After Sati killed herself, her husband was inconsolable. It was Sati who had convinced him to love, and who had taught him desire. It was for Sati that he had emerged from a life of austerity and isolation to be part of the world. And it was for his honor that she had thrown herself on the pyre.
He pulled her body from the fire and carried it for days, wandering, crazed with grief and rage. Because he was Shiva, and a god, his fury was destruction—a chaos that threatened to engulf the whole world. Vishnu went to calm him down, dismembering Sati’s corpse as Shiva carried it. (Gods have their ways.) People still worship at the places where Sati’s body parts fell.
Empty-handed, Shiva went to the river, to the Yamuna. Yamuna, daughter of the sun, twin sister of death, goddess of love and compassion. He bathed in the river, and as the madness of his grief cooled, it scorched the water black.
This, they say, explains the color of the Yamuna—so distinct from the milky waters of the Ganges. The holy Yamuna is a river that accepts and dilutes grief and rage, a fount of love and understanding for everyone from the gods on down. Maybe it is mythologically appropriate, then, that it accepts so much else.
India is full of holy rivers, and even derives its name from a river. It is the land beyond the Indus, a river whose own name, just to be safe, derives from an ancient Sanskrit word for river. And as with Hindu deities, so with Indian waterways. The name of the game is multiplicity. Each is the incarnation or avatar or consort or child of every other, and there is hardly a creek in the subcontinent that can escape the burden of some pretty hard-core metaphysical freight. How holy are India’s rivers? So holy that even certain bodies of water in Queens are also holy. So holy that you can’t spill your drink without worrying that someone will show up to venerate it.
The Ganges—or Ganga, as it is called in India—is, by many accounts, the holiest of all. Heart of Varanasi, consort of Vishnu, flowing through the hair of Shiva, etc., etc. It is the apotheosis and parent of all other rivers. And it was on the Ganga’s banks, nearly a decade earlier, that I had first seen the light as a pollution tourist. I had lived in New Delhi for six months and had happened to visit Kanpur, where the Ganga received a crippling infusion of industrial effluent and municipal sewage. It was supposedly the most polluted city in India. But I liked visiting Kanpur. I liked how you could walk from the tanneries to the river, from the open sewers to the farms, and see for yourself how they were all connected. I liked how you could stand on the banks of the reeking Ganga, almost as sludgy as it was holy, and watch pilgrims take their holy baths, confident in the purifying power of the impure water. All this, and cheap hotels. Yet in the guidebooks, Kanpur didn’t exist.
Well that’s not fair, I’d thought.
And in Delhi, I had met a different species of environmentalism from that in the United States. Back home, however much you thought you cared about the environment, it was an impersonal concern. After all, your daily surroundings, whether in suburb or city, were likely to be pleasant, or at least clean, or at least nontoxic. In India, though, environmentalism was more than an abstract moral value. It was more than a way to signal your politics and your socioeconomic status. Here, in the daily confrontation with poor air and adulterated drinking water, it took on the urgency of a civil rights struggle. Only in the polluted places could you properly understand what was at stake.
This time I skipped Kanpur. Skipped Ganga. It might be India’s holiest river, but the Yamuna is its most polluted, and I had priorities. I wanted to know why, with all the Hindu rumpus about rivers, a river goddess can’t actually catch a break. For although the Yamuna might be a goddess, by the time she leaves Delhi, she is no longer a river.
I hadn’t gone home. I had none. I had come straight from China. From Linfen to Beijing, from Beijing to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Delhi. Delhi, where, not five minutes from the airport, the cabdriver resumed where the Han family had left off.
“You are married?” he asked.
Had entire continents been populated only to make me say it? I was alone. Not with the Doctor, not newly married, but alone, and alone, and alone.
“No,” I said. “Are you?”
He nodded. He had a child, too.
“Your country, all love marriages. No arranged marriages. This is good,” he said. “Arranged marriage, father and mother choose the girl. You choose different girl.”
“You had an arranged marriage?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you love your wife?”
“Yes,” he said. His eyes were on the road. “But I loved another woman.”
India. Land of contrasts.
That’s what you’re not supposed to write about India. But nobody can help it. Even the most sophisticated people will write thoughtful, evocative prose that still amounts to India, land of contrasts. What are they trying to say? Is there no contrast anywhere else in the world? I think what they mean is India, less tidy and homogenous than I’m used to.
I had loved Delhi when I’d lived here. Loved the noise, the smells, the energy of the street. That’s what I wrote home about. I had reveled even in the simple tumult of buying a train ticket. But as the truism has it, a traveler’s writings say more about the traveler than about the place traveled to. Before, I had found dusty blossoms of curiosity and independence on every corner. Now, years later, I saw Delhi again and wondered if I could just sleep through it. Through drab, mediocre Delhi.
But it wasn’t just me. Delhi had changed in the past decade. At least, that’s what people told me.
“Oh!” they would say. “Delhi has changed so much!” Even the autorickshaw drivers, if they spoke English, would tell me how bad the traffic had become, as if there were no traffic jams in Delhi in 2002. And those same autorickshaw drivers still pouted when you tried not to let them rip you off as fully as they wanted.
So Delhi was still recognizably Delhi. But it was true—there had been some restyling. Its elite shopping malls more convincingly suggested that you might be in America. The Evergreen Sweet House restaurant now had three floors, and air-conditioning. The city’s upscale neighborhoods were marginally tidier than before, and disappointingly free of wildlife. Street animals used to be half the fun in Delhi, but now you’ve got to work to bring your clichés to life, and you’re down by Tughlaqabad before you can find a pair of cows blocking the road.
The most obvious change was the Delhi Metro, whose routes had burrowed through the city far more rapidly and effectively than anyone could have expected. It now ran all the way down to the satellite city of Gurgaon, about ten miles to the southeast. A subway to Gurgaon, imagine! The success of the Metro seemed to have taken the city by surprise. In a land where public works are so often lumbering, ineffectual, and corrupt, the subway was clean, efficient, and cheap.
As for the Yamuna, I had no idea if it had changed. Its banks lay only a few miles from where I had lived, but at the time I had been only dimly aware that a river even existed in Delhi. It was an appropriate ignorance, though. Delhi had long since turned its back on the Yamuna. Now the river played a part in the city’s life only as an object of neglect and disgust.
On the riverbank, I gave a man called Ravinder a few hundred rupees and we went out in his flat-bottomed wooden rowboat. Sitting next to Kakoli, my translator for the day, I peered over the edge as Ravinder worked the oars. The surface of the water was a dark gradient of billowing grays interrupted by little bubbles. Methane, I assumed. We coasted into a stretch of water spread with an unfamiliar film, not quite as colorful as a petroleum rainbow, not quite as thick as the skin of milk on a boiling pot of chai. Lumpy black gobbets dotted its surface. We needed only our noses to understand that the water was dark with more than Shiva’s grief. We were floating not on a river, but on a great urban outflow, a stream of human sewage that was standing in for the river that had dug the channel.
