On days when the allergens were a little less taxing, I could sense the car slowing to let a troop of monkeys pass or allow a batch of headloaders carrying firewood to cross the road.
Among my abiding childhood memories are that of drives in kali-peeli (black and yellow) taxis after asthma attacks. Not very far from my home in Rajinder Nagar, where Central Delhi met West Delhi, rows of Ambassador and Fiat cabs used to queue up, their drivers reclining, chatting, or sipping tea, waiting for business — from my parents, for instance. My father would hold my hands as I slumped into the vehicle’s fraying rexine seats.
Inhalers and corticosteroids were some years from being part of the asthma treatment protocol in India. Cough syrups and tablets rarely brought relief. But my parents seemed to know a way out. They rolled down the Ambassador’s windows. As the car turned left and then right towards a broad road flanked on one side by foliage that seemed to extend far beyond sight, I felt that the air had joined my parents in comforting me. A sense of calm returned to my lungs. By the time the vehicle had taken the second or the third round of the road leading to Buddha Jayanti Park, I would doze off, free of the pain, and exhausted by what seemed like hours of short breath.
This was my asthma treatment almost three or four times every year. On days when the allergens were a little less taxing, I could sense the car slowing to let a troop of monkeys pass or allow a batch of headloaders carrying firewood to cross the road. At other times, I could strain my ears to hear the anecdotes and stories my parents were recounting, apparently to take my mind off the pain. Once, between the wheezing, I learnt of the terrible incident a few years back, when two adolescents had been abducted from the area we were passing by and then killed.
The episodes of breathing difficulty were also my first intimate encounters with the Delhi Ridge — the bronchodilator Delhi gave me when doctors and pharmacies could not.
Later, I learnt that my slice of the Ridge was the central sliver of the several thousands of hectares of discontinuous forests that follow the path of the Aravalli Mountain range in Delhi and parts of Haryana. From influencing rainfall and temperature to recharging aquifers, from providing fuelwood to cordoning off the city from dust and absorbing pollutants, this millennia-old ecosystem has played a critical role in the lives of Delhi’s residents.
With my lungs becoming resilient in adolescence, this salve for asthma attacks fell off my mental map. I did not care to make connections, even when I went for a Social Science education in a university cradled in the southern part of the Ridge. At times, I did make sketchy associations between the nilgais that would sometimes visit the campus with the foliage and fauna I encountered on my taxi rides about 10-12 years back, but perhaps I was too caught up with Marxism, Subaltern Studies, the Cambridge School or The Nationalist School, Structuralism or Post Colonialism. I did not make the connection even when, as a student of history, I learnt that the 14th-century ruler Firoze Shah Tughlak had built a hunting lodge in a different part of the ridge or that the East India Company forces camped had there during the 1857 revolt.
The Delhi Ridge had, by then, shrunk by about 10 per cent to what it had been when it was my asthma medicine.
A few years later, on my way to work at Jai Singh Road in Central Delhi, I would often pass by the road skirting the Ridge. But this was a different road, governed by phrases like “peak-hour traffic”. The chartered bus that I took to work seemed to crawl along with other buses, cars, two-wheelers, and three-wheelers. There were scarcely any monkeys and no people carrying firewood.
In the mid-1990s, in response to a Save the Ridge movement, the government clamped down on “encroachers”. But the Ridge continued to shrink. As sociologist Amita Baviskar and historian Thomas Crowley have written, the criminalisation of livelihood-related activities has only driven many of them underground. At the same time, urban amenities and construction activities have chipped away at Delhi’s green lung. Today, it’s almost half of what it was in the early 1980s.
My asthma attacks returned as I stepped into middle age. Three years ago, after a particularly nasty episode, a little after the Covid lockdown had eased, a friend drove me along the painkilling road of my childhood. The roads were sparse, much like during my rides in the kali peeli. My lungs felt soothed.
Let’s, however, not take the analogy too far. Forty years ago, using a cab was a luxury even for a comfortably placed middle-class family like mine. For the better part of the last 15 years, I have used a car to commute — its tailpipe, a contributor to the city’s now infamous pollution load. My parents had to walk half a kilometre to fetch a cab. I use an app that brings a ride to my doorstep almost every day.
In my childhood, the city played less of a role in my asthma. A rough comparison: I was the only one in my class of 30 who had the ailment; today, one in three children has it. When I often blame Delhi’s polluted air for my breathing difficulties today, I also recollect that the city had once blessed me with a green lung. Perhaps I did not own or care for it enough to do justice to my privilege, education and lived experiences.
kaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com
