It is a very ordinary weekday morning. I am taking my children to school, a 10-minute journey if the traffic is good, double that if it is not. A very normal checklist: sports kit, spare jumper and, of course, face mask.
It is eight o’clock, the worst time of the day for pollution. Through the windows of the car – pooled with a neighbour – the smog is a thick yellow. The outlines of buildings, even trees, only a hundred or so metres away are blurred and vague. I check the air monitor readings on my phone. The levels of PM2.5, the tiny particulates that embed in lungs and can reach the bloodstream, are more than 300 micrograms per cubic metre. This is 12 times the European Union legal maximum. The level has previously topped 500.
Since mid-October, the air quality has varied between “very poor” and “hazardous”. A week ago there was a day when the sky was blue, after a brief shower washed out the dust and smoke. It is still spoken of in hushed terms more usually reserved for eclipses and other wondrous natural phenomena.
“Yucky pollution,” says my three-year-old daughter, whose teachers will keep her inside all day. Her parents will try to keep her and her brother, who has developed mild asthma in the last year, inside as much of the weekend as is possible. And this is in one of the most verdant, spacious parts of the city. Elsewhere levels are regularly twice, even three times, as high. These are levels that would be seen as a national public health emergency in Europe. Not here.
Most children do not get driven to school in cars fitted with internal air filters bought by worried parents in the UK, but walk or cycle along roadsides.
Now people talk of the “Delhi cough”. This is a hacking, dry retch that afflicts almost every one of the 25 million-plus citizens of India’s capital. An hour or two in traffic or, if you risk it, in a park means a sore throat, streaming eyes and a migraine that can last for hours.
Exercise is out of the question. Simply walking anywhere is deeply unpleasant. With sleep affected too, energy levels are low. The entire city wakes up feeling as if it has spent the night on the tiles. This is a “pollution hangover”, according to one expatriate friend who, like so many other foreigners, has decided to leave.
For all but the very wealthy or expats, leaving is of course not an option. So, with typical grit and dark humour, the cough has become a grim mark of identity, the sign of a true inhabitant of this still fascinating, lively, energetic, exciting city, with its tragically contaminated, toxic air.