The Yamuna was full of shit.
It gets this way in stages. Emerging clean from the Himalayas, the river receives periodic doses of sewage and industrial runoff as it crosses the plain. Then, about 140 miles upstream from Delhi, it meets the Hathnikund Barrage—a multi-gated dam built to control the river’s flow. At Hathnikund, the greater part of the river’s water is diverted into the Eastern and Western Yamuna Canals. These canals, both hundreds of years old, were originally devised for irrigation, but an increasing amount of the water they divert is used for city water supplies, especially Delhi’s. The city’s population has grown more than 600 percent over the past fifty years, drastically increasing its water use.
In India, as in so many places, tension over water is the driving force behind an incredible swath of environmental and political problems. In this case, to make up for water spirited away by the megalopolis downstream, farmers in the region pump massive volumes of groundwater. The overextraction is so intense that it has lowered the water table to below the level of the riverbed itself, meaning that south of Hathnikund, the Yamuna simply percolates straight into the ground. The river runs dry. Except during the several months of the monsoon, the Yamuna essentially ceases to exist as it approaches Delhi.
Because it would otherwise disappear into the riverbed, water extracted for Delhi is transported via the Munak Escape, a fork of the Western Yamuna Canal that itself receives a helping of industrial waste and domestic sewage. The water then collects behind the Wazirabad Barrage, on Delhi’s northern margin. (Here it is augmented with water brought from the Ganga, of all places, making the Ganga a tributary of one of its own tributaries.)
Thanks to these inputs, there is water in the river at Wazirabad. But this water does not flow south into Delhi, as the river once did. Instead, it is pumped out and treated, becoming the basis of the city’s water supply.
Nevertheless, there is water downstream of the Wazirabad Barrage, flowing the fourteen miles through the heart of Delhi. For this stretch, the Yamuna takes the city itself as its source, receiving something close to a billion gallons of wastewater each day, the vast majority of it domestic sewage, and more than half of it completely untreated.
So when local activists refer to the Yamuna as a sewage canal, as they do, it is no figure of speech. Except during the monsoon, there would be no river in Delhi without this wastewater.
Nor is it much of an exaggeration when people refer to the Yamuna as dead. The river’s level of dissolved oxygen (a good indicator of its capacity to sustain life) here falls to approximately one-tenth of the minimum government standard. Coliform levels (which indicate a waterway’s microbial danger) are incredibly high. The Indian government’s upper limit for safe bathing is five hundred coliforms per hundred milliliters of water. At points in Delhi, though, the coliform count has exceeded seventeen million.
The oarlocks squeaked and knocked as Ravinder worked the oars. He wore a Levi Strauss T-shirt and blue track pants. The lifeless river was placid, almost pleasant. A light breeze took the edge off the sewage smell.
“Who told you this is water?” he said. He told us that when he was young, he had been able to see to the bottom of the river. Now, though, you could barely see a foot deep, and clouds of inky muck eddied against the surface as we passed through shallow areas, the ends of the oars black where they had touched the bottom.
Ravinder had grown up on the banks of the Yamuna, and still lived in one of the city’s few riverfront neighborhoods. And in his thirty-odd years he had seen the river change. “There were lots of tortoises, but people sold them off. There were fish, and snakes,” he said. “But now it’s just a drain.” Although he lived mere steps away from the river, he neither bathed in it nor allowed his family to. Only in July and August, during the annual floods of the monsoon, would they get in the water. “During that period, the river becomes very beautiful,” he said. “But within a month, it’s over.”
Ravinder earned his money by taking people out to the center of the river to drop offerings or cremation ashes in the water. Sometimes he made a thousand rupees in a day—about twenty dollars. Sometimes he made nothing.
“I took two people out on the river earlier today to drop eighty kilos of charcoal in the water,” he said. “A priest told them to. They invoked the name of the sun, and of Yamuna, and dropped handfuls of charcoal into the river. Then they dumped the rest out of the bags. Tomorrow morning, I’m taking a couple to put a hundred and twenty fish into the river.”
“Living fish?” I asked.
“Living fish,” he said.
Kakoli shook her head. “Those fish will die.”
A printed picture of a blue-skinned deity came floating downstream. Before I could make out if it was Shiva or Krishna, the oar struck it on the downstroke, folding the image and plunging it into the black water.
A pair of men were bathing on the riverbank. A gull flew over our heads. Upriver we saw a hawk, a tern. Over Ravinder’s right shoulder, Nigambodh Ghat was coming into view—the cremation ground. A trio of pyres burned on the shore, braiding the air into thick tangles of heat.
The cremation ground is one of the few lively spots on the riverside, and a surprisingly relaxing place to spend the morning. Kakoli and I had visited before going downriver to find Ravinder. We had sat on a large concrete step and watched a group of young men build one of the pyres now burning. (There was a gas-fired crematorium just down the bank, but no person in his right mind wants to be cremated in a dank, indoor, gas crematorium. Not if your family can afford the wood to burn you on the riverbank.)
On a low pallet, a man lay wrapped in white cloth, his head exposed. His face was old. He was dead. The younger generation dribbled water on him from a plastic bottle and sprinkled dirt over his body. Then they finished building the pyre, leaning planks and branches against the man until they had formed a teepee of wood four or five feet tall. It was ten in the morning.
“In Calcutta, people still go to bathe in the river,” Kakoli said. “Even wealthier people. But in Delhi, people will not look at it. People will only come to the river to use it as a cremation ground.”
A young man in black trousers and a red sweater walked around the pyre, holding a thin strip of burning wood. It was the dead man’s son, I assumed. He stopped at the head of the pyre and lit it near the ground. A thin trail of smoke trickled out. That’s where we all go—not back to dust, but into the atmosphere, to join our emissions. The young man and his five companions then retired to one of the concrete tiers facing the bank and began their wait, chatting casually. It would take several hours for the pyre to burn.
Riding by the pyres in Ravinder’s boat, I now noticed a pair of men standing knee-deep in the water, mucking out scoops of mud. They were collecting ashes that had been cast into the water from the riverbank. A cremated person may have been wearing rings, or been adorned with other precious objects, as they were placed on their pyre. Now these men were poring through their sodden ashes to see what they could find. Gold fillings, maybe?
I asked Ravinder if this wasn’t, you know, bad manners.
He frowned, looking at the men on the bank. No, he said. It’s not seen as disrespectful.
South of the cremation ground, we crossed wakes with a dark-skinned woman wearing an olive-colored sari. She was squatting on a large plastic bag stuffed with scraps of polystyrene foam and mounted with a square wooden frame. Her raft listed forward steeply to where she hunkered on its edge, working the water with a single, short oar.
