Oh Lahore! How Will You Breathe?

Pakistan's second city is being suffocated by truly frightening levels of pollution, reports British Pakistani writer and journalist BJ Sadiq

Students wait for morning transport as smog envelops Lahore, Pakistan, Friday 8 November 2024. Photo: KM Chaudary/Associated Press/Alamy

Lahore is Pakistan’s second largest city; and the city where I spent most of my youth. It is one of the oldest cities on the planet, drawing trade caravans from afar and suffering many a plundering horde from the Central Asian Steppes who wandered the plains of Punjab in search of booty and power. Poets and writers through centuries have been enchanted by its gilded minarets, its ivory domes, its colossal monuments; its antiquated house tops, and above all, its salubrious foggy air in winters.

In Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic, Lahore appears as one of the cities Adam peered down from the lush cliffs of Eden. Sir Muhammad Iqbal, a legendary Urdu poet lived here. Romantic Irish poet Thomas Moore wrote of it and Rudyard Kipling chose it as the setting for Kim, his classic novel.

But whenever I think of Lahore; a strange melancholy seizes me. I think of the leafy Mall Road that still dissects the city and a profusion of gardens and Victorian bungalows screening it. I think of the gable-roofed building of Government College Lahore and the kites sailing above it. I think of sparrows cheeping in the golden hour. I think of the traffic hooting away silently and children playing cricket in green spaces, sniffing clean morning air. I think of the artists painting what they saw in beautiful water colours. I think of crowded cafes, full of young people discussing politics and poetry, amidst sounds of muffled music, kettle whistling and the perpetual clink of white china cups; a glorious resurrection of Paris in the east. But that entire world is a figment of my imagination. The alteration the city has gone through over the past two decades is horrendous.

Last week, Lahore was ranked as the world’s most polluted city, as dense smog enveloped major districts of the Punjab province. Suddenly Lahore was in the news for all the wrong reasons. The city’s Air Quality Index (AQI) rose to frightening heights, surpassing 1,000 in some areas, a level deemed hazardous for public health and safety. In fact, Swiss group IQAir, which gathers data from 14 regional monitoring stations, rated Lahore the world's most polluted city last Wednesday, with an air quality index (AQI) score of 1165, more than 120 times the levels recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).