This is a photo of Jama Masjid (Mosque) in Delhi.
The photo was taken at about 8 am on a Sunday morning in November.
The mist is deceptive – it’s not mist. That morning the pollution levels went to the highest level ever – this was the most polluted air anywhere on Earth that day. The day before, the levels were at 250 ppb which is about ten times over the safe limit. On this day the levels went up to 999 – which is as high as the scale goes.
I’m wearing a face mask and feeling slightly dizzy and sick.
I took this picture without even thinking, as a typical tourist does. I lifted my camera and pressed ‘click’. As I moved my eyes from the camera lens to the view in front of me, I remember seeing the small toddler pouring a bucket of shit into a drain. Knowing that this child is not much older than my daughter made me want to vomit. I could see his parents rubbing their eyes as they were still waking up. They had another child and some bags of possessions that they slept with next to the wall surrounding the mosque.
In the bottom left, you can see a man in a white checkered shirt indicating with his hand his dismay and disgust at something else. Other people are distracted by this and looking in the same direction. They’re all looking at two tramps shout and begin fighting each other. They’re eyeing eachother in this picture. The shouting of a homeless drunkard is horrifying for many reasons.
This is by far the worst picture I took in India.
The memory is just as bad.