Her name was Mamta. She lived with her husband on the opposite bank. They made their living combing the margins of the river for paper, plastic, anything they could sell to the recyclers. Her raft was littered with the morning’s haul: several coconuts, a few paper booklets, and a single plastic sandal.
She stared at the water as she answered my questions. They had been in Delhi for ten or fifteen years, she said. Eight years ago, the government had pushed them out of the shantytown they had lived in. Now, they lived in a temporary shack on the floodplain. When the river rose each year with the monsoon, they had to retreat with the land.
When I asked how old she was, she hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think I’m twenty-five or twenty-six.” Then she continued upriver, raking her oar through the mat of flowers and trash that clung to the bank.
Ravinder sent us back out to the middle of the river, where he left off rowing and let us drift. He crossed his legs and opened a packet of tobacco. “So many people migrated to Delhi,” he said. “The waste going into the river has grown and grown with the city. But Yamuna is one. It has not multiplied.”
He still believed in the river, though. Yamuna was a goddess, he said. He might go for a week and a half without earning any money at all—only to make up for it in a single day’s work. The Yamuna didn’t take, he said. It gave.
With that, he put some tobacco in his mouth and we drifted for a while longer, spinning quiet circles in the breeze.
Where there are rivers or lakes in India, there are ghats: wide riverfront stairs that lead down to the water. Ghats are an indispensable part of the sacred Hindu love affair with water, and through history they have been places for worship, and worshipful bathing, and non-worshipful swimming, and for doing the laundry, and for cremating the dead—as at Nigambodh Ghat—and for pretty much anything else you might want to do at the riverside. But Delhi has few ghats. It is a city of sixteen million with barely any places, ghat or otherwise, where people interact with the river. I went looking for any that were left.
At the south end of its Delhi segment, the Yamuna is again made to jump its channel. The Okhla Barrage shunts it into the Agra Canal, through which it is destined to become the Taj Mahal city’s unenviable water supply. Just upstream of the barrage is the riverfront park of Kalindi Kunj. Unlike many riverfront parks, though, Kalindi Kunj offers no actual frontage to its river. A fence encloses the park, keeping visitors away from the actual river, which sits quiet and littered with trash. Ill-disposed to climb an eight-foot-tall fence topped with spikes, I resigned myself to wandering the leafy confines of the park.
The place was crawling with young couples in the throes of passionate hand-holding. With every corner I turned, I almost stepped on a pair of sweethearts. In a city where young couples have no apartments or cars of their own to disappear into, they go to the parks. It is so common here for couples to meet each other in parks or at historical monuments that it sometimes seems that these places have been designated by the city government as official make-out spots.
It ought to have sent me into a lovelorn tailspin, like everything else did. Instead, it was a respite. Since arriving in Delhi, I had been preoccupied with how Indian men and women interacted in public—or how they didn’t. It’s safe to say that the vast majority of Indians live under very conservative sexual mores, and it had been depressing the hell out of me.
Maybe it was the astounding numbers I had recently heard about child sexual abuse in India. The country is home to more than four hundred million children, nearly a fifth of the world’s below-eighteen population, and according to the government more than half are sexually abused. Incredible India, land of contrasts, awash in brutality.
I thought of this every time I boarded the Delhi Metro. There are separate cars for men and women—which itself says something—and as we filed on, I would think of those children growing up, of what my fellow male passengers must be carrying inside them, and of what they must have done, and of hundreds of millions of lives distorted by such epidemic violence and rape. By the time the train left the station, I’d have convinced myself that men were born only for cruelty, and that no living person, woman or man, would ever escape our planet-eating vortex of betrayal and isolation.
I was down.
In Kalindi Kunj, though, it was different. Maybe there was hope—just a little—for loving coexistence between the human species. Every second tree hosted a couple that sat at its base, talking quietly, laughing, holding hands, kissing. Everyone was running their hands through someone’s hair. Everyone was cradling the head of their beloved in their lap. If the woman wore a sari, she might drape its veil over both their heads. Who knows what went on in those micro-zones of privacy? Everyone was smitten. On a perfect spring day, thirty yards upwind from the shittiest stretch of river in the world, I believed in love for a little while.
There once were ghats up by the ISBT highway bridge, but for no good reason the city government ripped them out in the early 2000s. Now the overpass itself serves as a kind of high-altitude, drive-thru ghat. As on other bridges over the river, people pause day and night to throw offerings or trash into the water. It’s hard to tell the worship from the littering.
My friend Mansi brought her camera, and we spent a morning underneath the overpass, where a slope of packed dirt led down to the river. Every minute or two, an untidy rain of flowers would sift down from the bridge, or a full plastic bag would hit the water with a dank plop. We would look heavenward, sometimes catching a motorcycle helmet peering down from the railing. The city government had erected fences on most bridges to keep people from throwing over so many offerings; invariably the fences become tufted with flowers and bags that snag as someone tries to throw them over. Here, though, people had found an unprotected spot where they could throw their offerings unhindered. It was the same kind of unceremonious ceremony that I had seen at the cremation grounds, a sacredness that had no use for aesthetics.
And as with the cremation grounds, anything of value that goes into the water here must also come out. Wherever offerings are made, there are coin collectors, men who scour the river bottom with their hands. Although they are called coin collectors, they are comprehensive in their religious recycling, and actually collect anything that can be sold or reused.
The sun had just come up, murky over the Yamuna, and on the bank four collectors were finishing their morning chores before getting down to work.
“In the summer,” one of them told me, “the smell gets so strong here, your eyes water.” His name was Jagdish, and he had been in the reverse-offering business for nearly twenty years, since he was a teenager. He made enough to support his wife and ten-year-old daughter.
Jagdish reeled off a list of what you could find in the water here: gold and silver rings, gold chains hung with devotional pendants, coins with images of gods. But only once in a while was the score so good. “If that happened every day,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here.” When he found coal, he sold it to the men who ironed clothes on the side of the road. When he found paper, he sold it for recycling. Coconuts he sold to people to sell on the street, or to be pressed for coconut oil if they were dry.
When you make an offering to the Yamuna, then, you are not making a permanent transfer of spiritual wealth, but playing part in a cycle, leaving tributes that will go into the river this morning only to be fished out, sold again, and reoffered this afternoon.
Jagdish worked this part of the riverbank with his brother and two other men, and while Jagdish lived five or six kilometers away, his brother Govind lived here by the water, in a tiny, tent-like shack. Govind, a friendly man in a green baseball cap, was also in his late thirties. He explained that because the water was too dark to see through, the collectors worked by touch, bringing handfuls of mud off the bottom to inspect. Govind wasn’t a good swimmer, so he only waded in to his neck. His brother did the diving, when it was necessary.
A bag of trash or offerings dropped from the overpass. In the dirt, Jagdish’s pet monkey, Rani, was lying on top of his dog, Michael. Rani idly scratched the snoozing dog’s stomach, a picture of interspecies peace. This was the kind of symbiotic friendship the human race needed with the rest of the natural world, I thought. But then Rani started picking at Michael’s anus, and he snarled and kicked her off.
