This is a piece I wrote in the middle of 2016. It's called Climate Bait. I was sitting in the waiting room when you was flashed across the screen. A heat wave smothered India and you were on the scene as you tried to cross the street, your shoe stuck to the road, so you crossed in bare-scotch feet as the black task slowly flowed, where once were straight white lines of crazy patterned, morphed and swirled as if a giant with a paintbrush smashed out and dwarf the world. You long for cooling rain, but the monsoon will be late. And this is how some people face their climate fate. You're a woman of Maharashtra. Farm life is what you know. With the earth so cracked and bare, nothing green can grow. As the dead piles up for the chemicals and seed as you wonder how to fill the many mouths, you have to feed as you turn to your husband to say somehow you will cope, you see in his eyes that there's no more room for hope and then your nightmare just gets worse. The day you lose your mate. And this is how some people face their climate fate. You've lived in Karachi, all of your life, there with your kids, your parents, your wife last year, the heat wave rolled in and swept a thousand lives away, overwhelmed the morg, corpses left out to decay, this time you swear you will be ready and not have to face that smell of those left rot in the very place they fell and so you dig out mass graves and pray for rain while you wait. This is how some people face their climate fate. When Sandy struck New York, you'd left for somewhere calm, flew back when it was over, once you knew you'd meet no harm next to super storm to hit will not be so inconvenient. Even if next time Mother Nature is less lenient for you, bought yourself a condo with room sealed watertight, floodgates, pumps power, and the emergency light and so you gamble on the oil stocks knowing you'll be all right mate and this is how some people face their climate fate.