NEW DELHI
In the dense smog that engulfed India’s capital, New Delhi, early this month, a baby named Vaishnavi gasped through the night.
Inside the concrete room that her father and mother rent for $20 (Dh73) a month, they took turns staying up, laying a hand on her rib cage, feeling it move up and down. Her coughing fits became so violent that she vomited, milk mixed with ropes of sputum.
Thirty-two-kilometres away, inside an elegant, high-ceilinged house in an elite neighbourhood, a four-year-old boy named Mehtab was also struggling to fill his lungs with air.
His mother, heavily pregnant, sat beside him, administering corticosteroids through a nebuliser mask once an hour. But once an hour wasn’t enough. Mehtab’s father fought waves of panic as they waited for the sun to rise. The boy looked, to him, like a fish suffocating in the air.
For seven days at the beginning of this month, a thick cloud settled over this metropolis of 20 million people. Held in place by a weather system known as an anticyclone, the pollution was pulled inward and down, trapping the people of this city in concentrations of hazardous micro-particles never before recorded here.
The rich, who are buffered from so many of Delhi’s dangers, bunkered themselves inside, filtering out particles in their own air through expensive, high-tech purifiers. But the nature of air pollution is that it is pervasive. Researchers in China have found that exposure rates for the rich and the poor are virtually indistinguishable.
As average daytime levels of PM 2.5, the most dangerous particles, passed 700 micrograms per cubic metre, 28 times the concentration the World Health Organisation (WHO) considers safe, authorities in Delhi took the unprecedented step of shutting schools for three days. Protesters marched in surgical masks, carrying posters likening the city to a gas chamber.
Eventually, the wind picked up, bringing the city’s pollution level down to its usual, atrocious winter level. But the air quality in north India will remain dangerous for months, as poor people fight the dropping temperature by burning things — leaves, plastic, anything — to stay warm.
There is a clear body of evid-ence that death rates, emergency room visits, heart attacks and strokes all rise when particulate concentrations are high. Recent data from the Who’s Global Burden of Disease project indicates that the number of premature deaths related to air pollution in India has caught up with the number in China and is now surpassing it.
The worst-hit will be the very old, who are susceptible to heart disease and stroke, and the very young, whose lungs are so taxed by polluted air that they cannot develop normally. Children are more vulnerable because they are smaller, with shallower breaths and higher heart rates; they breathe more air.
In the very different homes of Vaishnavi and Mehtab, four parents are waiting to see what the rest of this winter will do to their children. Vaishnavi’s father, Ravi, who does not use a last name, remembers that October day because he woke up and smelled something burning. The rubber casing of an electrical wire is burning, that was his first thought. He splashed his eyes with water to stop the stinging.
Turning grey
On the ride into central Delhi, where he sells trinkets on a street corner, he passed columns of smoke: grey-blue wisps from piles of trash, and black pillars from fields where farmers were burning the straw left over from their rice harvests.Scientists had been tracking the progress of a mass of smoke via Nasa satellite images, as it rose off farmers’ fields in the nearby states of Punjab and Haryana and floated across the plains toward the city, a two-day drift. In Delhi, it merged with emissions from cars, coal-fired power plants, open-air burning of trash, and dust from construction.
This year, the crop-burning emissions happened to arrive on the eve of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, when smoke from millions of celebratory fireworks typically send concentrations of the harmful PM 2.5 particles skyrocketing. Ravi has worked on the same corner since he was a child, and his mother worked there before him. He had never seen smog so thick that it obscured the Shangri-La Hotel.
What worried him more was his only child Vaishnavi, just 18 months old, whose spasmodic night-time cough no longer quieted with the arrival of morning. He bought her a surgical mask for Rs40 (Dh2.1) from a merchant at an intersection, but she kept pulling it off.
The air that week was utterly still; meteorologists measured both horizontal and vertical movement at nil. Madhurbain Singh Anand, the father of four-year-old Mehtab, peered into the garden behind their house as the cloud of pollution settled on the city; the garden wall, maybe six metres away, was no longer visible. Anand, an executive at a clothing company, grew up in the house and moved his family back to it from Mumbai shortly after his son, their only child, turned two.
Home, not so sweet home
He hoped Mehtab could enjoy the same protected Delhi boyhood that he did, tumbling out the door after school and running around with a gang of neighbourhood kids until dinner. But Mehtab’s life is nothing like that. In the winter, when the air quality plummets, he barely goes outside for fear of setting off his breathing problems.
After a severe attack last year that led to a four-day hospitalisation, his mother, Guntas Kaur moved Mehtab into his parents’ bedroom and set her iPhone alarm for every two hours, so she could strap on his nebuliser mask at intervals throughout the night. On the night of Diwali, the couple sat inside, listening to the neighbours celebrate. They could hear firecrackers going off outside.
The two children, 32km and at different ends at the economic spectrum, got sick on the same night.
Thirty-six hours after Diwali, the pollution had pooled close to the ground. Delhi’s airport, Indira Gandhi International, reported visibility of around 304 metres, the worst conditions in 17 years.
After episodic smog events, it typically takes between one and three days for severe effects to emerge in children, according to Bhargav Krishna, who manages the Public Health Foundation of India’s environmental health system.
The crisis typically comes in the form of a lower respiratory infection, like bronchitis or pneumonia, that can become dangerous, with fluid filling the lungs and plummeting levels of oxygen in the blood.
Anand brought home an air purifier that cost Rs29,000 and switched it on, peering at the display to see the concentration of PM 2.5. It was above 700 inside the house. Three days later, Kaur took Mehtab out of Delhi, to her parents’ home, a few hours north. What shocked her was how quickly his breathing eased. The next morning, she watched through the window as he played outside.
Not so for Vaishnavi. She had improved with a course of antibiotics, but her father felt no certainty that she would survive another week like the one that followed Diwali. Or, that anyone would notice if she did not. “Delhi people have no memory,” he said. “It would be one in a hundred who would ask me how she died.”
—New York Times News Service
