Where do socio-economic dispossession and marginalization end and the physical realities of climate change begin? What’s in a definition? Who gets to define it? As the climate continues to change, who is in charge to telling its stories? The “refugees”? The people calling them refugees?

I used to think that being able to rattle away in English was the greatest of achievements and sought to follow the diktat of the wet nurses of English education, “To earn money, study English.”

The small gods said
that I can’t see past the hill.

What am I?
A lady? A queen?

The kitchen is a silent civil war zone
Bound by wedding rings

He was the purple flower with
his palms for leaves
that could hold the
tears passed down
as family legacy.

Not many people live here anymore.
And those who do, they look like,
they’ve forgotten how to laugh.

On the first day of 2019 I happened to be rifling through a bookshelf in a hotel in Benaulim, Goa, a bookshelf of the sort common in places where people come to forget.

“Have you seen a nāgā?” I was talking to an eminent scholar, from a famous American university, about Kathmandu’s religion. He clearly felt that I’d misunderstood what these spirits might be. “They are not snakes,”...