Lore and order

A new work of fiction by researcher and Wknd columnist Mridula Ramesh explores forests and faith as keys to addressing the climate crisis.

- Natasha Rego

The real magic can be as simple as a shift in perspective, she says. From thinking of something as unsolvable, to seeing it as ‘my problem, that I have to address’he winds had changed. The oceans were warming. The forests were burning. A monstrous El Niño was coming.

Amid it all, in a wooden cupboard in the basement of a temple in a small town in southern Tamil Nadu, a prophecy was waiting to be uncovered. A prophecy of pralaya or dissolution, handed down from generation to generation, within a family of priests. A prophecy, and a solution.

The Pralaya Prophecy (2026; Hachette India) is Wknd columnist, climate researcher and climate-tech investor Mridula Ramesh’s first work of fiction.

It is rooted in the idea of a planet in peril; but rooted also in the sense of hope, agency and action that underpin Ramesh’s works of nonfiction, The Climate Solution: India’s Climate-Change Crisis and What We Can Do about It (2018) and Watershed: How We Destroyed India’s Water and How We Can Save It (2021).

Like the earlier works, this one is set in the Indian context.

“When I wrote The Climate Solution, the goal was a book that was purely about India,” says Ramesh, 51. She has known for 12 years that she would use the same principle for her first work of fiction (which, incidentally, is designed as a trilogy). “I wanted a work of climate fiction that would have very Indian themes running through it,” she says.

In The Pralaya Prophecy, then, temples, faith and forests have a key role to play.

What did it take to merge myth and data, research and lore? It was an experiment, the author says. “The story weaves together the places and temples I have visited, the science I work with, and the stories I grew up with.”