Editor’s Note: Over the past year, Fresh Energy has partnered with Change Narrative founder Jothsna Harris to help our staff explore and articulate their personal climate stories through guided workshops and reflective writing exercises. The following post is the third in a series in which Fresh Energy staff share their individual climate stories, providing an intimate, personal look into our staff’s diverse experiences, passions, and connections to place that shape our dedication to building a carbon-free economy that works for all Minnesotans. –Isak Kvam
I’m sitting on the veranda of my grandmother’s house in India, Kerala to be specific, staring at the coconut trees in the stillness, wondering if they were just as bored as I was. I was born here but raised in the West — straddling two worlds, one rooted in the lingering scent of curry and doting relatives; the other defined by report cards and after-school TV reruns.
My uncle sits on a woven chair next to me, reading the newspaper, his daily ritual, observed as faithfully as the sun sets and rises. He is deaf, but his attention is sharp — attuned to the fluttering of curtains, the faint rustle of my grandmother’s sari, the measured rhythm of vegetables being chopped in the kitchen. The road beyond the gate is barely a road at all — just packed mud with boulders buried beneath the surface, their edges breaking through here and there. Every now and then, someone saunters by, eyes peering at me like I’ve been plucked from somewhere far away and set down here by accident. “Athaaraanu?” they shout in Malayalam. Who is that? My uncle, skilled at lip-reading, gently folds the newspaper, turns his chin and shouts back: “Ponniyude makal.” Ponni’s daughter. My mom was a legend around these parts.
Many years ago, my mom left this place, headed off to the West in search of a brighter future, Fulbright Scholarship in hand. She did not return until much later, bearing kids with American passports and strange accents, children of somewhere else.
I am a teenager, held hostage by humidity and too many empty hours. Time inches forward, slow and unwilling. Across the dirt road lie forested hills — cloaked in layers of green — a jungle so dense it swallows sound. The air and water are as clean as the jungle is silent.
My father came from another India entirely: a city bloated with industry and rickshaws, dense with concrete and dusk-colored smog. The air was gauzy with ash, thick with the smell of diesel and burning trash, the sky a muted gray, as if blue had never belonged to that place at all.
My parents, unsure what to do with two restless children over long American summers, sent us to India like cargo — delivered into the arms of relatives and the mercy of slow time.
By the time I was a young adult, I had spent much of my life in India, a country of infinite magic and innumerable contradictions. Where faith feeds millions but poverty starves them on the streets, and the rich drive by without looking, as if suffering were part of the scenery.
It was here I first learned what injustice feels like — not as a news headline about some far off place in the distance, but as something I could see, feel, and would carry in my very being.
I was maybe eleven years old, sitting in the back seat of an air-conditioned SUV in a heatwave so dense it blurred the edges of vision. The traffic was stalled, a metallic chorus of horns and frustration swelling in the air. A girl, no older than me, tapped on the window. She was barefoot and dirty, dust clinging to her skin; her small hands offered wilted jasmine strands—once fragrant, now limp and browned by the sun. She was a child beggar. Her eyes met mine, not accusingly, but with a kind of resigned knowing.
That moment replays in my mind like a scene in a movie I’ve watched too many times to forget. I realized that I had done nothing to earn the cold air on my skin or the comfort of our spacious car — sheltered from the choking heat and haze of the world outside, the world that was this young girl’s home. She had done nothing to deserve the burning pavement on her bare feet. The chasm between us wasn’t about effort or worth — it was chance. A roll of the dice. A lottery of birth.
During my long stretches in India, I saw things that settled deep in me. Children squatting on the roadside, women walking barefoot, carrying bricks on their head and babies in their sarees, laborers sweeping dust from one side of the road to another. I learned that suffering was everywhere. It hummed beneath the surface of daily life. It is in the eyes of a child knocking on a car window.
That suffering has never loosened its grip on me. I carry it still — not as guilt, but as a kind of compass. I’ve always wanted to help. But for years, I didn’t know how.
Only later did I begin to understand that so much of what I witnessed — choking air, extreme heat, families without clean water or electricity — was not only poverty, but a preview of a changing climate. These weren’t just individual hardships. They were symptoms of something bigger, something global.
Climate change, I realized, does not arrive equally. It deepens existing wounds. It finds the vulnerable and presses harder.
Now, in the unfolding of the clean energy transition, I see an opportunity not only to reduce emissions and slow climate change, but also to change lives. To make homes healthier, bills lower, air cleaner. To include people and communities that have often been exposed and unheard. This work — the possibility of transforming a system from extractive to inclusive — excites me. It doesn’t erase the suffering I’ve seen. But it gives me a way to meet it. To answer it. To try.
