AIR QUALITY INDEX
I have a hacking dry cough which has been increasing for the last week. In the last four days I’ve had a violent night of food poisoning and then, on and off since, a sour stomach of acid reflux. I’ve lost all interest in eating anything, Indian or Western. For lunch I had a toasted bun with broiled cheese and sliced tomatoes and potato salad. Susie tasted them and said they were delicious. I found then tasteless. I don’t feel like photographing or exploring. I am listless and tired.
This may affect me more at 85 than it would have twenty years ago. But I know the basic problem because I have had it before. On every trip of the last five after a month I begin to cough more and more insistently until it is almost continuous, scaring everyone around me who wonder if I am infectious. But I’m not. I know exactly what is wrong. India’s ferocious pollution is catching up to me. When I arrived in Delhi the Delhi Air Quality Index was 425 on a scale of 500, deep into the reddest part of scale. Not fair or poor but severe, 9 times the safe level. That is what it is today and we will be in Delhi tomorrow. I know from experience that even that level of pollution doesn’t affect me in the first or second week but by the 4th week particularates are gathering in my lungs and body is trying to expel them through a constant nasal drip (which I can slow by swallowing the snot, but that leads to sour belly and acid reflux as I fill up with fudge), so instead I keep coughing explosively. I don’t have a virus, I don’t have a cold, my problem is India’s overwhelming pollution. I can last for about a month in India and then simply have to escape. We have one day in Delhi tomorrow but once through that when we reach the Himalayas and 7000 feet the next day the air should be clearer. But I also know that even after Mussoorie, even when we reach the pristine air of Helsinki the next week, that chest won’t clear for several weeks and the cough will continue.
Susie looked up the Indian answer to air pollution cough on the Internet and it is gargled salt water. I am trying that, but only to moderate the coughing, not to remove the cough.
It is time to leave India.
But that is my solution. A billion Indians breathe this air year after years and gargle with salt water. But the old or the infirm or someone who comes down with some other disease are probably much more likely to die than if the air were clear. It is a hidden killer. But I can see it and I’m getting out of here.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 