Like the boatman Ravinder and the workers at the cremation grounds, Jagdish and Govind and their colleagues were among the last people in Delhi for whom the Yamuna was a life-giver not merely in a spiritual sense but in a practical one. And Govind told us he liked the work. “We’re our own boss,” he said. “We go in whenever we want. We’re here tension-free.”
When I asked him if he was religious, he shrugged. “Because the world follows God, we have to follow God, too,” he said. I wasn’t sure if that meant he was a devotee or not. Did they make offerings? He waggled his head. Sometimes they would give flowers or incense. But that was it.
“We take it out,” he said. “We don’t put it in.”
India’s credentials as a pollution superpower go beyond its rivers. There are the astounding shipbreaking beaches of Alang, and the lead smelters of Tiljala. And let’s not forget Kanpur, with its tannery effluent, rich in heavy metals. All of South Asia, really, is a wonderland of untreated toxic waste. And while India’s per capita carbon emissions are still low, its growing economy and the fact that there are 1.2 billion of those capitas mean that it is still a huge source of climate-changing gases.
The irony is that, in terms of environmental law, India is extremely advanced. Its very constitution mandates that “the State shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the forests and wildlife of the country.” As if that weren’t enough to make an American environmentalist weak at the knees, it goes on to declare that “it shall be the duty of every citizen of India to protect and improve the natural environment, including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and to have compassion for living creatures.” And it’s backed up by an activist supreme court that issues binding rulings on specific problems. Sounds like paradise.
Yet the results aren’t great. Bharat Lal Seth, a researcher and writer at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, told me that although the court system is activist, this is merely because the executive branches of government shy away from taking action, leaving it to the judiciary to issue edicts. But rulings are useless on their own.
“The judiciary feeds the [environmental] movement, and the movement feeds the judiciary,” Seth said, sitting in CSE’s open-air lunchroom. “You get a landmark ruling, and…what’s going to come of it?” The very fact that the Indian government doesn’t feel threatened or bound by such decisions makes it easier for the court to issue them.
Seth had put me in touch with R. C. Trivedi, a retired engineer from the Central Pollution Control Board, who joined us in the CSE canteen. He was a small, friendly man with rectangular glasses and a short, scruffy beard, and probably knew more about the Yamuna’s problems than anyone else in the country. Even after a thirty-year career, he exuded enthusiasm for the details of India’s water supply and wastewater system. He smiled when he talked.
Before long, Trivedi was sketching a tangled diagram of the Yamuna in my notebook, reeling off numbers for biochemical oxygen demand and flow rate, and marking off the river’s segments, from the still-flourishing Himalayan stretch, to the dry river below Hathnikund, to the Delhi segment—“basically an oxidation pond,” he said—and finally the “eutrophicated” lower stretch, where the nutrients from decomposing sewage lead to algae blooms and oxygen depletion. “A lot of fish kill, we observe,” he said, tapping on his newly drawn map. The eutrophicated segment runs for more than three hundred miles, until finally the Chambal, the Banas, and the Sind Rivers join it. There, he said, “it is good dilution. After that, Yamuna is quite clean.”
Listening to Trivedi and Seth, I could see that the brutal irony of the Yamuna’s situation was not only that its holiness did nothing to protect it, nor that India’s tradition of environmental law was so out of joint with the actual state of its environment. The worst part was that, incredibly, cleaning up the country’s rivers had for years been a major government priority. There was the Ganga Action Plan (or GAP, begun in 1985), and the Yamuna Action Plan (YAP, 1993), and the National River Conservation Plan (1995), and YAP II (2005), and YAP III (2011), among many other programs and plans, many of which continue to this day. Such programs had received massive funding, more than half a billion dollars over the previous two decades. Most of it had been spent on the construction of sewage treatment infrastructure.
At best, it had been a vast reenactment of the coin collectors’ work, with the government pouring billions of rupees into the rivers, and builders of infrastructure standing by to dredge the money out.
The problem with this approach was that building sewage treatment plants was simply not enough. “We are spending huge amounts of money from the World Bank, from all other sources, taking loans,” Trivedi said. But little of the wastewater infrastructure created with that money actually worked. “You have taken the loan and created it, and they don’t have the money to operate it! It can work only when there is continuous flow of funds.” He shook his head, smiling. “When you create a sewage treatment plant, you first figure out how it will work for twenty or thirty years. But we never looked at that. We just implemented the YAP.”
“Which has no effect,” I hazarded.
“Which has no effect,” he confirmed.
Because Delhi doesn’t charge for sewage treatment, there is no flow of funds to sustain the treatment plants. Not that most people in Delhi could afford sewage treatment fees in the first place. A further problem is the helter-skelter pattern of development in the city. A large proportion of Delhi’s neighborhoods have sprouted up unplanned, without any thought for how services like water and sewage treatment could be delivered, even if they were affordable. Sewage treatment plants built with YAP funds were therefore placed where there was room for the plants, not where there was sewage to be treated.
Trivedi thought any viable solution had to address the depletion of groundwater in the river basin. That meant promoting rainwater harvesting, a practice with deep traditional roots in India. Village ponds and earthen bunds can allow monsoonal water to stand long enough for it to seep into the ground and recharge the depleted water table. “Thereby, we can reduce the depletion of the groundwater table in the entire catchment area,” Trivedi said. “And if the water table comes up, all the rivers will start flowing again.”
Having told me how to heal every river in India, he put his hands on the table. There was, I knew, another shoe to drop.
The rainwater harvesting, I asked. Was that something that would happen at the local level?
“Yes,” he said. “But government always spends money on big, big projects. When people suggest something small, like five thousand dollars for a small reservoir or village pond…” He trailed off, still smiling. “They say, ‘No, no, no. This is very small.’”
The one place where Delhi retains a bit of the river life that it ought to have is Ram Ghat, which clings to the west side of the river immediately below the Wazirabad Barrage. It is behind this barrage, which doubles as a bridge to east Delhi, that the city’s drinking water supply collects.
Ram Ghat is a bank of broad stairs dropping precipitously to the river from a wooded area next to the road. The upstream edge of the ghat abuts the barrage, itself several stories tall. Thick concrete pylons support its roadway, with metal doors in between, to hold back the upstream part of the river. In monsoon season, large volumes of water are allowed through, but on the day Mansi and I visited, all the doors were closed but for one, and even it was open only a crack. Several boys laughed and swam in the minor waterfall that spilled from its edge. Because we were upstream of the sewage drains that emptied into the river, the water here was brighter and clearer, and free of those unmentionable floating clumps. On the far side of the river we could see modest fields of vegetables. There were small fields like this up and down the floodplain, even in Delhi.
