The first thing winter does in my part of the city is not temperature, not poetry, not “season,” not any of that calendar-brochure nonsense where a sweater is an accessory and fog is a vibe. Winter begins as a taste. A dry, metallic, pre-cough tang on the tongue, like you licked a fan blade in a government office and got rewarded with tetanus and a brochure about national pride.

I wake up before the light has fully made up its mind, and the room looks like a photograph that someone left in a basin of dishwater—everything softened, edges surrendering. The window grille is a black geometry lesson against a pale outside. Somewhere a kettle whistles like a tiny animal being politely murdered. There’s the faint smell of last night’s cooking oil—mustard, stubborn and sharp—and beneath it, the bigger smell, the civic smell, the shared smell, the smell we all pay for with our lungs: smoke without a source, burning without a flame, a communal incense offered to no god except the god of “chalta hai.”

I step onto the balcony (calling it a balcony is like calling a pothole a reservoir), and the air is thick. Not thick like humidity, which at least has the decency to be honest about being water. Thick like a lie that learned to wear a tie. Thick like a memo. Thick like the kind of official sentence that starts with “Whereas…” and ends with the poor man in the middle, bent, bewildered, convinced that the existence of commas means somebody did something.

Down below, a dog trots with the weary competence of an old municipal worker. A cycle van creaks past, the driver wrapped in a shawl that looks like it’s been through three wars and a divorce. A neighbor’s radio leaks devotional music into the fog, because India has this extraordinary habit of trying to solve material problems by chanting at them, like smog will feel ashamed and politely leave if we sing at the correct pitch.

The street is half erased. People emerge as silhouettes, as if the city is generating humans at low resolution to save bandwidth.

And I think, as I often do in winter, that we have invented a special kind of invisibility here: the invisibility of things that are absolutely, catastrophically present.

Fog, Smog, and Other Soft Weapons

Fog is supposed to be innocent. In children’s books it comes with lanterns and suspense and maybe a polite Victorian murder. Fog is nature doing a little theater—water vapor condensing into droplets because the air has cooled, because the dew point has been reached, because physics is in one of its practical moods. Fog is, in the old imagination, the world putting on a thin bedsheet and pretending it’s a ghost.

Smog is fog’s corrupt cousin who started as a charming rogue and ended as a full-time criminal. Smog is not a weather event so much as a social event: combustion, chemistry, policy failure, greed, traffic, trash fires, diesel, brick kilns, crop residue, construction dust, and the kind of governance that issues a press release like it’s a vaccine.

But here’s the trick winter plays: it makes the dirty look poetic.

Cold air near the ground gets trapped under warmer air above—an “inversion,” which is a nice scientific word for what Indians do with everything: we invert the logic. The atmosphere becomes a lid, and we become a pot of slowly boiling stupidity. The pollutants that might have drifted upward on a warmer day stay close, marinating with us at face level, the way a petty office clerk stays close to the stamping table. You can almost feel the city breathing back at you: you inhale, it exhales, and what it exhales is yesterday’s exhaust, last week’s burning plastic, someone’s celebratory fireworks, and the powdered remains of a thousand crumbling concrete dreams.

Fog plus pollution creates that familiar winter opacity—the world gone gray and beige and exhausted—as if the city has been overexposed to its own excuses.

And this is where my brain, being the kind of bookish rat that runs mazes for the occasional cheese of meaning, starts rummaging around in history.

Because fog—actual fog, honest fog—once helped humans see the unseen.

The Cloud Chamber, or: When Mist Was Noble

There was a time when a little mist in a box was a miracle, and not a municipal sentencing.

The idea is almost embarrassingly simple, which is always how the universe humiliates us. Take a sealed chamber. Fill it with vapor—water or alcohol. Create conditions where the vapor is supersaturated, meaning it’s ready to condense but hasn’t decided where. Then let a charged particle pass through—an electron, an alpha particle, some cosmic interloper. The particle ionizes the air along its path, leaving a trail of ions like breadcrumbs for a very small god. The vapor condenses on those ions, and suddenly the invisible becomes visible: a thin, delicate track, a ghostly signature of something that was there and is gone.

