It is not easy to think of storms, cyclones or tornadoes, or floods that drown cities in the lobby of a five-star hotel, where Amitav Ghosh is meeting reporters on Monday morning to talk about his latest book: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Penguin/Allen Lane).

But it is not easy to think about them anywhere. In fiction in particular.

Ghosh takes up this most difficult of subjects: what resists being put into words. The book begins with him talking about the cyclone that hit Delhi on March 17, 1978. A student of Delhi University then, Ghosh almost deliberately decided to walk into the tornado that would kill 30 and injure 700. He saw a "grey, tube-like extrusion" forming under a dark cloud and hid in a balcony, to see an "an extraordinary panoply" of flying objects that included vehicles and lamp posts.

"In that instant, gravity itself seemed to have been transformed into a wheel spinning upon the fingertip of some unknown power." Only much later did he realise that he had seen the eye of the storm.

This remains an overpowering image in the book - and in Ghosh's memory. Yet no tornado has ever figured in any of his novels, though he still has the newspaper clippings.

It is because of a silence at the heart of a modern novel. A tornado in the middle of a novel would appear "improbable", and the improbable is inappropriate in a literary form that has been shaped by the "regularity of bourgeois life", a phrase that Ghosh borrows from Franco Moretti. It is outside Culture. It is Nature, in a form that cannot be grasped, yet makes eye contact with you after coming alive in a shape that can frighten. It is, says Ghosh, "the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the non-human". It is a "re-cognition", as it occurs in classical Greek tragedy. It means it was there in the first place, but was obscured.

It is something that his fiction has often touched on: in The Calcutta Chromosome it is the mysterious, continuous world that hovers over the apparent one; in The Hungry Tide, a city-bred looks into the eye of the tiger, and there is the hungry tide itself.

And in these times of climate change, it is in the offing all around us, the forgotten life of the non-human. "The signs are everywhere," says Ghosh, of the phenomena of an uncanny, untold Nature springing from anywhere, yet we don't see them, let alone write about them. Ghosh's book calls this "derangement", madness.

"But climate change is very real," he stresses. He speaks about the recent permafrost melting in Siberia, which has led frozen bacteria to come to life and cause a severe anthrax outbreak claiming several lives already. Yet even as it happens, it sounds like perfect material for just sci-fi.

If that sounds distant, Calcutta has news that should make it reel. The sea is rising, downpours are becoming excessive. The city, much of which is below the sea level, is in severe threat of being flooded. A World Bank report has marked Calcutta among cities most vulnerable to flooding, area by area, and Lake Gardens and Jodhpur Park are among places likely to be worst hit. The report made Ghosh call up his mother in Jodhpur Parkfrom New York and ask her to shift. That did not happen.

The difficulty of engaging with climate change is not only limited to fiction. Ghosh's book cuts across many layers, looking at philosophy, religion and climate science - and also at the inability of history and politics to deal with climate change.

It is as if a consensus is at work in ignoring the implications. The stakeholders - everyone knows. They include not only politicians, businessmen or builders, but everyone.

That is another difficulty of writing about climate change: it asks us to examine ourselves, for almost every move in our lives now is "carbon-intensive", as are our desires, of buying, eating and flying in that fast car.

Ghosh mentions the flooding of Mumbai on July 26, 2005, and the more recent one of Chennai. Mumbai was hit by the "rain bomb", an unprecedented rainfall, he says, another climate change phenomenon. Its impact was made worse by the Mithi and drains that the city had choked with its refuse. Chennai flooded too, because "old drainage channels" were blocked. "But water can't be cheated."

It rises - and strikes. "In Maryland, suddenly the water rose," he says. The floods occurred after a river running through the area rose on Saturday.

Aren't these images Biblical, mythical in their dimension and portent?

Ghosh smiles. A bit of flooding in Delhi is reported everywhere. "But several millions of people are displaced in Assam."

 

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