At the top of the stairs, a man wearing office clothes bought a tiny tray of birdseed from a vendor, placed it in front of some ravens on the parapet, and prayed. On the submerged steps at the bottom, a boy lingered knee-deep in the river, collecting plastic bags and scraps of wood. A few yards downriver, a woman heaved a two-foot-tall idol of Ganesh into the water. By the time his elephant-headed form had disappeared under the surface, she was already starting the climb back, dusting off her hands as she went.
I walked down the tall stairs to the water. On the bottom step, a man in a white undershirt was dragging a magnet through the water. The coin collectors were innovating. “To live, you have to do something,” he said, in the universal wisdom offered to journalists who ask people about their humble, dangerous, or generally crummy jobs. And there were worse ways to spend your life than wandering up and down Ram Ghat in your shorts.
On the lowest step, I hunkered by the water. I wasn’t about to take a holy dip, as they call it, but this seemed like the cleanest spot on Delhi’s riverbank to get tight with the goddess of love. If it was good enough for Shiva, it was good enough for my tiny, writhing knot of a heart.
I put a hand in the water. Minute forms darted away. Water bugs. Something still lived in the Yamuna. Under the heat of the day, the river was cool against my skin. Coliform-rich, but refreshing. I lifted a handful of water. How much of this was Ganga? How much from the Munak Escape? How much had diffused its way upstream from the nearest sewage outflow? I poured it over my head. Yamuna’s all-encompassing love dribbled through my hair, down the back of my neck, and soaked into the collar of my shirt.
A woman with a big white sack landed heavily on the lower step. Her daughter was with her. Together they upended the sack. Flowers and small pots tumbled out, along with what looked like disposable food trays: the leavings of some devotion performed elsewhere, which would only be completed once they had drowned the ritual scraps. Another couple overturned a bag of charcoal. Hydrocarbon rainbows spread across the water. A pair of boys standing in the river immediately started picking out the hunks.
But coins and charcoal were not the only things that got fished out at Ram Ghat. At the top of the stairs, we met Abdul Sattar, sitting cross-legged on a small rug he had rolled out on a shady bit of the parapet. He was in his mid-forties, and wore a black sweatshirt and a pencil mustache.
Sattar was the self-appointed lifeguard of Ram Ghat. By vocation he was a boatman, like Ravinder, but that was auxiliary to his real passion, which was pulling attempted suicides out of the river. He had been doing it for more than twenty-five years.
With Mansi translating, I asked him if a lot of people tried to kill themselves there. He waved his head emphatically. “Bahot,” he said. A lot. We were only a week and a half into March, and there had already been two attempts this month.
“I didn’t let it happen,” Sattar said. “I can see them coming in. They generally look distressed.” He had a crew of youngsters who hung out by the river. Whenever he spotted someone who looked upset, he would direct his helpers to follow the person around, so a rescuer would be close at hand in the case of a suicide attempt.
Sattar provided his services for free. And why not? All he had to do was sit in the shade, greet passersby, enjoy the view, and occasionally save somebody’s life. But he told us his family didn’t like it. They didn’t like that he would invariably rush off to the river when called, even in the middle of the night.
“Are people upset when they realize you’ve kept them from killing themselves?” I asked.
There was a faint smile on his face. “Usually the women get very upset. But the family is grateful.” He said there were a lot of students who tried. There was always a rush after exam results came out. Others were motivated by family disputes.
“Do people kill themselves because they can’t marry who they want?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes. There are plenty of love cases. It’s mostly students and lovers.”
He was staring at the barrage. I asked him whether he had ever lost anyone. He nodded without hesitation.
The defining moment of Sattar’s lifeguarding career had come on a cold, foggy November morning, nearly fifteen years earlier. A crowded school bus had come across the barrage from the east, the driver speeding in the fog. In those days, Sattar said, there was no fence on the bridge. The driver had veered to avoid a pile of sand in the roadway, and the bus skidded out of control and crashed over the downriver side of the barrage. It was seven-fifteen in the morning.
“I dived in straight away,” he said, pointing at a spot of water twenty feet from the bank. “Three boats charged, as well.” The men dove and dove into the cold water, pulling kids to safety before going back to find more. Soon, they were finding only bodies.
“Now that I’m describing it to you, it’s right there in front of me,” Sattar said. “Everywhere we put our hands, we found them. Under the seats. I pulled out the body of one boy, and two others came with him.” Out of 130 children on the bus, nearly 30 died.
The Wazirabad crash was a huge news story in Delhi, and Sattar received an award from the national government. There had been promises of money, too, but Sattar told us that had just been the chatter of politicians trying to look generous. They had never followed up.
But he didn’t care. Lifeguarding was its own reward. He told us of one girl who had survived the crash. In a television interview, she had said it was thanks to Sattar that she was alive.
“I save lots of people,” he said. “I’ve gotten used to it. But when that girl said that, it really touched me.”
He shook his head, still deep in the memory. He had been shivering for a week, he said. The river had been very cold.
My original plan had been to find a canoe or a rowboat and run the Yamuna from Delhi to Agra, a journey usually made by bus. My waterborne arrival at the Taj Mahal—likely to a throng of local media—would open up an entirely new tourist route, and possibly lead to economic development along the water, and a renewed campaign to restore the Yamuna. You’re welcome.
But my delusions faded fast. Just you try looking up kayak in the Delhi yellow pages. And although there are scores of whitewater rafting companies in the foothills of the Himalayas, I soon realized it was hopeless to try to entice them out of the mountains. I didn’t have the money. Besides, they were whitewater rafters, not brown. Finally, there were all those dams on the Yamuna, and diversions, and dry sections. How do you raft a river that’s not there?
On foot is how. I had learned there was a yatra under way. Yatra is a Sanskrit word for “procession” or “journey,” and in this case meant a large protest march undertaken by a group of sadhus. Hindu holy men. They were walking a four-hundred-mile stretch of the Yamuna, from its confluence with the Ganga in Allahabad all the way up to Delhi, to demonstrate against the government’s failure to clean up the river. If I could find the march, out there in the wilds of the state of Uttar Pradesh, I could tag along for a few days. What luck! Environmentalism, spirituality, a good hike—and it was free. Knowing I’d need some Hindi on my side, I asked Mansi if she wanted to come along. She agreed right away. She’s a photographer, and photographers are always down for an adventure.
Before I left Delhi for the trip downstream, though, I went to see the source of the trouble.
The Najafgarh drain was once a natural stream, but even more than the Yamuna, it has been completely overwhelmed by its use as a sewage channel. With a discharge approaching five hundred million gallons a day, including nearly four hundred tons of suspended solids—yes, those solids—the single drain of the Najafgarh accounts for up to a third of all the pollution in the entire, 850-mile-long river. It is the Yamuna’s ground zero.
We approached it on foot, picking our way around the hubbub of a construction site. There was a new highway bridge going up, bypassing the chokepoint of the road over the Wazirabad Barrage. Beyond the work area we found a footbridge that crossed the drain several hundred yards up from where it met the Yamuna.
