The roosters’ crows pierce through the morning fog, sounding off the early morning alarm that wakes me before my grandparents, whom I am visiting for winter break from America. The house they live in doesn’t have a bathroom, so 5 AM is the optimal time to take care of business in the surrounding fields without anyone noticing. I get out of bed and walk to the front of the house, where the village’s Sankranti bonfire continues to burn. The plastic chairs sit outside people’s homes as remains of last night’s the Sankranti dinner potluck. I wander to the back of the house where the cows graze on the few panes of grass left, mooing at the sight of people walking past them.

I hike through the fields of mango trees to find a place to pee. The grounds are a lot less lush than I remember them as a child. Days before Sankranti, the Hindu festival celebrating the winter solstice, my cousins and I used to travel from all across the world to gather and celebrate the festival in our grandparents’ village. The kids would sneak into these fields and play Antakshari, a game where each contestant sings a song that begins with the word with which the previous contestant’s song ended. After our games, we would carve our names and the date onto a nearby mango tree. Years later, only one name remains on the withered tree: Arjun, my cousin who ran away from home and is still missing.

The surrounding area reeks of cremating bodies of farmers who committed suicide due to failed crops. Rows of tombstones stand erect in silence to the left and right, in front and behind, like a sea of the dead. They did not even have the privilege to be cremated since suicide Hinduism sees suicide as unholy, proving that segregation continues even after physical death. The once-flourishing mango trees leaning freely towards the stones and branches reaching out to each other. The dead laid to rest, gravestones in the promise of not being forgotten, but a promise which always ends broken. A few months later, my family would plant another tombstone in the land after a bottle of pesticides replaced my uncle’s evening chai. The plight of farmers seemed lost in the narrative I was shown on international news that focuses on celebrity gossip and mindless politics.

I take a detour into the local villages’ combined shopping center, a series of concrete housings shuttered down not to protect against thieves, but to hide the lack of products from the public. At the end of the shops was a newly-built Hindu temple, a closet-sized room with checks adorned by portraits of Hindu deities. At the front of the room stood a three-foot-tall statue of Lord Venkateswara with a chain of plastic pink roses and fresh white chrysanthemums from the previous night’s Sankranti-eve puja. Behind the temple, I see the run-down Kummarapalli Theatre, with its monolithic showtime display above the tinted doors. I peek in through the windows and see demolished wood, dust, trash, and movie posters. The concession booths still stand intact, with the price of samosas still displayed on the menu board. I cannot help but recall the cultural hub that this place once was. Village families, teenage friend groups, film enthusiasts all once gathered here. Three years ago, during Sankranti, my extended family all went to this theatre to watch a family movie about Sankranti–the Tollywood film industry functions on meta-themes during for its releases. The doors to the theatre, which gave passage to villagers into the world of entertainment, dance numbers, idealism, and false hope, currently serve as a bulletin for real estate ads for foreclosed houses and religious flyers promising the same better life. A familiar venue for village residents perishes while the cultural relic remains.

Kummarapalli was a village of hardships, where poverty replaced abundance and joy. Kummarapalli and its surrounding communities are experiencing their lowest percentage of Monsoon rainfall in 140 years. Since the agriculture-based villages only planted water-intensive mango trees to get higher profits, all farmers’ crops were equally hurt by the drought. Due to the government’s lack of help, farmers have resorted to public suicides as a hopeless protest. In February 2016, after his crops had failed for the third year in a row and with no chance of repaying his loans, a farmer from Kummarapalli sat on the street outside the local bank and drank from a bottle of pesticide. He died a few hours later, leaving his wife and two daughters.

Since then, farmer suicides had tripled, theatres shut down, and new temples were erected. The cycle of drought, debt, and suicide spread like a plague as news media focuses on aimless gossips, and politicians fail to take concrete steps to help farmers. The primary cause of the drought seems to be climate change, as a rise in global temperatures is causing a lack of rainfall. The correlation between suicide rates and rising temperatures was uncovered in large-scale research in July 2017 by Tamma Carleton, then a Ph.D. candidate in agriculture and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Suicide is a stark indicator of human hardship, yet the causes of these deaths remain understudied, particularly in developing countries,” Carleton wrote. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change is causing 12.6 million deaths a year — a figure expected to rise by 250,000 between 2030 and 2050. In India, where one-fifth of the world’s suicides occur, according to Carleton, “the climate, particularly temperature, has a strong influence over a growing suicide epidemic.”

The village that I grew up in is no more. Everything is now unfamiliar. The villagers lack the willpower to fight their own battles and are resorting to God to hear their silent prayers. The mango trees that gave me and my cousins shade during our annual cricket competitions now shelter the dead farmers and their dreams. This year, my cousins decided not to come to the village for Sankranti. They stayed back in their foreign countries for fear of having to face the unfamiliar emotional terrain of our family’s original home. Although I, too, was scared, my dad and I flew from the US to India to keep the Sankranti tradition of visiting my grandparents alive. The village of Kummarapalli lost its joy, grit, people, and identity. I can only see this before the sun rises, and its warmth casts the message that the Sankranti eve is over, and now the festivities begin. The bonfire struggles to burn through its last minutes as gusts of dusty wind fight its existence. However, the rest of the village remains asleep where their dreams bring more joy than their wakeful nightmares. I get back into the bed with my grandfather and go back to dreaming of better times. Meanwhile, the industrialized countries from thousands of miles away continue creating enough climate change to kill a small Indian village in its sleep.