Our Smogasbord of Apathy

A grim look at what the future holds if necessary action keeps getting deferred

Adopting the intricate style of a Mughal miniature, Rohama Malik presents a jarring vision of the future where clean air is a distant memory. The traditional aesthetic, typically used to depict courtly splendor, here illuminates a ‘Smogasbord of Apathy’—a society that has normalised toxicity rather than fighting for a breathable future.

The final, most formidable obstacle to clean air is not found in policy or science, but in ourselves. After 19 chapters of evidence and analysis, Rimmel Mohydin’s concluding piece confronts the crisis of apathy that allows the poison to persist. It is a visceral, personal, and ultimately damning account of our collective inaction, a final reminder that the most significant barrier to change may well be our own.

The best and worst thing about humans is that we are as quick to forget as we are often slow to react. It wasn’t long ago that it was mandated by law to wear masks. Now, even hospitals—institutions most profoundly affected by the contagion—count masking up as a luxury. And while the pandemic is thankfully over, its exposure of the world’s weaknesses, fissures, and inequalities has been added to the pile of things that we should be acting against, but don’t.

Like smog.

The fifth season in Punjab, where breathing becomes a burden; a token of decades of uncontrolled emissions, low fuel quality, crop burning and climate change.

We know it’s coming. We know what it does to us, our children, our sick, our elders. We also know that its arrival will be met with a vague government response, in the form of yet another committee, yet another hollow promise and perhaps, an accusation of manufacturing panic to sell more air purifiers. And we know still, that our best bet is to hope for rain in months where it rarely does. The state stalling until there is deliverance from nature seems to be as close to an anti-smog policy as we can get. We know it. They know we know it. And they also know that they will get away with it.

You see, the government relies on our acquiescence by way of our collective outrage going nowhere. They understand their public better than we will ever understand them. This is why they are so successful in staying in power when they do so little to deserve to. They know that inflation, the absence of political agency, the ceaseless stream of all kinds of life endangering crises will exhaust us. And this careful curation of our fatigue is fed into systems that are designed to punish honest, hard work and reward corrupt shortcuts. The result is that we can count on our fingers the days when Lahore’s air doesn’t actively poison us—and smog still hardly figures anywhere on the political agenda.

The problem with living where the sky seems to be falling nearly every day is that eventually you make peace with being crushed by it. You adjust your posture and find the reinforcements you can pay for. That is certainly what the elite in Pakistan have done, with air purifiers humming in bedrooms in posh neighbourhoods of the dirtiest cities.

School calendars are disrupted with a few hours’ notice with mandatory closures, because it is assumed that all children will have access to the internet and a device that can connect them virtually. We tell our infirm to stay indoors, taking it for granted that they do not need to work to put food on the table.

And of course, there are those who do get broken by the collapsing sky. Think of the language fluency that has become commonplace around air quality. There are mobile apps that tell us how many cigarettes we have smoked, despite not bringing even one to our lips. We speak in terms of AQI, or Air Quality Index, a unit that measures whether the air is safe to breathe or not. We know the ranges, and the advisory that each carries. We know not to get surgical masks or even N95 ones. It’s the bulky air respirator that does the trick.

Those who need to make use of this knowledge the most remain unaware of it or unable to protect themselves from this risk.

Lahore is a storied city, steeped in history and literature, both a backdrop and muse to many artists. It is also one of major inequalities. A labourer, a farmhand or a construction worker will likely be poisoned faster because their work keeps them outside. It is unlikely that they can take a day off to save themselves from the smog, because they count on daily wages. The fact is that even though they form the city’s largest demographic, their suffering will be largely consequence-free for the state they break their backs paying exorbitant taxes to.

Despite all the little ways the elite might soothe themselves about having done enough to protect themselves, the truth is that smog is as inescapable as breathing is essential to stay alive. When evidence of the consequences is so dire, their arrival all but confirmed, one can be forgiven for believing this is yet another example of our long-cultivated apathy.

