Winter in Delhi comes with a grey, smoky veil, forcing residents to cover their faces with masks as they wrap their heads in woollens. The capital's air pollution is not only a health emergency, it also deepens inequality — as the rich retreat behind the safety of personal air purifiers and the poor work outdoors without any protection from the toxic air.
This year, the residents faced the additional assualts of suppressing of air quality data and throttling of dissenting voices. In the face of these threats to multiple human rights, the artistic community has not stayed silent. Through songs, films, paintings and photographs, they have mounted a powerful protest against the policymakers who have failed to address this yearly crisis. The following set of poems is an example of their response.
‘The Asthma City’ is a collection of poems by Rachit Sharma that chronicles Delhi’s recurring and intensifying air pollution crisis. The series uses a mix of satire, metaphor, myth and stark imagery to document the normalisation of hazardous air, while invoking Article 21 of the Indian Constitution that guarantees the ‘Right to Life’ — including the right to clean air and water for every citizen.
“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night...
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.”
— John Keats
the tongue licks the frontiers
between the air and the breath —
a lost fight over suzerainty,
the gulmohars in our street hang limp,
the blue shrines starving,
singed,
landfills
tunneled like fake scented candles,
lighting kites in the shape of a wound.
the raspy air is set into a song;
its crescendo folds the sun
into silence.
we are trapped in a beehive —
its pentagonal cavities have started to close upon us.
these days the city is a glowing yellow crystal ball,
its prophecies —
like its alveoli — a garden
of moldering fruits
“tazkira Dehli-e-marhoom ka ae dost na chhed
Na suna jaayega hum se ye fasaana hargiz”
(Don’t talk to me of Late Lamented Delhi, my friend
I don’t have the heart to hear this story.)
— Altaf Husain Hali
packets of garish paisley
on dim coal, floating in the air of Delhi.
futures turning blue,
waiting to enter the bloodstream
under the care of Delhi.
encrusted with milk teeth of Saptaparni blooms,
blood rippling through hazardous wells—
we are mapping pink lagoons everywhere in Delhi.
wheezing voices of your children rearrange the air;
Aali-Hakam, safe in the navel of the city, with something
that kept them spared from Delhi.
is there a word, in any language, for home
in a state of psychosis?
send it to the ghost fish of Yamuna, lest it be shared with Delhi.
once a city of refuge, now calls for its children’s exile.
ransack all its charbaghs—
if there lies buried a useful prayer
for Delhi…
“the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,"
— TS Elliot
What if the smoke that settled on your child’s tongue
weighs more than the apathy of the crows
for domes, and you wait to throw the leftover air
lying like a dust-trail into disorder,
until your lips start to fall, moving like a moth
in mud, on feet, yawned in by the asthma city?
Rachit Sharma is a poet and founder of Dillipoetry.