“I find it hard to believe people that live here. It’s uninhabitable for most of the year but the monsoons are murderous, the entire city flooded with filth,” said Ullis, looking up at the clear night sky, alert to augury and fray. “It’s unlivable yet people live here. It’s true of everywhere, true and getting truer as the years pass. You can see it if you look for it. First the water rises slowly, so slowly it’s imperceptible. But you know it’s higher than it was last year. It’s higher and you have to raise your house. You raise your house and then you raise it again. Now the water comes suddenly. Huge water, huge lakes, great rivers where it has always been dry. Flash floods in places that have never flooded before. Then the water doesn’t come at all. It dries the earth, cracks it open. There are cracks where there was moisture, a new desert, and people become water refugees. They take their animals and move to the cities. But the city can’t handle the influx. The riots begin, the killings, the long struggle, tribes forming and reforming, everybody living for the day, for the next few hours. It’s already happening. It’s already crazy that we live the way we live. Look at the huge fissures in the land and in the water. Think about earthquakes. Entire towns flattened overnight. Or washed away overnight. Your house shredding around you, your street washed away, your car floating upside down among the trees. The permafrost thawing faster than anybody imagined, abruptly thawing over vast tracts of the Arctic, and the billions of tons of carbon that’s locked into it, waiting to be released into the atmosphere, to make everything hotter. More heat, more water, more displacement. We say, how can this be? Yet we endure, year after year we endure. It’s a natural calamity, we say. The hand of God is upon us but we take pride in our resilience. We shall overcome. But it’s happening more often and it gets worse every time. And what do you do afterwards? Do you go back to the town or neighborhood or village that has washed away or dried up? Do you try and reconstruct your life? How do you do it when the old world is gone? How do you live through the next catastrophe? How do you persist? How do you rebuild knowing it will happen again? You search the sky for clues, listen to the birds and the dogs for a warning, and you pick up and move on, go somewhere new to start again. Why do you do it? There’s nowhere to go and everywhere is the same.”  

From LOW by Jeet Thayil, Faber & Faber (2019) Copyright © 2019 Jeet Thayil