UNFIT FOR HABITATION
They don’t show it to you in Bollywood movies, the haze. Yet there it is, sure as rent, draped over Mumbai’s skyscrapers.
They don’t tell you about the smell either, but every Mumbaikar knows it in their bones. Raw sewage, Bombay duck (a pungent species of lizardfish) drying in the heat, exhaust from traffic jams in which the average resident spends 11 days of every year, landfill refuse, hazardous chemicals, coriander in the open-air markets… It’s an olfactory overload that could knock a tourist out cold, but sometimes comes back to me in dreams in which I’m on the last local train home, my cheek pressed to the iron window grilles, navigating the city purely by scent.
In 2018, Mumbai was ranked the fourth most polluted megacity in the world by the World Health Organization. But like every other city in India that’s not Delhi, Mumbai’s pollution crisis gets a fraction of the attention, despite being the media and financial capital of India.
It’s as if each megapolis is assigned a part: Delhi chokes, Mumbai drowns, Chennai bakes. With urban centres bursting at their seams, Indian cities are
