Behind The Mask.

He has been doing this for 11 months. When I stopped to talk to him, the first thing I noticed wasn't his uniform or his whistle, it was his mask.

Not the kind people wear for a few hours during a bad air day, but the kind he has learned to live in, day after day. "It gets really hard sometimes," he told me, almost in passing, like it was just another part of the job.

"The amount of vehicles in Kathmandu has gone up so much, and so has the population.

Standing here in the middle of it, the pollution hits differently." He didn't say this with anger or complaint.

He said it the way someone says something they have simply accepted as true. Standing in his uniform on a closed road, with engines idling and exhaust rising around him, it's easy to forget that the people regulating our traffic are breathing the same toxic air they are protecting us from, only for longer hours, every single day. He admitted that the breathing problems sneak up on him, a tightness in his chest by the end of his shift, a cough that lingers longer than it should.

His uniform tells its own story too.

By the time he heads home, his sleeves and collar carry a fine layer of road dust, and the smell of exhaust clings to the fabric no matter how many times he washes it. Despite all of this, when I asked him how he felt about his job, his answer surprised me.

There was no hesitation, no complaint.

"It is hard, but I am proud to serve the nation as a traffic police," he said. That's the part most of us never see.

Behind the whistle and the white gloves is a man who has made peace with breathing bad air every day, with a dusty uniform and a heavy chest, simply because someone has to stand there and keep the city moving. For Inspector Dhungal, the mask isn't just protection.

It's a quiet, daily reminder of what it costs to do his job in a city where the air keeps getting heavier, and the traffic keeps getting louder.