By Ellerine Diengdoh
Disclaimer: This op-ed has been reviewed by a team of experts who have spent the last decade confirming that ‘grey’ is, in fact, a colour. They are currently monitoring the situation by standing very far away, probably in Switzerland, looking through binoculars that have been wiped clean of the truth. If you find the satire in this piece too dark, remember that it is still thirty shades lighter than the average Tuesday morning in Byrnihat.
For most of human history, air has always been the polite bit of nothing that existed between your face and whatever it is you wanted to look at.Air never got in the way, and air has always been invisible, like common sense.
However, in our hills, the ” Scotland of the East”, in a town called Byrnihat, air has undergone a personality change. It has decided that it no longer wants to be anonymous, and insists on being felt, so it has started behaving like a physical thing one must shove aside just to get somewhere.
We have been informed that Byrnihat is currently the most polluted place in India, which is not exactly the sort of record anyone wants to break, but still, congratulations, I suppose. It’s nice to be first at something, even if that something is an entire town choking to death.
My recent journey through Byrnihat was a revelation, and I half expected soot-covered Oliver Twist to materialise on the sidewalk gasping for air. So, why has Byrnihat turned into this? Experts will tell you that it is because of something called “Industry.” Industry is when humans take a perfectly nice bit of nature and turn it into a place that looks like something straight out of a Dickensian hellscape.
Now, there are factories in Byrnihat, that are making things like iron, cement and smoke. What you see however is mostly smoke, tons and tons of ghastly smoke that is being pumped into the sky, presumably because factory owners think that the sky is a giant community bin that never gets full, but the sky is full, it is now overflowing with Byrnihat’s industrial vomit. Since the sky is now enveloped in this strange, dark ominous cloud, the people living below have had to adopt a strange new diet. For those living in Byrnihat, they aren’t just breathing, they are basically eating a building one molecule at a time. It is, I must say, a painfully slow way to consume a massive office block, which is much less delicious than a KitKat, or even the paper a KitKat comes in.
Our officials have noticed this, by the way, and tried to fix it by “monitoring” the situation. “Monitoring” for those who don’t know, is a clever term for watching something get worse while holding a file and nodding seriously. After years of intense watching, the officials have recently noticed that the air is grey, which is a massive breakthrough in the scientific field of “looking at things with your eyes” and seeing what others have seen two decades ago. Yet, despite this discovery, nothing has changed, because people argue that we need these grey-air-makers for something called “The Economy”.
Now let me explain to you what an economy is from the perspective of an English teacher. The economy is a magical invisible ghost that lives in banks and gets angry if we don’t destroy a forest and a river every twenty minutes.
The problem with feeding this invisible ghost is that it leaves the rest of us with a visible problem….a thick, grey paste that coats everything from the trees to the inside of your uncle’s throat and yours too if you are not careful.
If you only have half a brain…or perhaps just the one hemisphere that isn’t currently clogged with industrial soot…you have to wonder, what’s the use of a strong economy if your skin is covered in industrial boils? Who is going to pay for the doctors? Do you think the men who own these smoke-fountains are going to reach into their silk pockets and foot the bill for your oxygen tank? No. They won’t even pay for the tissue you are presently using to cough up a piece of their factory. They’ve built an entire system where the profit goes to them, and the cancer goes to you.
In the olden days, people in Meghalaya lived in harmony with nature. Now, they live in harmony with industrial plants. It is definitely less poetic, and it comes with added perks like your laundry coming off the line looking like it’s been used to clean the exhaust pipe of a very old, very sick truck.
Now this leads us to a bleak question about where we are all heading. In the future, we will look back at Byrnihat and wonder why we let an entire town turn into a giant, grey ashtray, or we may not, because we will be too busy being dead to care.
While Christians believe you couldn’t take your money with you to the afterlife, in Byrnihat, you can at least take a significant portion of a steel plant with you in your windpipe, and that somehow is very reassuring.
In short, Byrnihat stands as a monument to human progress. We took something beautiful and made it the sootiest, smoggiest version of itself, thereby proving that if humans put their minds and several hundred poorly regulated factories to it, we could ruin absolutely anything…..
Inspired by
https://youtu.be/ JKCxiBghzwI?si = GBI6PgnoJij71KPR
https://theshillongtimes.com/2026/06/30/ viral- report-on-byrnihat-ethanol-plant- pollution-faces-govt-denial/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/frontline.thehindu.com/photo-essay /byrnihat-industrial- pollution-public- health-crisis/article70493712.ece/amp/
