What is the significance of the tornado Ghosh recalls witnessing at Delhi University while he was a student? How does this event relate to the major questions being posed in the text?

The reader should recall that this was a formative and memorable event in the author's life and that he struggled for years to include it in his fiction, because "Novelists inevitably mine their own experience when they write" (15). Ghosh believes his inability to put this tornado into one of his novels speaks to the difficulty writers have with introducing themes or events related to climate change into their own work.

What literary traditions does Ghosh suggest as the likely reasons that the topic of climate change does not appear more frequently in contemporary fiction? How do these traditions inhibit authors from discussing climate change in their work?

Readers should recall that Ghosh suggests realism and...