“The rain started at three. Not rain — the specific, Goan, October, cyclonic rain that was not water falling but water arriving, a horizontal assault that turned the air into sea and the beach into a river and the distinction between land and ocean into a philosophical rather than geographical concept. The wind was forty knots. The palm trees bent — the specific, evolutionary, storm-surviving flexibility of coconut palms, bending rather than breaking, a survival strategy that the palms had perfected over millennia and that humans had not.”