Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect and matured to become a writer and one of India’s leading public intellectuals. This prophetic piece was written in the midst of the climate crisis and in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many nations in the Global South went into lockdown with little regard for the basic needs of their poor. It anticipates the Black Lives Matters protests, which energised people to confront police brutality and racism at a large scale. Roy’s message is a global call for social change, imagined architecturally.