My Indian colleagues and their children, on the other hand, are trapped. Currently, all schools are closed due to extreme air pollution, and playing outside is also impossible. This sitting indoors for fear of what is outside looks like a repeat of the COVID period, with the major difference that back then — for the first time (!) — people saw a blue sky. Looking outside now, you see (and smell) the grey thick fog.

The father-in-law of one of my team members has chronic asthma and is condemned to sit on top of the air purifier. Another team member’s little son was in intensive care last year because of infected lungs due to pollution. The rest of us have daily headaches, a smoker’s cough and a nagging throat infection. Despite poor sleep, burning eyes and black water when you wash your hands, we are doing our best to cope with the situation.

What does it do to a person when one is surrounded by air pollution that cannot be ignored?

In fact, very little. My daughter, who grew up in Delhi and is here again for a short period with me as we pass through to our next destination in India. She hasn’t seen her Indian friends for a long time, and before she’s flying out, they want to meet up. Obviously, I would like to tell her to stay home, to stay safe, breathing in the cleaner air streaming out of the hard-working air purifiers, but unfortunately life goes on. Keeping physical discomfort aside, it is frankly an unreal experience: watching that thick smoke curtain descending, over the city, folding menacingly around houses and buildings and everything else it encounters, dissipating into a cloud of ash that also remains palpably on your skin. Today the AQI in Delhi stands at 500, and by December it will have reached 999 – but that’s because the measurement has only three digits.

You would think that — as with COVID — people would wear special masks. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, they are not free and are even too expensive for many, but secondly, people either wilfully ignore the situation or are unaware of the dangers. In fact, plenty of people still drive around in their cars with their windows open. Using the car’s air conditioner would be too cold in this season of the year, so to avoid fogging up the windscreen, there seems to be nothing to do but drive with the window open, a simple act that we take for granted but which in the capital poses a health threat.