A line drawn by a thing you can’t hold.

Fog as evidence.

Mist as testimony.

A humble, laboratory-grade weather event used to catch fundamental particles in the act of existing, like a cosmic paparazzi.

I love that. I love that the universe will reveal itself if you build the right little box and wait with the right kind of patience. I love that discovery sometimes looks like a faint white thread in a chamber, a transient scribble, a shy confession from reality.

And then I step outside in my own city and realize: we have built the world’s largest cloud chamber, except the particles we’re revealing are not fundamental in any romantic sense. They’re not alpha particles from the deep laws of nature. They’re the crushed, ground, burnt, aerosolized residue of our habits—PM2.5 and PM10, soot, sulfates, nitrates, whatever chemical alphabet soup our lungs are expected to recite as civic duty.

This is the part that makes me laugh in that bleak way where laughter is just despair doing jazz.

We wanted to see the invisible, and we succeeded so hard we can’t see anything else.

Now the “tracks” are everywhere, and they don’t lead to the secrets of the cosmos; they lead to a garbage pile on fire behind a tea stall.

Winter, in India, is particle physics performed by idiots.

It’s like we read about Rutherford and said, nice, and then used the same principle to detect burning tarpaulin.

GRAP and Other Elegant Fictions

Delhi, being the capital, gets the headlines, like a favored child who also happens to be set on fire. Everyone knows Delhi’s winter air is a horror show. It has its own vocabulary now—AQI, severe, very poor, emergency measures—as if giving something a scale makes it less of a catastrophe and more of a board game.

And then comes the bureaucratic ritual: GRAP, the Graded Response Action Plan, which sounds like a superhero team but behaves more like a troupe of tired clerks, shuffling papers while the building burns. GRAP always arrives with the solemnity of a Vedic yajna and the effectiveness of a WhatsApp forward. It announces bans, restrictions, advisories, odd-even schemes, dust control measures, sprinkling, enforcement drives—words that feel like action if you don’t live here.

The trouble is, in India, policy often functions as a form of literature.

Not literature that delights, mind you. Literature as camouflage.

A good Indian government document has the structure of a Victorian sermon: long sentences, passive voice, moralizing tone, and an almost sexual devotion to the phrase “shall be.” It creates the sensation of machinery turning. It gives the common citizen that warm, stupid feeling: Something is happening. The adults are in charge.

But the air doesn’t care about adjectives.

The air doesn’t read your notification.

The air only responds to actual reductions in emissions and actual enforcement and actual infrastructure changes, none of which can be conjured by legalese the way a magician conjures a rabbit. Victorian English was good for empire because it was a fog machine: it created opacity. You could hide cruelty inside syntax. You could bury responsibility under subordinate clauses.

We inherited that style like we inherited the railway: proud of it, addicted to it, and still not maintaining it properly.

So yes, GRAP is, in a way, a kind of crap—an official fart dressed up as perfume. Not because every individual involved is evil, but because the whole system is structured to reward the appearance of action over the discomfort of doing it. The system loves the performance of governance the way some people love religion: the rituals are familiar, the chants are soothing, and the gods—if they exist—are not expected to show up on time.

And if you protest, if you cough too loudly, if you point at the haze and say this is not weather, this is policy failure made visible, you will be told to be grateful, to be patriotic, to stop “defaming,” to stop “negativity,” as if negativity is the pollutant and not the literal poison.

Meanwhile, the city continues its slow inhalation of its own exhaust, like a depressed man doom-scrolling: each breath a click, each click a small surrender.

Sanskrit, Smog, and the National Talent for Misreading

This is where I’m supposed to quote the ancient texts, because we Bengalis—especially the bookish ones—have a reflex. When reality becomes unbearable, we start rummaging through the library for something that sounds like it knew this was coming.

Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it’s just another narcotic.

There’s a line from the Rigveda that gets quoted whenever someone wants to sound profound and inclusive, usually right before they do something petty: “आ नो भद्राः क्रतवो यन्तु विश्वतः”—let noble thoughts come to us from all directions. It’s a gorgeous idea: openness, receptivity, the mind not being a locked room.

