— पांच हजार तीन सौ —
I had a headache almost all day yesterday. By the end of the day, even after having taken two Aleve in the morning. it was feeling more like a sinus headache. I was really tired by the evening and cut a Skype call with Shobhit short after connecting with him for about 45 minutes. Thank god, I woke up today basically feeling fine.
I'm not as sure about Shobhit. It's not covid fucking him up by the
air quality—the level of air quality there as I write this is listed as
hazardous. For like, two days a couple of weeks ago we all freaked out about how Seattle had the worst air quality in the world due to wildfire smoke, Portland at #2 and bumping Delhi to #3. It's probably good to keep in mind that Delhi is #1 most of the time. Shobhit is coughing constantly when we're on Skype, and he says it's because of the air there.
So that's what he's been breathing the past two weeks. Now, consider this: his mom lives in it. So does his brother. I think for them, they don't think very much about it. It's just part of their daily lives.
Delhi is now the largest city in India, by the way, and
second largest in the world, now behind only Tokyo. It has had astonishing growth in recent decades; just yesterday I figured out that the city's population has
doubled since just 2001—the year Shobhit moved to the U.S. It was a huge city already then, at around 16 million. Even then it was bigger than metropolitan New York City is now.
Which brings me to the most horrible thing I learned from Shobhit last night: where do you think all the garbage goes from such a massive amount of people? Into staggeringly large landfills—ones much larger than they need to be, because they still don't have any efficient process of separating garbage from recyclables (no need to even bring up compost). This specifically came up, actually, because Shobhit had to leave his laptop briefly to gather garbage from his mom's apartment to give to someone who comes to collect it every day. That led to Shobhit mentioning they don't have any recycling programs, and then he mentioned the nearby "garbage mountain," and when he suggested I google "Ghazipur garbage mountain," I really wasn't prepared for what I was about to learn.
This is merely the biggest of multiple such "garbage mountains" in Delhi, and I found links online referring to it as "
India's 'Mount Everest' of Trash, covering more acreage than, and nearly matching the height, of the Taj Mahal (which, thankfully, is 128 miles away from it—although there's also
plenty of trash near that. The Ghazipur landfill is so huge that in 2017, part of it collapsed
and killed two people.
Shobhit told me about this place as though it kind of amused him, just a normal part of living in Delhi. He thought he had once sent me a picture of it, but no: I just went though all my photo albums of his visits to New Delhi, and I see no photos of a garbage mountain.
What honestly concerned me more, though, was to learn that this landfill is all of a mile from where Shobhit's mom lives (as the crow flies technically it's
1.3 miles). There are
frequent spontaneous fires due to methane gas, and this is a significant contributor to Delhi's horrible air quality, to bring this discussion back around full circle. So it's not just the horrifyingly gigantic mountain of garbage itself that's an issue here, but how it contributes to the city's horrifying air quality.
I wanted to find something recent in news coverage about this landfill, and found
this article from March, noting a fire that ignited there then. Curiously, this article includes a local leader's assurance that the entirety of the landfill would be "processed" (what does that mean, exactly) by the end of 2024, but I have my doubts: multiple news articles from only a month later (April) state that completely clearing the site will take
at last ten years.
Shobhit goes through periods where he's coughing regularly for weeks on end, something once identified as part of his acid reflux and the reason he is taking Omeprazole every day (as do I). He's probably going to come home coughing. I can only hope our currently fresh air helps him move on from that quickly. I have no idea what kind of permanent respiratory damage could be caused by exposure to that level of pollution, let alone actually living in it every day like his mom and his brother do.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ —
— पांच हजार तीन सौ —
Anyway. I thought about switching it up and having a veggie hot dog for dinner, but seeing we still had a block of smoked gouda—and Shobhit hates smoke flavor—I went ahead and, for the third night in a row, made myself a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner. Honestly the ones with the bleu cheese were better, but that's all right. Tonight I think I'll just make a regular sandwich with the smoked gouda and veggie ham, and bring it with me over to Alexia's for when we watch
The Rise of Skywalker.
Last night, I watched this week's episode of
Andor while eating my dinner. It contained no resolution of any kind, which is typical of this show and actually adds to its uniquely compelling quality. I really love that show and think it's easily the best of the TV series set in the Star Wars universe.
I keep thinking about watching the original, 1958 version of
The Fly, and then the 1986 version as a double feature. I've never seen the first and have only ever seen parts of the remake. I know it was notorious for how disgusting it was, but the effects now might be nearly as laughable as I presume the 1958 ones were. But whatever, I'm curious. They're both on HBO Max and I might see if I can't get Shobhit to watch them with me.
I was getting too tired after the show anyway, and might have gone to bed earlier than I did had Shobhit not called me. It was probably best for us to get on Skype for a bit; we never did on Tuesday and we won't have a chance tonight—he'll be on the first leg of his flights home. He leaves Delhi for Dubai at 3:45 this afternoon my time, which will be, kind of stunningly, 4:15 Friday morning in Delhi. What a time to catch a flight.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ —
[posted 12:20 pm]
