Come, Rain

Shouldn't all my classes be about climate change?

This picture is from exactly a year ago. July 9, 2023. Raj Kamal Jha, novelist and newspaper editor, noted that 150-plus mm of rain had fallen in Delhi that day. (It is hot and dry where I am today, at home in upstate New York. Delhi is only as hot as it is here in New York, probably because rain is expected there. Last month, when I was in Delhi, the temperature had hit 49.9 degrees C or 121.82 F. Hell couldn’t be hotter.)

I wish we had rain here. In India, too. But I remember how, last year, I had been stuck on the highway in India for sixteen hours on account of a landslide that had been the result of heavy rains. In fact, Raj Kamal sent me this video of what had happened in Delhi that day I had taken the photograph above. Here is the video:

I have a poet-friend who for the past three or more decades has every morning recorded the weather in his journal. For more than a year, I have been maintaining a heat journal. The planet is becoming hotter with every passing year and it hurts the poor in poorer countries the most. In the new course I am teaching this coming semester, one of the titles we will be discussing will be Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First.

While growing up in India, I always maintained this fantasy of retreating from the heat into the mountains. When I won some money in a debate contest during my first year in college, I used the money to go to Kashmir. The next year, I went to Himachal Pradesh. But climate change means rising temperatures, heavy, unpredictable rains, and flooding from Ladakh to Sikkim.

I’m teaching “Nature Writing” for the first time as a semester-long writing course. I’d like students to gain a global understanding of what is happening to the planet. But I also want them to have the means of exploring language and the weather—like Raj Kamal does even in the simple matter of providing a caption to a photograph. The writers in my course include Joy Williams, John Vaillant, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Arundhati Roy, Rebecca Solnit, and others. I need to read a lot this summer to even be able to teach such a course but the real question is—shouldn’t all my courses be about climate change?