And then you look around, and you realize we have perfected the opposite: we have turned our cities into locked rooms filled with smoke.

Another line—this one often recited with that earnest, tremulous reverence that makes me want to both respect it and slap it—“असतो मा सद्गमय । तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय । मृत्योर्मा अमृतं गमय ॥” Lead me from untruth to truth, from darkness to light, from death to immortality.

Beautiful. Aspirational. Human.

And yet we have a civilization that can chant “from darkness to light” while driving a diesel truck that belches darkness directly into a child’s face. We can invoke jyoti while wrapping the city in soot. We can speak of immortality while acting as if lungs are disposable, as if the poor exist to be the filter.

This is not a criticism of the texts. The texts are just texts—mirrors, instruments, fossils of thought. The criticism is of our national genius for treating words as substitutes for systems. We quote the Upanishads like insurance. We hang mantras on walls like air purifiers. We perform holiness while inhaling burning plastic.

Religion in India is often deployed like a deodorant: not to clean the body, but to make you forget the smell.

And the smell, in winter, is relentless.

My Own Part in the Haze

I’m not writing this from a heroic position. I’m writing this from a cheap chair, inside a room that I did not build, in a life that has more footnotes than achievements. I am not a crusader. I am not an activist. I am not even consistently functional.

Some mornings I wake up with that bipolar trick—my brain buzzing, connections firing, everything meaning something, my thoughts doing parkour across science and history and politics and my own shame. I can make metaphors like a factory makes smoke.

Other mornings, the depression pins me flat and simple. The world becomes a list of chores I won’t do, messages I won’t answer, ambitions that now feel like elaborate pranks I played on myself. The air outside looks like my mind feels: cloudy, heavy, indifferent, full of particles I can’t name but can’t escape.

I doom-scroll. Of course I doom-scroll. I inhale outrage the way I inhale smog, and then I sit here, coughing, righteous, useless.

Sometimes I delete drafts obsessively—write a paragraph, hate it, delete it, rewrite it, delete it again—because control is the one drug left when the outside world is ungovernable. You can’t lower the AQI with a backspace key, but you can at least sand down a sentence until it feels like a clean surface. It’s pathetic, but it’s also a kind of survival: making a small order inside the larger entropy.

And I am complicit in the usual ways. I use electricity. I order things that arrive wrapped in plastic. I have taken taxis that cough black smoke. I have lit fireworks once upon a time, because I too wanted to see the sky behave like it cared about me. I have accepted the daily bargain: I will tolerate the poison if the poison comes packaged as normal life.

The difference, maybe, is that I don’t have the talent for cheerful denial.

I can’t do the Indian optimism that is really just anesthesia. I can’t say “it is what it is” without wanting to throw myself into the Hooghly out of boredom and spite (I won’t, relax, I’m too lazy and the river is too dirty; even my self-destruction has standards).

So instead I write these essays—these long, wandering, self-implicating rants—because if I don’t transmute the poison into language, it stays poison. It just sits in my chest, next to the particulate matter, and the two of them gossip.

The City as a Bad Diagram

If you’re visually oriented, winter pollution in an Indian city is not just a health crisis; it’s a diagram of how we live.

The haze is the graph of inequality.

The people in cars glide through their little sealed bubbles of conditioned air, listening to podcasts about wellness, as if the world outside is a video game texture that doesn’t apply to them. The people on bikes, on foot, in open rickshaws, at bus stops, at construction sites, in chai stalls—those people are the actual lungs of the economy, breathing the cost.

The haze is also the physical manifestation of our national habit of postponement.

We postpone sewage treatment, so the river dies slowly.

We postpone waste management, so trash becomes smoke.

We postpone public transport investment, so traffic becomes exhaust.

We postpone enforcement, so rules become jokes.

We postpone accountability, so the same faces keep returning like seasonal illnesses.

And winter, with its inversion layer and its dead, still air, simply refuses to let us pretend. It takes our postponement and compresses it into a visible ceiling, a low gray sky that feels like a hand on the back of your neck.