The reality is much worse. We’ve been putting more cars on the road, building more underpasses and signal-free corridors, and doing next to nothing to improve fuel quality. We parade public transit projects as revolutionary solutions even while they are utterly inadequate. We criminalise crop burning, but fail to provide the already beleaguered farming community with alternative solutions. We have no plans to stop burning fossil fuels to feed our evergrowing energy requirements. Billion tree plantations do nothing to check the horrifying deforestation rates that rank among the highest in the world. There is no attention being paid to the actual causes of smog, and so where does it stop looking like an active choice to enable the infrastructure for our complete obliteration?

Let me take you to the Lahore of tomorrow—though ‘tomorrow’ feels less like a distant future and more like the next season of smog. This isn’t some far-off dystopia—it’s the reality we’re building with each policy neglected, each warning ignored.

Consider, then, the path these choices are paving for us:

This isn’t some faroff dystopia—it’s the reality we’re building with each policy neglected, each warning ignored.

An invisible city, engulfed in smoke, is home to many of us. Sulfur dioxide, PM2.5, volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxide and the like give the air a pungence that salts our insides.

A respirator that resembles a hazmat suit helmet is a necessity but not ubiquitous. Its price tag ensures that it is of use to only the richest. At any rate, they are not ergonomically designed for people who earn their keep through manual labour. There never was anything personal protection equipment or intention—designed to prevent them falling into the cracks.

Our lung capacities have shrunk and oxygen cylinders have become pantry items, stacked next to packets of sugar and tea. Hoarding them has also slowly crept into what we consider socially acceptable. After all, aren’t we all fast becoming patients wrestling with respiratory illness, besides what are we meant to do when we have young children in the house? Who wants to trek all the way to a hospital, when they can never really keep up with the demand for oxygen cylinders anyway.

School buildings now lay abandoned, as parents opt to keep their children at home. In fact, the only reason why children are taken out of the protection of their four walls is to be rushed to the hospital. Their lungs were never built to breathe smoke instead of reasonably clean air. But children are children, and sometimes they like to play outside. An unguarded window or door, a momentarily distracted caregiver and the curiosity inherent to young, developing minds is all it can take.

When someone around us dies, and they often do, we add five years to their age at the time of death. Or maybe by then, life expectancy will be shortened even more. Somehow, in smog-ridden cities, people are always dying before their time.

Newer strains of respiratory illnesses abound, and modern medicine has simply not been able to keep up. And even if it did, saving brown lives in a low priority country like Pakistan is not something that dominates the global pharmaceutical market. So as the Global North continues to outsource manufacturing to the South in a bid to fatten their profits with cheap labour and undervalued raw material with flexible standards for workplace safety, their skies remain clear and if it’s happening far away to brown people, does it even happen at all?

No fresh food is grown because anyone who works in the field for too long does not return the next day. The crops that do somehow sprout are often diseased and stunted, and because they grow in poison, they tend to absorb some of it. Rest assured, by the time the rice and pulses reach your plate, it does not contain the nutrients you’re hoping to nourish yourself with. Very often, we’re ingesting something toxic—except the choices have become few and far between.

There are no longer any traffic lights in Lahore. The project to turn every major road into an artery of a signal-free corridor is complete. And there have never been more car accidents, owing to the low visibility. The sun barely cuts through so the streetlights—that need to be on during the day now—never had much of a chance. Everyone that spent their savings on installing solar panels on their roof rue the day, because there never is enough sun to generate the electricity they need. There is darkness when there should be day.

When we walk into hospitals in a future as imminent as the next generation, we’ll recall the days when masking up was all it took to feel protected. As we hold our wheezing children, we will wonder why anything else seemed more important when there was still time to act. We will look to the leaders; some of whom will be in cleaner cities, cloistered in luxurious apartments; and gawk at how we could form a politic that could possibly be occupied by an issue other than the air we breathe.

And perhaps then, when suffocation becomes mercy, we’ll be grateful for the years that smog can cull from our lives.