After they find dry ground for refuge, tie up surviving livestock, scan the ground for snakes and scorpions, queue, break queue and grab for food, plead for water, scream for tents, weep for loss, curse officials, lament fate — after all that, people whose lives have been upended by floods want to talk. I tell them I can’t do much. I am a researcher documenting and analyzing disaster impacts for various organizations, and it can be months before anyone even reads my reports. But sometimes, it’s enough for them to find someone who will listen.

Their stories are preserved in my scribbles from Pakistan’s 2010 superfloods, amber-toned by the resin of old grievances. And there are other, newer ones from this year’s record-breaking “Monster Monsoon” floods, not yet tinged by time and age; instead, they hold the clarity and acidity of vinegar. A few of the stories make it to my reports as case studies or three-line illustrations of my analyses. The rest lie in my soundproof vault of secondary grief.

What if I pulled them out? Mirroring Émile Zola, what if I were to write a story titled “The Flood,” detailing one family’s desperation and suffering as water levels rise, their hopes unraveling as they take dire measures, fail, and eventually drown? Whose story would I choose?

Maybe it would be the story of Najma’s brother, whose tragedy Najma narrated to me at a camp for people displaced by the monsoon floods of 2022. Among the lucky few to get a tent from the government, Najma’s family was in the four dozen or so who had fled Dadu District and taken shelter almost two hundred kilometers away in Jamshoro, Sindh. She told me they were getting by: they were camped close to National Highway 55, so they were receiving dry rations every few days, and charity trucks would frequently drop off cooked food. But while her husband wanted to tell me about all of the material losses they’d endured, Najma only wanted to talk about her brother. She didn’t mention his name, and at the time, I didn’t think to ask. She referred to him as “munjho bha” in Sindhi — “my brother,” MB in my notes, shortened in my memory to the phonetically fluid “Monjoba.”

As water barreled down the hills in raging torrents and filled, overfilled, then breached the lake and bled into the rainwater already inundating his village, Monjoba clambered onto his roof with his wife and five children. Without legal ownership of the property, he refused to leave the house. His only claim was having lived there for generations; leaving would relinquish the claim. As Najma left the house with her husband, wading through waist-deep water with their kids hoisted on their heads, she tried to persuade her brother to come along. But Monjoba hunkered down to protect the only asset he had, confident that the water level would soon go down. It kept rising, reaching a depth of twelve feet. He was convinced that his family would have to huddle on the roof for only a few hours; two days later, all seven of them were dead. In the flooding, the roof of the house collapsed, trapping and burying all of them in the sunken debris. The house they stayed back to save no longer exists.

Najma didn’t know which frantic or forlorn conversations took place on that rooftop, which audacious plans were hatched, who prayed for what, whose hopes were dashed at which point. These are details that — if I were to write the story — I could imagine, fictionalize, and fill in.

I could build in a classic, if overused, tragic epiphany: Monjoba regretting his decision to stay, realizing at the end that love and family matter more than material things, swearing to abandon the house if help arrives — but understanding that too late, because it does not.

I could make the characters relatable, speeding through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Kids. Definitely kids. Children’s anguish makes for precision-guided sentimental assault. How would an eight-year-old girl bargain for her life? How would an eleven-year-old boy’s acceptance of encroaching death play out? I could rev up the poignancy: get the family to fixate on a particular point on the horizon — maybe a mosque’s minaret, a talisman — and believe that as long as this point is visible, they’ll be safe.

Perhaps I’d layer the narrative by introducing objects of attachment, emotional anchors readers can identify with, even if they cannot relate to the horror of helplessly watching the life one knows drown inch by inch. Monjoba’s wife could have a special rilli, a type of intricate appliqué bedspread made by women across rural Sindh. She’d have spent years making it for her trousseau. It would have eventually become her security blanket, companion to her abuse or orgasms, or her bridge to another person or time — a secret lover, a gossipy sister, the joy of her youth, picnics along the lake — its essence so much more than a quilt sewn in red, green, and yellow, the way a cross is so much more than two pieces of wood nailed together. Maybe she’d weep on the roof as she watches the water consume the rilli, churn it, turn its deep jewel tones into a searing sepia mess. Maybe she’d feel her blood thicken and slow as the mud-drenched rilli ebbs away, caught across her goat’s bloated, floating carcass.

You wouldn’t be able to see through my authorial machinations once these descriptions were in place: Monjoba’s thick wrists and deeply grooved palms, calloused after years of tilling the soil with his hoe, the prominent veins on the back of his hand furrowing through a smattering of hair, hair the same color as the soil embedded in his cuticles. His wife’s eyes, luminous pools of despair, guarded by straight, spiked lashes. His innocent child with her palm trustingly curled around Monjoba’s finger, the birthmark on her cheek enhancing her dimple, secure in the belief that her father will protect her.

