essential civic and national institutions are located. The southernmost tip of Mumbai consists of a tongue of low-lying land, much of it reclaimed; several important military and naval installations are situated there, as is one of the country’s most important scientific bodies— the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. A storm surge of 2 or 3 metres would put much of this area under water; single-storey buildings may be submerged almost to the roof. And an even higher surge is possible. Not far from here lie the areas in which the city’s most famous landmarks and institutions are located: most notably, the iconic Marine Drive, with its sea-facing hotels, famous for their sunset views, and its necklace-like row of art deco buildings. All of this sits on reclaimed land; at high tide waves Bovary, in both of which chance and happenstance are crucial to the narrative. In Flaubert’s novel, for instance, the narrative pivots at a moment when Monsieur Bovary has an accidental encounter with his wife’s soon-to- be lover at the opera, just after an impassioned scene during which she has imagined that the lead singer ‘was looking at her... She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength, as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out, “Take me away! carry me with you!”’ It could not, of course, be otherwise: if novels were not built upon a scaffolding of exceptional moments, writers would be faced with the Borgesian task of reproducing the world in its entirety. But the modern novel, unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable: the concealment of its scaffolding of events continues to be essential to its functioning. It is this that makes a certain kind of narrative a recognizably modern novel. Here, then, is the irony of the ‘realist’ novel: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real. What this means in practice is that the calculus of probability that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same as that which obtains outside it; this is why it is commonly said, ‘If this were in a novel, no one would believe it.’ Within the pages of a novel an event that is only slightly improbable in real life—say, an unexpected encounter with a long-lost childhood friend—may seem wildly unlikely: the writer will have to work hard to make it appear persuasive. If that is true of a small fluke of chance, consider how much harder a writer would have to work to set up a scene that is wildly improbable even in real life? For example, a scene in which a character is walking down a road at the precise moment when it is hit by an unheard-of weather phenomenon? To introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence; it is to risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house —those generic outhouses that were once known by names such as ‘the often pour over the sea wall. A storm surge would be barely impeded as it swept over and advanced eastward. A distance of about 4 kilometres separates south Mumbai’s two sea- facing shorelines. Situated on the east side are the city’s port facilities, the legendary Taj Mahal Hotel, and the plaza of the Gateway of India, which is already increasingly prone to flooding. Beyond lies a much-used fishing port: any vessels that had not been moved to safe locations would be seized by the storm surge and swept towards the Gateway of India and the Taj Hotel. At this point waves would be pouring into south Mumbai from both its sea-facing shorelines; it is not inconceivable that the two fronts of the storm surge would meet and merge. In that case the hills and promontories of south Mumbai would once again become islands, rising out of a wildly agitated expanse of water. Also visible above the waves would be the upper storeys of many of the city’s most important institutions: the Town Hall, Vidhan Sabha, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminus, the towering headquarters of the Reserve Bank of India and the skyscraper that houses India’s largest and most important stock exchange. Much of south Mumbai is low-lying; even after the passing of the cyclone many neighbourhoods would probably be waterlogged for several days; this will be true of other parts of the city as well. If the roads and rail lines are cut for any length of time, food and water shortages may develop, possibly leading to civil unrest. In Mumbai, waterlogging often leads to the spread of illness and disease: the city’s health infrastructure was intended to cater to a population of about half its present size; its municipal hospitals have only 40,000 beds. Since many hospitals will have been evacuated before the storm, it may be difficult for the sick and injured to get medical attention. If Mumbai’s stock exchange and Reserve Bank are rendered inoperative, then India’s financial and commercial systems may be paralysed. But there is another possibility, yet more frightening. Of the world’s megacities, Mumbai is one of the few that has a nuclear facility within its urban limits: the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre at Trombay. To the north, at Tarapur, 94 kilometres from the city’s periphery, lies another nuclear facility. Both these plants sit right upon the shoreline, as do many other nuclear installations around the world: these locations were chosen in order to give them easy access to water. With climate change many nuclear plants around the world are now threatened by rising seas. An article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists notes: ‘During massive storms... there is a greatly increased chance of the loss of power at a nuclear power plant, which significantly contributes to safety risks.’ Essential cooling systems could fail; safety systems could be damaged; contaminants could seep into the plant and radioactive water could leak out, as happened at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. What threats might a major storm pose for nuclear plants like those in Mumbai’s vicinity? I addressed this question to a nuclear safety expert, M.V. Ramana, of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University. His answer was as follows: ‘My biggest concerns have to do with the tanks in which liquid radioactive waste is stored. These tanks contain, in high concentrations, radioactive fission products and produce a lot of heat due to radioactive decay; explosive chemicals can also be produced in these tanks, in particular hydrogen gas. Typically waste storage facilities include several safety systems to prevent explosions. During major storms, however, some or all of these systems could be simultaneously disabled: cascading failures could make it difficult for workers to carry out any repairs—this is assuming that there will be any workers available and capable of undertaking repairs during a major storm. An explosion at such a tank, depending on the energy of the explosion and the exact weather conditions, could lead to the dispersal of radioactivity over hundreds of square kilometres; this in turn could require mass evacuations or the long- term cessation of agriculture in regions of high contamination.’ Fortunately, the chances of a cyclone hitting Mumbai are small in any given year. But there is no doubt whatsoever of the threats that will confront the city because of other climate change impacts: increased precipitation and rising sea levels. If there are substantial increases in rainfall over the next few decades, as climate models predict, then damaging floods will become more frequent. As for sea levels, if they rise by 1 metre or more by the end of the century, as some climate scientists fear they might, then some parts of south Mumbai will gradually become uninhabitable. A similar fate awaits two other colonial cities, founded in the same century as Mumbai: Chennai, which also experienced a traumatic deluge in 2015; and Kolkata, to which I have close familial links. Unlike Chennai and Mumbai, Kolkata is not situated beside the sea. However, much of its surface area is below sea level, and the city is subject to regular flooding: like everyone who has lived in Kolkata, I have vivid memories of epic floods. But long familiarity with flooding tends to have a lulling effect, which is why it came as a shock to me when I learned, from a World Bank report, that Kolkata is one of the global megacities that is most at risk from climate change; equally shocking was the discovery that my family’s house, where my mother and sister live, is right next to one of the city’s most threatened neighbourhoods. The report forced me to face a question that eventually confronts everybody who takes the trouble to inform themselves about climate change: what can I do to protect my family and loved ones now that I know what lies ahead? My mother is elderly and increasingly frail; there is no telling how she would fare if the house were to be cut off by a flood and medical attention were to become unavailable for any length of time. After much thought I decided to talk to my mother about moving. I tried to introduce the subject tactfully, but it made little difference: she looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Nor could I blame her: it did seem like lunacy to talk about leaving a beloved family home, with all its memories and associations, simply because of a threat outlined in a World Bank report. It was a fine day, cool and sunlit; I dropped the subject. But the experience did make me recognize something that I would otherwise have been loathe to admit: contrary to what I might like to think, my life is not guided by reason; it is ruled, rather, by the inertia of habitual motion. This is indeed the condition of the vast majority of human beings, which is why very few of us will be able to adapt to global warming if it is left to us, as individuals, to make the necessary changes; those who will uproot themselves and make the right preparations are precisely those obsessed monomaniacs who appear to be on the borderline of lunacy. If whole societies and polities are to adapt then the necessary decisions will need to be made collectively, within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn?