We’re barely finished with the wedding goodbyes when the warnings start.

“Where are you catching your train from?”

“Old Delhi,” we reply, and the looks we get are concerned enough to make us wonder whether we’ve misjudged something fundamental about this city.

Flying would be quicker, safer, and far less stressful, but what’s the point of coming all the way to India only to avoid India?

Besides, the five‑hour taxi ride to Delhi feels like part of the adventure.

What we don’t yet realise is that this drive will also be our first encounter with the deadliest thing in Delhi: its dreadful winter air.

Packing the essentials

The concerned individuals are Ollie and Chetna.

They’ve just thrown an unforgettable Hindu wedding and are now heading to Goa to begin their honeymoon.

Finn, Cameron, and I were Ollie’s indefatigable guests—three friends who’d travelled a third of the way around the world to celebrate with him.

With the wedding over, we’re free to return to living out of bags and to risk our lives on India’s frightening roads.

As a gesture of thanks, Ollie has booked and paid for the taxi that will take us from Ramnagar in Nainital to Delhi. Journey time: five hours.

We’ve packed properly for the long haul.

A nameless guest came good on our request for a bottle of whisky.

It's a cheap, military blend brewed in Scotland specifically for export to this corner of northern India.

We’ve also inherited the remains of Ollie’s “room wine,” plus a bottle of dreadfully sweet apple vodka that somehow made it into our bags.

Cameron has a decent Scotch he brought from the UK to share with Ollie before the wedding.

We will pair these fine tinctures with the sacks of nourishing almonds and cashews we received as wedding gifts.

Breakfast finished, goodbyes said, we let the driver lash our bags to the roof and set off for Delhi.

Leaving the rural north

For the first hour or so, we bump and jostle down rural roads that are barely roads at all.

For part of the journey we travel in convoy with one set of Chetna’s aunties and uncles, and their son, who duped me during a chaotic fight for Ollie’s wedding shoes.

In the towns, children play beside the dust, and shopkeepers loaf in their kiosks, which open directly onto the road.

Most daily business in India is conducted out of these kiosks.

Their crumbling stillness amid the broiling movement of Tuk Tuks, mopeds, and buses makes every town feel like a single, well‑serviced drive‑thru.

Occasionally, we pass an open lot—invariably a breaking yard for Tata and Ashok Leyland service vehicles driven beyond the point of end‑of‑life care on innumerable gruelling journeys.

Their bald tires are salvaged and piled into mini mountains inside these lots, ready to be transplanted onto the next lorry or bus.

In countries with huge populations like India, pushing fleet vehicles to the limits of roadworthiness is hardly frivolous.

Moving goods or people from A to B is one of the most reliable incomes available, even in the poorest towns.

Perhaps that’s why so many of them are lavishly decorated, with the same attention and individuality Europeans give their narrowboats.

Most of them are chromed out and decorated in garish colour schemes. Some of them even sport handsome Punjabi moustaches above the grille.

Regardless of decoration or age, all of them carry a “Blow Horn!” sign on the tailgate—in direct opposition to the government’s “No Honking” signs along the roadside.

Riced-out lorries, sagging under massive afros of leaning cargo, tear past us as we pick our way through ragged towns and fields.

Pollution over the crops

We arrive at a fork in the road.

To the right is the village where Chetna grew up, and where she and Ollie will briefly spend some time before flying to Goa.

We turn left.

Stubbly green crops carpet the flat agrarian plains of northern India.

We pass what we take to be a palm oil or sugar cane plantation; a tall thicket of dense crops.

The farms are demarcated by trees, which are the tallest features of the otherwise tabletop landscape.

The crops appear to be healthy and bountiful, but for the trees, it’s a different matter.

Many are completely bare, and others have pockmarked and unhealthy leaves.

Is this just winter, or something more insidious?

We’ve seen ample lush vegetation elsewhere, but where has it all gone?

The arboretum in my home city of Nottingham has lost many important tree specimens owing to poor air quality.

If poisoned air can be so damaging in Nottingham, what must it do to plants and people here in India?

Perhaps these are non‑native species, introduced during the British era, now struggling against the emissions of India's rapidly industrialising economy.

Then I notice something else: unlike wintering trees in the UK, these have no twigs or small branches at all, just trunks and a few broken limbs.

A similar destruction occurs when seabirds choose to nest in a shoreline tree and kill it with their fishy, alkaline guano.

Where the sun doesn't shine

Just under two hours in, we reach the motorway that will take us the rest of the way to Delhi.

No filter roads, no giving way to merging traffic; the on-ramp is a dusty parking lot of vehicles waiting to dart into the stream of fast-moving metal whenever there’s a gap big enough to test the driver’s courage.

With no signage or traffic lights to mitigate the risks of dying in a dreadful accident, we daringly join the flow.

Once we’re moving at the same speed as everyone else, the atmosphere settles and it becomes a regular motorway cruise.

The road surface is superb.

Finn, next to me in the rear passenger seat, reads Wikipedia and plays online chess while Cameron snoozes up front.

Notionally in charge of recording our experiences, I try to observe what passes by the window but can’t shake the conceit of being a temporary, privileged visitor.

The sky is a pale mustard–turmeric yellow that, diffused by the smog, loses all directionality, casting the signs, overpasses, and parking lots in a flat sepia light.

We know it’s an otherwise sunny day, but the sun remains invisible, hidden by a uniform quilt of pollution and dust.

The culprits of the smog are periodically visible—enormous petrochemical and industrial plants. Formidable jungles of steel and smoke.

Latticeworks of pipes and valves hulk past everything natural, powering the economy and poisoning the skies.

Compressed natural gas. A drop in the slurry

We stop for gas. Literally.

Our dinky taxi has been converted to run on compressed natural gas (CNG).

This alternative to petrol and diesel produces fewer emissions at the cost of reduced energy density.

Thus, the 7.5 million or so CNG-powered vehicles in India help keep the air cleaner than it otherwise might be.

The primary drawback is hauling a cylinder of highly compressed methane around a deadly road network.

At the gas station, we take the opportunity to stretch our legs.

We prove as popular in the public toilets as we were in the gardens of the Taj Mahal—which, on the theme of air pollution, was the last time we saw a truly blue sky.

India's rapid industrialisation

Back on the road and lulled into a torpid state by the peculiar bap-bap-bap of the gas engine, I observe the ample motorway signage.

What’s advertised usually says a lot about where you are.

In the UK, you are constantly blasted with shouty lifestyle ads for, in no particular order, fast food, meal box deliveries, dating apps, CRM software, package holidays, and electric vehicles.

It’s extremely doubtful whether you can infer anything reliable about a place without having lived there for a considerable period of time.

But the fun is in the trying.

What about the adverts in India?

The frequency of adverts for different types of cement certainly stands out.

Workers in yellow hard hats stand beside the bags, looking competent and trustworthy.

As you drive by, you can compare the tensile strengths and load‑bearing claims of the leading brands.

There are also adverts for construction partners.

These adverts could suggest that the government lacks the resources to keep pace with the country’s growth, and that individuals and private firms are being encouraged to fill the gap.

China next door also has a vast population, but it can mobilise enormous state resources for its construction projects.

Unsurprisingly, India’s real‑estate sector is booming, as it would be if the state can’t or won’t meet the country’s demand for housing.

Or the ads might simply suggest that India manufactures a lot of concrete.

There are also plenty of adverts for domestic and vehicular services along the motorway.

Curiously, many of them adopt a Royal theme to add cachet.

This leads to some unintentionally funny results, such as “Regal Tyres” and “The Royal Dump.”

Concrete above. Ritual below

We cruise down the motorway until the drivers pull over for lunch. We are still in convoy with the other taxi, so we hang out with Chetna’s family while the drivers are away.

A guard patrols the parking lot with a baton, which is reassuring as our bags are lashed to the roof and easily accessible without the deterrent of a good walloping.

We don’t want to rely on on‑train catering, assuming there is any, so we load up on biscuits and snacks.

They aren’t nourishing, but they’ll provide junk energy, and we’ll be sedentary once we’re on the train.

When the drivers return, we say our final goodbyes to Chetna’s family as this is where our convoy splits.

We’ve had a memorable time together, but this is the last we’ll see of them.

Belted up, it’s time for the onward charge.

Soon the motorway lifts onto a vast concrete flyover, pillars planted into the Ganges on oversized stilts.

From up here, we can see worshippers taking a dip in the placid and holy river.

The holy Hindu pilgrimage of Kumbh Mela is taking place during our trip.

This festival—the largest public gathering on the planet—attracts hundreds of millions of pilgrims and is held roughly once every twelve years, tied to Jupiter’s orbit.

The precise location varies according to celestial calculations, adjusted to account for the fact that Jupiter’s orbit is slightly shorter than twelve years.

Smaller Melas are held more frequently.

We’re far from the main ritual dip site, but there are still plenty of worshippers taking a cleansing plunge beneath the motorway.

People wade out and briefly dip themselves below the waters. Rowing boats lie angled on the sandbars.

We ask Finn if a dip might hasten his recovery from the short but violent tummy bug that still has him off his food. He thinks not.

The sight slips behind us as we rumble up to a wide toll gate where lorries fume on tickover and child–beggars dart between them.

Ailing kids. Delhi's air is "Worse than hell"

The Supreme Court of India has described Delhi’s awfully polluted air as “worse than hell.”

We’re near Brijghat, still over 100 kilometres from Delhi, but the smog is already thicker, and the industrial plants are gathering into a continuous steel landscape.

“As Mr. Aldous Huxley has remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods.”

In The Road to Wigan Pier, from which the quote is taken, George Orwell travels through the industrial north of England and asks why industrialisation is so ugly, and whether that ugliness is inherent.

I agree with Huxley, but as Orwell points out, there’s nothing inherently ugly about steel pipes or chimneys, and factories don’t have to be built in ways that resist aesthetic improvement.

Their ugliness, he says, is because they imply “warped lives” and “ailing kids.”

BBC News Arabic’s masterful documentary Under Poisoned Skies shows the same truth in in Iraq’s Rumaila oil field, where gas flaring has dreadful and frequently terminal consequences.

Orwell wrote about Sheffield, Leeds, and Wigan.

But he could well have been in the back of our taxi, heading into Delhi’s choking fumes at the worst time of day, week, and year: Friday rush hour in winter, at the apex of climate change.

Delhi air quality level: Unfit to breathe

According to a study conducted by the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute with the Central Pollution Control Board, 43.5 % of school children aged 9–17 in Delhi have reduced lung function, compared with 25.7 % in a control group from less polluted rural areas.

But the hazards of air pollution are not limited to Delhi.

The 2024 World Air Quality Report by IQAir states that 13 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in India, including Byrnihat, Delhi, and several others in the north.

But in the densely populated capital, the health effects are felt most acutely.

Poisoning is an annual event

The causes of the poor air quality include vehicular emissions, solid fuel burning, industrial processes, crop stubble burning, and dust.

Except for dust, each of these sources has political defenders.

So when you try to determine which source contributes most, the reports vary widely.

But perhaps the exact percentages matter less than the fact that the major contributors are well known—even as 1–2 million Indians are thought to die each year from air pollution. (The primary study was published in The Lancet.)

Looking out of the window, the air seems agnostic towards the causes.

In the November of 2024, Delhi experienced some of its worst air quality levels on record. Given its grim status as one of the world’s most polluted megacities, these readings were effectively among the worst ever measured on Earth.

The same story unfolded again in 2025.

Changing the relative proportions of segments on a pie chart is facile. The effort should go into shrinking the entire circle. How to do that is another matter.

Dieselpunk Delhi

On the approach to the capital, the Delhi–Meerut Expressway broadens into tarmac estuaries that merge and flow over and under one another.

The raised gas silos of the industrial hinterland recede, replaced by even larger flat blocks that loom over us as we pass their lower levels on the elevated motorway.

Traffic periodically brings us to a halt, but from up here we have a clear view of Delhi’s foreshore.

Dense runnels of alleyways snake between low-rise tenements. “Suburban” railway lines press together, stacked and squeezed to make the most of the space.

Not for the first time, India pushes the cyberpunk genre to the front of mind.

The materials are unmistakably modern, but their arrangement feels both retro and futuristic.

Retro.

A brutal-looking diesel locomotive, the colour of a bloodstain, peers out through a single offset, hooded lamp

It hauls a line of peeling rolling stock, and it sounds broodingly reluctant about it.

It sits so high it could be driverless.

But its windows are barred, so you cannot tell.

Futuristic.

A gas‑converted car lined with external piping passes by, its wheels level with our heads thanks to a motorway system so vast and complex it seems to defy human planning.

And we build up, and up, and up.

Ghazipur landfill. Waste mismanagement in the capital

On the left, the municipal trash pile comes into view: Ghazipur landfill.

About 70 metres tall and with a 70-acre footprint, it’s trash’s own Olympus.

Terraced roads cut into its sides, and at the very top a lone excavator levels the plateau for the next dumping.

Sometimes, it catches fire, making the air even less breathable.

Yet, despite its horror, it somehow manages to be a viable ecosystem.

For whom? That’s the issue.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of trash-picking gulls swoop and fly above us. Many more roost on the slums and the electricity cables.

Doubtless, stray dogs and other vermin tread the heap.

Doubtless, trash pickers collect what might pass for a meagre living from this awful hill.

It’s a bleak sight—life and decay in ugly symbiosis.

As I wonder whether those living in the landfill’s shadow consider themselves lucky to have a fixed residence at all, it slips out of view and we drive into the centre of New Delhi.