There is a specific kind of scroll that I have started recognising. You are on your phone, half-awake, not really looking for anything, and then there it is. A forest somewhere. A coastline. A number that did not use to be that high. You keep scrolling. That is it. No gasp. No crisis. Just a small, quiet lowering of something inside you, and then you keep scrolling.
I used to think grief was supposed to feel like something. Like you would know when it arrived. But this thing that has been accumulating but not announcing itself. It just settles.
In Chandigarh, the winters have been doing something odd. Not dramatically odd, just slightly off. Even this month of March has been weird. I cannot prove anything. I am not a scientist. But I grew up in this air, and something is different.
Delhi is harder to sit with. Every visit, I notice my nose doing something it should not be doing. There is a specific grey-brown that settles in front of my eyes when I look out over the city. People just… live inside it. Go to work inside it. You say something, and everyone nods, and then the conversation moves on.
I went to Kerala, which was all green and blue, and felt very reassured. But I keep reading things on my phone when I am not there. Landslides. Rain where there was not supposed to be rain, and no rain where there was. The place looked exactly as I always expected it to, and yet it felt like it was quietly negotiating something it had not signed up for.
The feeds do not help, but I cannot look away from them either. There is something almost compulsive about checking in on something about the environment and the world you cannot fix but feel responsible for anyway. A new wildfire. A heat record. A before-and-after glacier photo someone posts, a few people double-tap it, and nobody knows what to do with it.
I have started to think that climate grief being mundane is actually the point. Maybe it is the body’s way of managing something too large to feel all at once. Maybe. But I think it might also just be what living at this particular moment in history feels like. Not apocalypse. Just Tuesday. It is just this low-grade awareness while you reply to your work emails and share reels with your friends. It is not a protest.
