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What struck me most was the gumption.

I traveled to West Africa earlier this year to explore whether and how climate change was uprooting people from their homes. My reporting led to the seventh and final installment of a series called Carbon’s Casualties, which explores one of the most vexing issues facing humanity: the effects of rising seas, shrinking lakes and shifting deserts on displacement.

In a city in Niger called Agadez, at the edge of the Sahara, I met dozens of young men who were risking their lives to make a new life elsewhere, usually with no legal papers to travel to their destinations. There was a mix of harrowing reasons behind their exodus. They were fleeing jihadists or dictators, or they were no longer able to live off the land as their ancestors had done for generations. Most of them had tried to better their prospects closer to home. And many of them recalled the lure of vague Facebook posts from people who had gone abroad before them. Their stories pulled them, one after another, toward a shimmering elsewhere — even if, in reality, that meant ending up in lawless Libya.

I come from a family of migrants. We came with passports and visas. We did not flee war or persecution or hunger or failed harvests. We were middle-class city people for generations. But like the young Africans I wrote about, stories pulled us, too. My father’s older brother was the first in the Sengupta clan to leave Calcutta, once a jewel of the British Empire, where American soldiers brought jazz in the first decades of the 20th century — and where my uncle felt stultified. He left first for Bombay, the city of movies, and then, on something of a crazy lark, got himself a visa to Canada. He landed in a tiny village in the Canadian prairie, covered in snow for half of the year. He found a job at a textile factory. He brought his wife and daughter — and then set to work persuading my father. He told a familiar story of the New World. It’s cold but there’s money to be made. We can do it. Come.

My father and mother were sold on the idea. Me, I was 8 years old. Up for an adventure. We landed in Selkirk, Manitoba, in late September. It snowed a few weeks later. I have an old picture of my mother and aunt standing on the banks of one of Canada’s great lakes, dressed in saris and overcoats, trying to smile. I tell the story of my family’s journey, and my own journey back as the New Delhi Bureau Chief for The Times in my book, “The End of Karma: Hope and Fury among India’s Young,” published earlier this year.

Among the migrants I interviewed in Agadez were young men filled with a hubris I recognized. Some of them had left home without telling their families. They got on buses and traveled across West Africa, hundreds of miles, not knowing exactly where they were headed nor what they would do. In some places, border guards beat them, or forced them to strip down and took the money they had hidden in their underwear. Some of them slept in bus shelters. A couple of them ended up in detention in Libya and were now on their way back home, defeated. As for those who were still on the journey, some would surely end up dead; nearly 5,000 have died this year trying to cross the Mediterranean, most of them Africans.

A few would make it to Europe. And who knows, some of them might even persuade a brother to follow.

My uncle was an extraordinary hustler. He left Selkirk and settled in Quebec, then Miami, then Los Angeles, where he briefly ran a textile factory of his own. He favored Italian suits, loved betting on horses and, for a while, smoked two packs a day. His idea of family time was to splurge on steak and Scotch on the rocks, and to tell tawdry jokes. We called him our own Tony Soprano. He took risks, as did my father. Both of them won some, and lost a lot. They taught their daughters gumption. But we, the three girls who grew up in the shadow of their hubris, are also far more cautious. We plan for retirement. We take vitamins.

 

We also have the luxury of choosing safer paths. Even when I’m reporting from war zones — and I’ve reported from many, including Congo, Liberia, Iraq and Nepal — I pack vitamins and antibiotics and a silk sleeping-bag liner, just in case.

I had just returned to Niamey, the capital of Niger, after a week of traveling throughout the country to interview migrants. I had a few more interviews to do, and then I was planning to head home to New York. A call came from my sister. She said my uncle had collapsed at home earlier that day after drinking a cup of tea. He died quickly, seemingly without pain, just days before his 85th birthday. Naturally, we celebrated him at the finest steak house in Beverly Hills. We drank Scotch on the rocks. The first Sengupta migrant, the one whose stories had pulled us here.