All these scenes could have come from Megha Majumdar’s prescient new novel, A Guardian and a Thief , set in a near-future apocalyptic Kolkata that is reeling from an acute food shortage caused by severe weather fluctuations. In this “ruined year,” Majumdar writes at the beginning of the book, “the heat [was] a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one’s head.” The searing days are interspersed with spells of intense rain, when sheets of water blur human vision and destroy crops, harvest, and lives with abandon: “By this time, stormwater was turning lanes into canals,” as “Kolkata was at last Venice.”

On Sept. 23, days before Durga Puja, the biggest annual carnival for Bengalis, the city of Kolkata experienced a shocking cloudburst. In just a few hours, parts of West Bengal’s capital saw nearly a foot of rainfall, which led to flash floods and the death of at least 12 people. Cars and buses floated on arterial roads as residents drained buckets of water from their houses. Homeless people scrambled to find shelter, and the power supply was disrupted for hours. A bizarre video of a snake swimming in a flooded backyard with a fish in its mouth went viral on social media.

On Sept. 23, days before Durga Puja, the biggest annual carnival for Bengalis, the city of Kolkata experienced a shocking cloudburst. In just a few hours, parts of West Bengal’s capital saw nearly a foot of rainfall, which led to flash floods and the death of at least 12 people. Cars and buses floated on arterial roads as residents drained buckets of water from their houses.