Each winter, Delhi disappears into its own breath. The sun dims behind a thick grey wall; the horizon blurs; the air tastes of burnt crops and diesel. People joke about “smog season”, as if a slow public asphyxiation were as natural as the monsoon. Those who can leave, do. The rest of Delhi — its millions of migrant workers, cleaners, builders, drivers, those who keep the city alive — suffocate in slow defeat.

Over the decades, India has perfected a way of surviving catastrophe: the rich simply opt out. When healthcare fails, the rich build their own hospitals. When the water turns brown, we install filters at home and lay private pipelines. With every blistering summer, Delhi rebuilds itself as an archipelago of air-conditioned fortresses, each a small insurance policy against the failure of the collective.

Health is purchased, education is corporatised, water comes in bottles, safety comes with private guards. The capital rebuilds itself as a mosaic of escapes — malls humming above drains of stagnant filth, gated colonies with apartheid-era segregated elevators glittering beside the slums that service them.

We live by subtraction — each family, each fortune, carving out a liveable island from a collapsing sea. A logic of separation, of purity and pollution that descends from the oldest grammar of the subcontinent, where the old taboo of caste eternally finds new technology.

To hold the government to account for our city, we must first have a conception of the city as ours — all of ours

But the air refuses to obey. It seeps through glass towers, over compound walls, into every lung. The city’s air is now 15 times dirtier than the World Health Organisation’s........

© Dawn (Magazines)