I live in Colombo and we're at the edge of Cyclone Ditwah. The hill country is in the thick of it, Kandy and Nuwara Eliya are completely flooded. Rivers are blowing through the streets of the hilly country. Three of our driver's friends got buried. I think at least 60 are dead, it must be more, the force is monumental. Sri Lanka hasn't had a cyclone like this for decades. It's both awful and awe-inspiring.

As Michael Ondaatje said in Running In The Family, describing the death of a relative in then Ceylon,

On August 15, 1947, she wanted fresh air, needed to walk, a walk to Moon Plains, no motorcycle, no danger, and she stepped out towards the still dark night of almost dawn and straight into the floods.

For two days and nights they had been oblivious to the amount of destruction outside their home. The whole country was mauled by the rains that year. Ratmalana, Bentota, Chilaw, Anuradhapura, were all under water. The forty-foot-high Peradeniya Bridge had been swept away. In Nuwara Eliya, Galways’s Land Bird Sanctuary and the Golf Course were ten feet under water. Snakes and fish from the lake swam into the windows of the Golf Club, into the bar, and around the indoor badminton court. Fish were found captured in the badminton nets when the flood receded a week later. Lalla took one step off the front porch and was immediately hauled away by an arm of water, her handbag bursting open. 208 cards moved ahead of her like a disturbed nest as she was thrown downhill still comfortable and drunk, snagged for a few moments on the railings of the Good Shepherd Convent and then lifted away towards the town of Nuwara.

It was her last perfect journey. The new river in the street moved her right across the race course and park towards the bus station. As the light came up slowly she was being swirled fast, “floating” (as ever confident of surviving this too) alongside branches and leaves, the dawn starting to hit flamboyant trees as she slipped past them like a dark log, shoes lost, false breast lost. She was free as a fish, travelling faster than she had in years, fast as Vere’s motorcycle, only now there was this roar around her. She overtook Jesus lizards that swam and ran in bursts over the water, she was surrounded by tired half-drowned fly-catchers screaming tack tack tack tack, frogmouths, nightjars forced to keep awake, brain-fever birds and their irritating ascending scales, snake eagles, scimitar-babblers, they rode the air around Lalla wishing to perch on her unable to alight on anything except what was moving.

Sri Lanka lives and dies by the regular monsoon, where the ocean breeze blows across the subcontinent, hits the Himalayas and rebounds as rain. The slow cycle gives us two growing cycles and sustenance that the ancients learned how to trap in giant tanks (let not a drop go to the sea without being useful to man). But Sri Lanka just dies by the irregular cyclone, it has wiped out our harvest this year and people will go hungry, I fear.

What is a tropical cyclone? It's like a hurricane but different. I guess it's like a colored hurricane. I think of it, meteorologically, like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. A spinning plume, spun out by the Coriolis Effect, the rotational force of the Earth. Clouds rise off the oceans and are spun, like cotton candy, by rotation. If the effect is strong enough, a low-pressure front develops at the center, the eye of the storm. Dense clouds whip all around.

The hotter the ocean the greater the potential energy, and the oceans are definitely hotter, the coral gets more and more bleached when I go diving. Is it climate change? Yes, it's climate, and the climate is changing. Life is, as Darwin said, adaptation to environmental change, and it goes both ways. The environment also adapts to us, it's an interplay.

I should have known when those first weird clouds hit Colombo. I don't know if there's a meteorological connection, but it was definitely an omen. There was a weird day when the kids drove to school with the windows down, because they could touch the clouds. People from apartments posted photos of skyscrapers in the mist. The heavy clouds had literally descended to earth, and it was heavenly at first.

Then it got worse. As I write this I feel like I'm on a ship, there's clinking and clanking outside, like a sail flapping, I can hear the wind roaring up and down in waves, and there's water getting in. We are inside the clouds again, but rain clouds. All day it drizzles and it blows, but at night it drenches and bellows. I hate the sounds at night, I'm safe on my ship but I don't sleep well.

I'm on the west coast and the cyclone hit the east coast (which got the tsunami also) most directly, and the hill country the worst. Sri Lanka is shaped like the palm of your left hand, with hills rising in the center of your palm. The rain clouds have whipped around them and brought the land sliding down.

Town I know—like Kandy and Nuwara Eliya—are unrecognizable. Roads I know are rivers. Hamlets have gotten hammered. Our maid's family has lost electricity for days and evacuated. Rail tracks have just disappeared. Old trees are fallen everywhere, ripped up by the roots in some cases. Getting a monsoon packed into a few days changes everything.

I've actually been in a cyclone once before, in Manila in the 2000s. I was there for a Nokia press junket, back when phones were cool and had different shapes and buttons. A cyclone shut the airport down and couldn't leave the Shangri-La, which was lovely, especially cause Nokia was paying for it. It was the end of an era, though I didn't know it. I had the sushi buffet for breakfast and felt the wind battering on the windows. The force was tremendous, if you went outside you could Smooth Criminal. That cyclone was a force of nature.

It's strange encountering such creatures. We're so used to being apex predators. But we still can't control the weather. We moderns think we're gods because we have smartphones, but we're only good for recording the movements of the old gods. Sun and wind, thunder and rain. Indra, whom my namesake (Indrajit) trapped once, but who human has ever captured. Like I say, I don't know if I believe in God (they/them), but I sure fear them. And right now, outside my blinds, I sure can hear them.