The footbridge was a wide dirt path bordered by concrete parapets. Looking over the edge, we could see the wide, concrete-lined trough of the drain, perhaps two stories deep. A dark slurry surged along its bottom. The air nearly rang with the smell—that fermented, almost salty smell. Sewage. It was a smell somehow removed from actual feces. A smell that somehow distilled and concentrated whatever it is about feces that smells so bad.
I had smelled that smell before, but never had it smelled like it smelled that day at Najafgarh. It smelled so bad it gave me goose bumps. It smelled so bad it made my mouth water. The gag reflex scrambled up my throat, looking for purchase. I tried to take shallow breaths.
And yet.
I looked over the side again. Vegetation climbed the seams of concrete on the walls of the drain. Green, bullet-headed parrots flew over the dark water. Pigeons stepped and dipped on a concrete ledge. Butterflies flopped upward through the sunny air.
Moving to the downstream side of the bridge, I saw strings of flowers snagged on the electrical wires that crossed the drain. They had caught there when people had thrown them in. Even here, people offered.
And why not? Underneath the stink and the noise, the rationale unfolded. This was a tributary of the Yamuna. Are you not to venerate it, merely because it smells? Why not worship it, suspended solids and all? What could be more sacred than a river that springs from inside your neighbor’s belly?
The temple of Maan Mandir stands on a craggy hill outside the small, tangled city of Barsana, seventy-five miles south of Delhi. They worship Krishna there, and you could do a lot worse. Krishna comes in the guises of an infant-god, a young prankster, a musician, an ideal lover, a fierce warrior, and—depending who you ask—an incarnation of the ultimate creator. With Krishna, you get it all.
Maan Mandir is the headquarters of Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj. Shri Ramesh Baba Ji—screw it, I’m just going to call him Shri Baba—was the guru who had launched the Yamuna yatra, and I had been granted permission to join the march on the condition that I visit him first. A reluctant guru-visitor, I had agreed only grudgingly. I was impatient to fall in with the yatra. Images danced in my mind of contemplative Hindu ascetics walking the banks of the Yamuna downstream from Delhi—the oxygen-starved, eutrophicated segment.
We had come to Braj, Krishna’s holy land. Braj straddles the boundaries of several Indian states, at the middle of the so-called Golden Triangle formed by Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra, and is one two-hundredth the size of Texas. It was here, way back when, that Krishna spent his days herding cows, stealing butter, and having sex with milkmaids.
So it is hallowed ground, and when you consider that almost every hill and pond and copse of trees in Braj is paired with a story of one of Lord Krishna’s frolics or flirtations, you begin to understand the environmentalist possibilities of Hindu belief. The very landscape of Braj is sometimes thought of as a physical expression of Krishna. And through it flows one of his lovers: the goddess Yamuna. In the temples of Braj, she is the holiest river of them all.
So the question isn’t why Shri Baba had launched the Yamuna yatra, but why he hadn’t done it sooner. Perhaps he was busy trying to protect the sacred hills and ponds of Braj. These were every bit as endangered as the Yamuna herself, and Shri Baba, in addition to pursuing a successful guru-hood at Maan Mandir, had made local conservation into a specialty—restoring ponds, protecting forests, fighting illegal mining in the hills, and establishing retirement homes for cows. (Not so ridiculous if you think cows are sacred.)
The embodiment of deities and sacred history in the natural world would seem to give Hinduism a huge leg up on Christianity in the eco-spirituality sweepstakes. St. Francis notwithstanding, Christianity has tended toward the anthropocentric. Our holy figures are all human, and live in the human sphere, which—some people argue—explains the West’s rapacious approach to its environment. Perhaps things would have been different if God had given Jesus the head of an elephant. And you know we Christians would have an easier time connecting to the rest of nature (and less trouble stomaching evolution) if there were a monkey in the Holy Trinity. Alas, we have no Ganesh, and no Hanuman.
Even worse, Christianity spent centuries promoting the idea that wilderness was either fodder for our dominion or a source of evil. The Devil was not in the details; he was in the woods. Of course, that’s not true anymore. Now, we love the woods, love nature, and save our fear and abhorrence for the dirty and despoiled places, precisely because they no longer count as natural. I guess that pent-up Judeo-Christian negativity had to go somewhere.
So, for a long time we were semiotically handicapped in the West, and there was no chance of us worshipping our forests. (What are you, an animist?) Besides, the world of forests and rivers and mountains was not the world that counted. All that mattered was the world that came after this one, a Kingdom that needed no conservation.
But don’t get all dewy-eyed about the alternatives. It seems humanity will find a way to ruin its environment, whether or not it’s holy. The funny thing about vesting the physical world with divine meaning, as in Hinduism, is that the world can retain its sacred integrity whether or not it gets treated like crap.
Years earlier, in my visit to Kanpur, I had seen pilgrims taking bottles of Ganga water home with them to drink as a curative—a curative laced with sewage and heavy metals. When I asked one man about the quality of the water, he told me he wasn’t worried. “It can’t cause disease,” he said. “Because Ganga is nectar. It can’t be made impure.”
And because a holy river has such purifying power, it is actually the perfect recipient for all your most impure waste—sewage, corpses, and so forth—which by mere contact with the water will be cleansed. So there is no paradox in the state of India’s rivers after all. Their very holiness speeds their ruin.
From the crown of its ridge, Maan Mandir commands a blinding view of the surrounding plain. To the west is Rajasthan, hills rising against the horizon. Our media handler, a skinny sadhu called Brahmini, showed us around the temple and down to the lower buildings, where we would be staying that evening. His manner was gentle, almost shy, and although he spoke with a faint lisp, his English was good. He used it to provide a detailed and unceasing account of Shri Baba’s work.
“Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj is the greatest saint of Braj,” Brahmini said. “In fifty-eight years, he never leaves Braj. When he came, there were robbers at Maan Mandir. They gave troubles to Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj. They threatened him and brought twelve guns. But Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj didn’t yield. He’s doing so many good works for India, specifically Braj. Braj has so many sacred places, but they are in a state of immense destruction.”
I perked up when he got to the Yamuna. “Yamuna River is also in very bad condition,” he intoned. “From New Delhi fresh water is not coming to Braj. It is stopped at the dam at Wazirabad. And instead of water, only stool and urine is coming to Braj. So yatra started two weeks ago in Allahabad, where Yamuna has confluence with Ganga. When yatra gets to New Delhi one month from now, millions of people will come to protest to the prime minister.”
Stool and urine, I scribbled in my notebook. Millions of people. Prime minister.
“Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj’s programs are not just for Braj,” Brahmini said. “Not just for all of India. But for all of the world.” He emphasized more than once that they accepted no money from the people who came to Maan Mandir, that free meals were given to all comers.
