4 ideas
In Bose's 1896 Bengali story, written for a contest run by the makers of Kuntaline hair oil, a cyclone forecast to strike Calcutta mysteriously vanishes. The narrator reveals that when the storm hit his ship, he poured his bottle of Kuntaline onto the sea, and the oil film flattened the waves and dissolved the cyclone. The story is widely cited as the first Bengali science fiction and was later reworked as 'Palatak Toofan' (The Runaway Cyclone).
The story alters one thing about the world, that a small household product can calm a storm, and narrates everything else with sober realism: weather bureaus, ship logistics, public puzzlement. The deadpan delivery makes an absurd premise read as a plausible scientific anecdote. Here the joke and the speculation are the same device.
Oil really does damp small waves at sea: a thin surface film changes surface tension and suppresses the ripples that wind uses to build larger waves, a practice sailors used for centuries. Bose stretches this genuine effect from calming local waves to dissolving an entire cyclone. The fiction gains credibility by starting from a known mechanism before scaling it past what it can do.
The story exists because a hair-oil company offered a prize for fiction featuring its product. Read this way, marketing constraints are a source of invention as well as a limit on it.