"Delhi—In early April, a fire began to smolder inside the Ghazipur landfill, the trash mountain that stands like a brown, stinking sentinel, two hundred feet high, on the outskirts of New Delhi, the district of the larger city that serves as India’s administrative capital. Journalists in India write that it will rival the height of the Taj Mahal in another year, a statistic presented with a tinge of perverse pride. Ragpickers climb the shifting, treacherous slopes of the landfill, which widens into a low range of hills; hawks, black kites, and other birds of prey circle overhead.
Landfill fires break out from time to time. But over the last few years, they have become a signal that summer has arrived in Delhi. Other signs are equally stark—fierce water wars as too many citizens in slums and low-income neighborhoods line up for too few water tankers; temperatures so scorching that if you touch the railing of a city bus you see red blister spots rising on your palm; the thick plume of dust from the Thar Desert that blasts in blinding storms through my burning city.
The trash fires send acrid waves of oily, brown, superheated smoke into the already foul air of the world’s most polluted city. Two days after the April fires start, I’m in the Ghazipur area. I step out of the car with the arrogance of a lifelong Delhiwallah, looking up at the burning garbage mountain, convinced that my lungs, already leathered and mummified by the bad air, can take it. Within seconds, my chest feels aflame. My coughs are ratchety, tubercular—a pathetic display of weakness for someone who thought she’d accustomed to the city’s fetid air by now."