I could do a lot more to the story. Increase the stakes: like Zola does with one of his characters, get Monjoba to fashion a raft from a wooden door in an attempt to save his children. Climax: It slams against some random submerged structure and overturns. They manage to grab each other and pull themselves back to temporary safety.

I could escalate the tension again, maybe get one or two of the family to die before the rest. Bring in futile heroism: get Monjoba to try swimming out with one small child, promising to return for the others, only to lose the child to the roiling waves, or maybe to a snakebite, and helplessly witness this child’s painful death. Is that enough of an emotional chokeslam? As a denouement, the rest of them could find grace in being together until the end.

But what would be the point of this apocryphal story? If written vividly enough, it might make some stomachs clench, draw out some empathy. And then what? Would empathy for the protagonist and his family transfer to those who survived the floods? How many can one feel empathy for? The thirty-three million impacted by the current floods in Pakistan? The nearly eight million displaced? Half of those? A quarter? One-tenth?

Ten?

One?

And then what?

The appeal of calls for climate justice, impacting millions of people, is partly dependent on how big of a lump they can produce in your throat. In what psychologists and behavioral scientists refer to as “psychic numbing,” as the number of victims in a disaster rise, people’s emotional response to that tragedy diminishes. Paul Slovic and Daniel Västfjäll, who study this phenomenon, have summed it up like so: “The more who die, the less we care.” We have documented the facts of the flooding in Pakistan: almost eight million displaced, six hundred thousand in relief camps, twenty million who require humanitarian assistance. And that’s all they are. Numbers. Distant, blurred numbers.

Others refer to the identifiable victim effect, a cognitive bias whereby people feel greater empathy and urge to help when the tragedy is about a specific person, vividly identifiable, like Monjoba, and not when victims are part of a larger and thus vaguer group. According to George Loewenstein and Karen E. Jenni, who wrote about this effect, there is a reason for the disparity in how people treat these two sets of victims: of those who are identifiable and at risk, a high proportion can be saved.

In Monjoba’s story, there is no one left to save. That’s partly why I’d choose it over other stories. If I were to write it, no one would email to ask where to send funds for survivors; there would be no requests from journalists to set up interviews, no requests to take the family on this or that tour, no setting up a GoFundMe page to rebuild their house, no holding survivorship up as a portrait of resilience. All easy altruism, all individualized feel-good options, would be closed off.

Would this story, if written, compel a reckoning? Could Monjoba’s raft of desperation — his wife’s rilli repository, his child’s trusting smile turned to poisoned froth and rigor mortis, the soil and regrets embedded in his cuticles — serve as something more than a thermometer for emotions? Could it prompt readers to perceive the link between how their governments’ decisions and their own lifestyles compound and impact nameless, faceless people across large swaths of the world?

What if I were to construct the story as an allegory: render Monjoba as an extended metaphor, set up his refusal to deal with life-threatening floods till it is too late as analogous to the denial of climate change that will eventually destroy us, and then wait for readers to realize they are Monjoba?

But allegories are considered old-fashioned, a disease of the didacts, painful and boring, like morality in global power politics. The form proposes a correct way of reading, limits imaginative freedom to the intentions of the author, like putting blinders on a horse to make it see in only one direction. Borges called allegories “intolerable…stupid and frivolous.” Poe claimed them to be an inferior literary mode, and from J. R. R. Tolkien to China Miéville, writers have criticized, disliked, and dismissed allegories. Modern readers don’t want to be the horse led to water. They want to go on their own journeys, meander through meanings, discover their own streams of water and consciousness.

So if moralizing is now misplaced in literature, what space is there to write about imperiled people, except to set them up as subjects for recreational grieving? And why should imperiled people be expected to display their pain for empty empathy that won’t translate into lifesaving action?

As I write, Nigeria has been hit by floods, the country’s worst in a decade, displacing nearly 1.3 million people. The devastation in Pakistan is far worse, in numbers and scale. What horrors should Nigerian writers present to break through the saturation and numbness set in motion by Pakistan’s floods, and how should they up the global attention ante? They could pit their stories against Monjoba by writing about the seventy-six souls who drowned when an overloaded boat of people fleeing the floods capsized in Anambra State. They could fictionalize more maudlin tales: a woman, eight months pregnant, who finally found the strength and saved enough money to run away from her abusive husband, only to drown. Or an octogenarian man who survived while all eleven of his family members, including grandchildren, died in front of his eyes.

But they won’t have to compete with Monjoba for compassion. I won’t enter that exchange of producing and consuming secondhand grief, and I won’t prompt any onus-shrugging philanthropy. I will not resolve this aporia.

Munjho bha’s story will remain unwritten.