Upper panel: long-term ESO/NTT NIR K_s lightcurve of H 1743-322. We included the quiescent K_s = 17.1 mag reported by McClintock et al. (2009) (MJD 53 862). Lower panel: Rossi-XTE/ASM 2−12 keV X-ray lightcurve. We report in the top of this panel: i) the five outbursts that occurred from 2003 to 2008 (indicated by numbers, see Sect. 1 for details), and ii) the dates of our OIR observations (indicated by vertical ticks, see Table 1 for details).