India, Oct. 11 -- What does it look like, a prayer for the drowning?

On a stage in Kochi, it is a wooden frame built to replicate a coastal home. Within the frame, Vilasini Surendran, 64, a daily-wage labourer from Ernakulam, performs in ankle-deep water. She isn't acting, really; she is narrating the story of her life. She speaks of 43 years of learning to "resurface". Of losing objects, a home, a sense of self and place.

The routine inundation of her home is a natural disaster, she says, but it isn't considered one. It is called tidal flooding.

Amid the climate crisis, as sea levels rise and storms intensify, the flooding has worsened.

Along India's extensive coastal and estuarine regions, residents (fisherfolk, policemen, farmers, ...