Home for a couple of weeks from a trip to India, I find myself having two stories to tell.

One is of the lovely, genuine people who assisted and accompanied my group of American voyagers. The other story, the one I feel compelled to write about, is about the devastating air pollution that accompanied me everywhere, even into a remote forest in Rajasthan. When I landed in Delhi the night after the festival of Diwali had been celebrated, accompanied by millions of firecrackers, Indian authorities had closed the schools in Delhi, and stopped construction as extreme measures to address the air pollution. As I stepped out of the airport, the air was thick, granular and smoky, and I felt like I had walked into a forest fire. My unflappable guide, Dinesh, told me that the farmers were burning the chaff from the first crop in order to plant the second. He acted as though this dense smog was a natural, passing phenomenon.

The next morning, The Hindustan Times reported the smog in Delhi was “the most perilous ever recorded” and that air pollution in India was now worse than in China. On my second day in DelhiI, I wrapped my scarf around my nose and mouth, like Lawrence of Arabia; my eyes were burning, and every vista was deeply clouded by smog. I had only experienced air this toxic once before, at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, 2 weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

After leaving Delhi the pollution was less, but it was still enough that I developed a deep rattling cough. This cough was at its worst a week into the trip, when I was in a Raja’s former hunting preserve in Ranthambore. I was coughing so hard that I was in bed for 36 hours. A week into our journey, my lungs bubbled and hissed when I lay down. Luckily, I did not feel unwell, just exhausted from hacking, and sore in the sternum. For the rest of the trip, I consumed cough drops, stayed inside as much as I could bear to, and tried to minimize my coughing spells. Amazingly, I did adapt to the daily assault of the pollution.

My second week in India I payed as little attention to my lungs as I could, and I concentrated on taking in as much as I could see of the beautiful bucolic countryside. And I started to notice that the leaves on the vast majority of the trees I was seeing were deeply coated in dun-colored dust. I remembered in Delhi on my first day that a large truck with many workers had been washing the leaves of roadside trees.

Indian Prime Minister Moti has created a huge re-forestation project called “Green India” to address the poisonous air. I did see trees being planted in large numbers. But the mature trees that I saw were covered with leaves that just hung down with the weight of the thick dust on top of them. The majority of the trees I saw in India were too covered with dust for transpiration to occur. The dust choked leaves upset me — they were a visible sign that more than trees were needed to clean the air.

The Hindu newspaper reported in a front page article on Nov. 19 that India had overtaken China in the number of deaths per year due to air pollution. It put the number at 3,383 deaths per day, or a million and a quarter people per year. Air India’s on flight magazine, Bon Voyage, had a full page ad by a natural gas company that claimed over 14 million deaths per year from air pollution in India. While the figures differ widely, the truth is clear — Indian people are dying on a massive scale right now, from air pollution.

I flew home to the United States on Thanksgiving Day. The next day, the front page article in the New York Times was about air pollution in Delhi where “daytime levels of PM 2.5, the most dangerous particles, passed 700 micrograms per cubic meter, 28x the concentration the World Health Organization considers safe.” The Times article pointed out it is mostly the elderly and the young who are dying from air pollution.

My life at home is normal again. I breathe without pain, or even awareness that I am doing the simple life giving act called breathing. After 18 days of air pollution, I hope with all my heart that the air quality in India will be improved with all possible speed. And I hope that the

United States will continue to work for and cherish our clean air. Our lives depend on it.

Pam Smith lives in Brunswick.