For a breath of rare fresh air

“The sky is blue!” I shout to no one in particular. I can’t contain my joy as I look out of the window. The sky, just as we learnt in school, is blue, finally. The last time I saw a sky this blue was when my neighbour’s child in primary school proudly flaunted her school drawing. Otherwise, the skies I know, of late in Mumbai, have been only in shades of grey, off white, sometimes a light brown.

To record this rare occurrence, I take several pictures and share them in my family group. Just photos of plain blue sky. But it hardly evokes the reaction I expect. Nobody seems to be impressed. So I add a line, “Look. The sky is blue!!”, with exclamation points for emphasis. Again, silence, except for a cousin’s dry comment: “And the grass is green.” That’s when it dawns on me that 90% of the members in my group live where the sky has somehow still managed to stay blue.

I suddenly realise how much I had taken it for granted earlier and how rare this has become — especially in a city such as Mumbai that feels perpetually a work in progress; where drilling and hammering is the all-day background score to the dance of everyday life, and for some reason, everyone is constantly redoing their homes and offices. Temporary inconvenience has quietly become permanent. In the race to improve quality of life, air quality has become collateral damage.

Before AQI became a thing, my informal tool for measuring air quality was visibility — specifically whether my friend’s apartment across the street had disappeared for the day. “We can’t go out for a walk today,”, I would say. “I can’t see Anjali’s apartment properly.” This was how I gauged the air.

Not going out for a walk posed a problem. My Vitamin D levels were low and the doctor had advised sun exposure along with supplements. But I wasn’t ready to risk my lung health — the city’s polluted air being equivalent to smoking six to 10 cigarettes per day — for sunlight. So the solution was a walk in the park, wearing an N95 mask.

New normal

Since most people have accepted bad air quality as the new normal with no mandate for wearing masks, I am often the only one in the park wearing a mask — which draws a few side-glances and smirks. It hardly matters for life is no longer what I had envisioned it to be. For instance, the only PMs I knew of earlier were Post Meridien (yes, 4 p.m.) and Prime Minister. Now, PM 2.5 and PM 10 are part of my daily life.

That morning, with the sky brilliant and blue, with my friend’s apartment clearly visible, I ventured out for my walk mask-less. The first thing that hit me was the air itself. It smelled normal, fresh, like how air is supposed to smell. Now, I have an acute sense of smell — a fact I found out through everyday life at home. Not exactly an advantage in a city such as Mumbai. My nose can detect a gas leak three floors up, a rainstorm approaching, a masala fry in the local dhaba, the agarbathi in the nearby apartment, and most unfortunately, dirty air.

That day, all that my nose picked up was the scent of the sea breeze, a faint whiff of cardamom from the cutting chai stall and an unknown perfume from someone walking past me. I was elated and if I could bottle that air and share it with my group, I would have done so. After a long long time, I enjoyed a walk that left me “soothed and healed, with my senses put in order”. I lingered a little longer than usual, taking it all in. For you never know when the sky will turn blue again, the air will be pure again. Experts ascribe the blue sky to a shift in weather. Officials say it’s because they shut down a thousand construction sites. But I think, the sky was just feeling blue and finally decided to let us know.

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