The most important part of their work, he said, was in the chanting of the holy names of God—specifically those of Krishna and of Radha, his lover and counterpart. Radha, milkmaid of milkmaids, was Krishna’s true love when he roamed the hills of Braj—never mind that she was married—and their relationship was so important to these particular followers of Krishna that they rarely spoke of one without the other.
“So much power is in the holy name of God,” Brahmini said. “You want to make sure that as many people hear the name of God as possible.” Maan Mandir had been distributing megaphones to devotees in small villages, so they could circulate through town every morning, chanting Hare Krishna, spreading the names of God. The program had reached thirty thousand villages so far.
I took a moment to mourn a million quiet village mornings ruined by amplified chanting. But Brahmini assured me it was worth it. “People and animals are salvated only by hearing it,” he said. “The entire atmosphere of the village is purified.”
Holy names could do more than purify village life. They were critical for the broader environment, a spiritual action necessary to confront the irreversible destruction predicted by scientists. “Only by chanting of holy names, the future and environmental problems can be saved,” Brahmini said. “He was a great environmentalist also, Lord Krishna was.”
In the evening we went to see Shri Baba preach. The sermon—or maybe it was a concert—took place in a breezy, square room in one of the buildings down the hill from the temple. The crowd was entirely Indian; Maan Mandir didn’t seem to be attracting any aging hippies or Silicon Valley dropouts. Shri Baba wandered in and sat on a low stage in front. He was in his late seventies but looked much younger. He had great skin. He was bald, with a perfect globe of skull that crowned an expressionless, hangdog face. He preached in Hindi, his voice low and strong, measuring his sermon with long pauses. As he talked, he noodled on an electric keyboard, and every now and then the music would take over, a drummer and a flutist would start up, and Shri Baba would shift seamlessly into song. His best move, which he pulled once or twice per song, was to let his melody soar into a high, long note: at this cue, the entire room would raise their arms and scream, an entire army of Gil Seriques. AAAGGHH!
Early the next day, we went to see the morning sermon up at the temple itself. Brahmini and Mansi and I climbed the stairs through the trees to the top of the ridge, toward an impossibly brilliant sky. Outside the temple, Brahmini led us into a small garden, in the middle of which stood the statue of a blue-skinned woman. It was Yamuna herself, a faint smile on her face.
The temple was older and sparer than the buildings down the hill. It had a stone floor, cool under our shoeless feet, and unglazed windows looking out over the countryside. Mansi sat with the women, and Brahmini and I walked to a crumbling chamber adjoining the back of the room, where he could translate the sermon without disturbing everyone else. He had brought a handheld digital recorder, into which he would speak his translation. Later, he said, he would send the audio file to a devotee in Australia, who would transcribe it and post it on the Internet. They did this every day.
Shri Baba was sitting on another low stage facing the audience. He spoke. Brahmini leaned over to me so I could hear him as he murmured into the recorder.
“The greatest mental disease is attachment,” he said. “Suppose a man is attached to a woman.”
I sat up.
“Don’t see the outside,” Shri Baba told us. “See the inside. The body is full of bones, blood, urine, and stool. It gets old and dies.” Brahmini’s translation was rhythmic and precise. “There are nine holes in the body,” he said. “Only dirt and pollution is coming out. And think about that stool.”
That was the key, according to Lord Krishna. “If you see the errors in the object, in the body,” Shri Baba said, “your attachment will be destroyed.”
I decided to give it a try. I thought about the Doctor, to whom I was still most abjectly attached. I thought about how she was full of stool and urine. About how she was nothing but flesh and bone. About how she would grow old and die. I saw her in a hospital bed, old and dying, full of stool and urine. A tourniquet of compassion seized me across the chest. My eyes filled with tears. It wasn’t working.
Shri Baba was still talking. He wanted to get some things straight about stool. He was, dare I say, attached to the topic. There were twelve kinds of it, he said, and proceeded to lay out the whole taxonomy, stool by stool. The body was a factory of stools, he said. It was folly to perfume and beautify something so polluted.
I know he was just trying to help his sadhus control their libido. But seriously, why so down on stool? Is our human plumbing really so vile? And wasn’t the Yamuna itself full of stool and urine?
I sat back, tuning out. As Shri Baba segued into a disquisition on lust, I watched two pigeons fornicate enthusiastically on a ledge above the doorway. A third pigeon arrived, and there was a fight, and then some more pigeon sex. It was hard to tell the sex from the fighting.
The sermon went on, in the gentle, alternating monotones of Shri Baba’s words and Brahmini’s translation. In a daze, I saw a fly circle out of the air and land on my forearm. I watched its head of eyes pivot back and forth. Then, hesitant, it lowered the mouth of its proboscis, and touched it to my skin.
“Baba is calling you,” Brahmini said, and we went in for our audience.
Shri Baba was sitting on a small dais in a long, bright chamber on the temple’s upper floor, profoundly expressionless, profoundly bald, cross-legged. We put our hands together and sat at his feet. It was like the scene near the end of Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen meets Marlon Brando, except Shri Baba wasn’t scary like Colonel Kurtz, and it was daytime, and I wasn’t there to kill him. A dull roar of drumming and chanting emanated from downstairs.
He began talking in Hindi. I had feared he would tell us that only by the chanting of holy names could Yamuna be “salvated,” but I detected a practical mind-set even before Brahmini started translating. Between my few words of Hindi and the language’s liberal borrowing of English, I could get the gist. Yamuna. Eighty percent. Water. Wazirabad. Twenty percent. Government not honest. No awareness.
Brahmini translated, and then indicated that I should ask some questions.
I told Shri Baba that I understood the Yamuna was important because of its connection to Krishna. But what about places Krishna had nothing to do with? What about the rest of the world? Did Shri Baba care only for Braj?
“The importance of environment is all over the world,” he said. “Without the non-human life there is no human life.”
What Shri Baba really wanted to talk about was corruption. And he didn’t mean it in the spiritual sense. He said India was corrupt from top to bottom, especially as related to the environment. The supreme court had decreed that fresh water should come to Braj through the Yamuna, and yet it didn’t happen. The yatra’s purpose was to confront that fact.
“Not even 1 percent of India’s people think about purifying Ganga and Yamuna,” he said. “People who make efforts for sacred works are crushed.” He said a price had been put on his head during the fight to save the hills from mining. People had been kidnapped. Shri Baba had been poisoned.
He ran his hand over the dome of his head, his face still impassive. “But we don’t fear death,” he said. “I consider myself as dead.”
We found the yatra that night, ten or fifteen miles southeast of Auraiya. They were camping in a grassy compound off a minor rural highway. The river was nowhere in sight. The roads and paths along its banks, I was told, had become almost impassable, especially for the support trucks. Sunil, the march’s logistical manager, had chosen to take the yatra along Highway 2 for a little while. We’d get back to the Yamuna soon, he assured me.
