Shadows of the Monsoon: Climate Change and Culture

I don’t have a home.

I live in an apartment with cold walls and dim hallways and boxy rooms that are too quiet for my liking. I live in Jakarta, the epicenter of business and economy, a city with a lovely background track of blaring car horns to accompany your walk around its bare parks and fake forests. I have a place to live, but I don’t have a home.

My home used to be the big house with the thatched roof and wooden floors at the center of the village west of Java. It used to be place where all the members of the village would come together for the annual gathering to celebrate each successful harvest, where we would all stuff our faces full with the delicious food made by Mami and our elders after a full day of prayer and rituals, and afterwards lie in the grass gazing up at the stars, exchanging stories and creating memories that would last for a lifetime. My home was hot, loud, chaotic, comparatively unstructured compared to the strict, straight skyscrapers and complex, winding roads of the big city—but that’s what made it home.

Life was simple, then. Every day we would work to grow our crops, and every year we would meet at the same house and see both familiar and new faces and eat good food and have a merry time together. But that was before the monsoon began acting up. At first, the rainy season started much later than usual. The temperature began to get noticeably hotter and hotter. The sun would dry up the farmland mercilessly for months on end and completely flood the place with rain on a random day. We could never predict what was coming next—and that meant we never knew when it was time to harvest our crops. Less and less people came for our yearly tradition, because what harvest was there to celebrate?

Once, it rained for a whole month straight. It was as if the heavens were weeping for the horrendous damage we had done to the earth, pummeling houses with its tears, screaming at its persecuted with a flash and a loud crack, shoving off all its impurities in an attempt to bury its tormentors and remind them of the grounds from which they came and will return to. I was trying to salvage what was left of our rice grains, fueled by some foolish hope that maybe, just maybe, this year we would finally have our harvest again. But it didn’t matter at all; I returned to find half my village buried in dirt from a landslide. Many people died that day. A part of me died, too. It has been exactly one year since Papi bought us the one-way train ticket that brought us to Jakarta. I haven’t recovered since.

My school counsellor tells me to stop dwelling on the past and start focusing on my future. I will have to submit my university applications soon. I need to pick a major. I should study something related to computer science, she says. Agriculture will get me nowhere, she says. Embrace the future of technology, contribute towards mankind’s next big advancement: Artificial Intelligence, she says. What a truly remarkable achievement AI is; reducing the complex human brain to a bunch of 0’s and 1’s on a screen and letting that take control of our lives. People keep telling me to look to the future, but how do they expect to have a future in a world that is being run on diminishing natural resources and is slowly destroying everything around it? How do people talk so much about progress and innovation and not realize that their creations are one thing that is sabotaging their own future?

Humanity’s hubris does not seem to know an end. And now, our own reckless actions are coming back to haunt us. In pursuit of greatness, we failed to do good. The longer we continue to chase this aimless progress, the sooner we lose our identity and lose sight of who we are. And in the end, is it really worth it?

I feel it, the shadow of the next monsoon, casting its dark aura over this city. No more a friend, but now a foe. No longer a symbol of hope, but now the harbinger of our demise.