It’s strange, isn’t it, how quickly humans adapt to unacceptable things. I remember—no, let me be honest, I don’t remember clearly, because memory is a liar that rewrites itself—but I have the sense that as a child, certain kinds of air felt… air-like. You could smell winter: wood smoke, maybe, damp earth, the faint sourness of ponds. Now winter smells like burning packaging.

And we normalize it. We plan around it. We discuss it like sports. “AQI is 280 today.” “Mine shows 310.” “Oh, you’re lucky, ours is 400.” As if we’re exchanging cricket scores. As if the winner gets a trophy and not bronchitis.

This is the part where satire becomes almost unnecessary, because reality is already doing the bit.

Fundamental Particles vs. Petty Ones

The older I get, the more I resent the word “fundamental.” It’s such a human word, so desperate. We want the universe to have a base layer that is simple and clean and true, because our own lives are not.

Fundamental particles, fundamental rights, fundamental duties—big words we throw at the chaos like nets.

In physics, at least, “fundamental” has a technical meaning: particles that aren’t known to be made of smaller parts, interactions that seem basic. It’s not poetry. It’s a working definition that can be revised when the universe changes its mind.

But in civic life, “fundamental” becomes propaganda. We call things fundamental and then treat them as optional.

Clean air should be fundamental. It is not. It is a privilege.

Winter haze makes this brutally, visually clear. The city becomes a layered composition: the poor in the open air, the rich in sealed compartments, everyone pretending the arrangement is natural because it has existed long enough to feel like fate.

Sometimes I imagine a future archaeologist—some post-human intelligence, maybe, a machine that doesn’t breathe—digging through the ruins of our cities and finding our policies and our slogans and our court orders and our spiritual posters and our little plastic air-quality masks. It will be baffled in the way scientists are baffled by ancient superstition: why did they think words would solve chemistry?

Why did they chant at particulate matter?

Why did they print “सत्यमेव जयते” on buildings while lying to themselves about the air?

Maybe it will conclude that Homo sapiens had a strange, self-sustaining addiction to narrative: we preferred stories about action to action itself.

And then, because the universe loves irony, the machine will run a simulation of us, to understand us, and in the simulation it will recreate winter in an Indian city, and the simulated people will cough in simulated smog, and the machine will learn something about cruelty and inertia and the peculiar human skill of making hell feel like routine.

I don’t know. My hypomanic brain likes these little sci-fi flourishes. My depressive brain rolls its eyes and says: yes, yes, very clever, now go drink water and stop pretending this essay is governance.

A Small Gesture, Unheroic and Real

By late morning the sun tries to appear, a pale disk behind the haze, like a coin held up to frosted glass. The light doesn’t clean anything; it just illuminates the dirt more evenly.

I make tea. I watch the steam rise and vanish. In a clean world, steam is a small domestic cloud chamber: vapor becoming visible, then dissolving. In this world, it feels like I’m contributing to the atmosphere, like even my comfort is a tiny emission.

I scroll past news about “measures,” about “plans,” about “task forces,” about “high-level meetings.” The language is always the same: earnest, swollen, frictionless. It glides over the bodies it affects.

And I catch myself doing the same thing in miniature. Writing big sentences. Feeling intelligent. Feeling briefly superior to the fools and the officials and the believers. It’s a delicious feeling, superiority. It’s also cheap. It’s also a kind of smog—mental particulate matter that makes it harder to see myself clearly.

So I try—awkwardly, without romance—to do something small and not performative. I close the news. I open a book, a real one, paper, the old technology that doesn’t need a push notification to exist. I sit by the window and read until the city’s noise becomes background static, until my breathing slows a little, until the air is still bad but my mind is less eager to drown itself in it.

Outside, someone lights a small roadside shrine lamp, the flame wobbling in the haze, stubborn and pathetic and, against my will, a little beautiful.

I don’t pray. I don’t believe. But I watch that flame for a moment, not as a symbol of divine anything, just as a physical fact: combustion without a press release, light without legalese, a tiny act that produces smoke and yet insists on shining.

Then I do the only noble thing I can reliably do.

I shut the window.