It had taken us all day to get there. Mansi and I had traveled from Maan Mandir alongside a tall, dark sadhu with a grandly overgrown beard. He wore a plain white robe and his only possessions were a small digital camera and a nonfunctional cellphone. He had a kindly face, but we dubbed him Creepy Baba, for the way he kept trying to put his hand on Mansi’s knee.
The idea had been for Creepy Baba to help us find the yatra, but over the course of multiple jeeps, buses, and one badly crowded jeep-bus, he proved blinkingly inadequate to the task. In Agra, he convinced us to board the wrong connecting bus, which we could only un-board after a quick shouting match with the driver and most of the passengers.
Oh god, said Mansi. Who knows where Creepy Baba is taking us.
Sunil picked us up in Auraiya and drove us to camp, where a pod of sadhus descended on us in greeting. Through Mansi, they asked me over and over how I had found out about the yatra. When I said I had read about it in a newspaper, online, they wanted to know which newspaper. I had no idea.
“Was it the Times of India?” asked one man.
I did know of the Times of India—and knew it was in English. “It could have been,” I said.
“Times of India!” he cried to the assembled crowd.
Soon a cellphone was thrust into my hand. When, moments later, it was snatched away, I had been interviewed by a newspaper in Agra. I know this because Mansi later read me an extensive quote—attributed to me, but none of which I actually said—from a Hindi-language Agra daily.
The man who had asked me about the Times was called Jai. In Shri Baba’s absence, he was lead sadhu on the march. Shri Baba never leaves the land of Krishna, and so would join the yatra only when it reached Braj. The sadhus were carrying a pair of his shoes on the march, though, so he could be there in spirit.
Jai had been following Shri Baba for ten years now. A former social worker, he lived at Maan Mandir and was an almost frantically amiable man. In Hindi, he apologized for not speaking English. In English, I apologized for not speaking Hindi. Not to be outdone, he made an elaborate pantomime of seizing the air in front of my mouth, inserting it into his ear, and then raising his hands once more in apology.
No, I said. It is I who must apologize.
Conditions on the yatra were spartan but well managed. The tents were large, sturdy structures of green canvas, perhaps handed down by the British upon their departure in 1948. Each tent was strung with a single, blinding lightbulb hanging from an old wire connecting it to the generator. There was a steel water tank on a trailer, and a truck mounted with an oven for baking flatbread, and a crew of at least half a dozen guys whose job it was to drive ahead of the march, set up camp, and cook. All we had to do was walk.
There is a long tradition of political walking in India, and this particular yatra happened to coincide with the anniversary of Ghandi’s famous Salt March, the yatra of yatras. For more than three weeks in the spring of 1930, Gandhi and an ever-increasing army of followers marched toward the sea, where they would make salt from seawater, symbolically violating the Salt Act imposed by Britain fifty years earlier. Along the way, Gandhi made evening speeches to the marchers and to the thousands of local people who came to investigate.
Covered widely in the international media, the Salt March gave a huge symbolic boost to the Indian independence movement, and put civil disobedience on the map as a major political strategy. The marches of the American civil rights movement were yatras. And it was in hope of a similar runaway train of popular righteousness that Shri Baba and company had launched the Yamuna yatra. So far, though, he had motivated somewhat fewer marchers than Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. had. It was hard to be sure in the dark, but I counted about twenty tents.
In the middle of camp, they were holding a satsang—a kind of group discussion or teach-in. Two dozen people from nearby villages sat on the ground in the garish light of a work lamp, while Jai talked over a microphone connected to a pair of earsplitting loudspeakers.
“You are the owners of this country,” Mansi translated. “Taxes are supposed to perform for you, but they don’t. You don’t get what you deserve. Come with us tomorrow morning. Come walk with us. Come with us to Delhi.”
At quarter past five in the morning, I became aware of the ground, and then of the tent, and then of the sound of tiny cymbals clashing together. I unzipped the collapsible mesh pod of mosquito netting—thoughtfully provided by Sunil—and stumbled out of my chrysalis into the dark of a new day. Bats flickered overhead.
Jai was on the loudspeakers again. “FIVE MINUTES!” he said, through a squeal of feedback. “IT’S OKAY TO CHANT GOD’S NAME, SO LET’S DO IT!” He warmed us up with a piercing round of Radhe Krishna Radhe Sharma. A couple of men in orange robes bumped around and got in line behind the white pickup truck on which the loudspeakers were mounted. Jai gave us our marching orders. “Don’t get in front of the truck!” he said. There was some hollering, and they gave the truck a push. The driver popped the clutch, the engine burped to life, and just like that, the yatra was in business for another day.
There weren’t more than twenty-five of us. We walked down the road, following the pickup truck, which was mounted with side-facing banners showing pictures of Shri Baba and the leader of the farmers’ union, with whom Shri Baba had formed a strategic alliance. There were several union members among us, recognizable by their green caps.
We walked, passing misty fields of green wheat, and the day came up. I hung back a little, avoiding the sonic kill zone directly behind the truck, and settled into the rhythm of the march. Eventually Jai would tire of leading us in chants of radhe-this and radhe-that, and a combo of young sadhus would get out their drums and cymbals and improvise a vigorous set of Krishna-themed songs. Jumbled among them in the bed of the truck, a young man cradling a laptop with a data antenna and a webcam tried to throw together a live webcast. Once the musicians exhausted themselves, they would patch the speakers into the computer to play some pre-recorded Krishna hymns, and then some archival recordings of Shri Baba himself, his halting baritone resounding over the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Then we would pass through a village, and Jai would get excited again, and take up the mic, and the cycle would repeat.
At breakfast, eaten off leaf plates set on the ground by the side of the road, Sunil suggested that Mansi and I might prefer to ride in the pickup truck, or even in his jeep. It took some effort to convince him that we had come to the march with marching in mind.
The modest procession began again. A squat sadhu with a gray beard and a potbelly ranged to the side of the road, handing out handbills to onlookers, who gathered in small groups to read the news. Creepy Baba had his camera out. For every picture he took of the marchers or the countryside, though, he seemed to take two of Mansi.
Oh god, she said. He is so creepy.
Mansi wandered off to take some pictures of her own, and I found myself overtaking a trim man of sixty-some years, who was pushing a bicycle. He had been at the previous evening’s teach-in.
“What is your country?” he asked, in cautious English.
“USA,” I said, and he nodded and smiled. For his benefit, I decided to rock out my very best Hindi.
“Kya yatra acha hai?” Is the yatra good?
He nodded again. “The sleeping Indians must awake,” he said, employing somewhat more English than I had expected. “Natural resources provide so many things to humanity, without which life cannot exist. The people in high power are interested only in a life of luxury. They must be dethroned.”
His name was M.P. and he was a retired schoolteacher from a nearby village. His shirt pocket was weighted down with pens. He told me he was only joining the yatra for the day. I asked him if he thought the yatra would have any effect.
“If the task is great and the desire is good, it must have success,” he said.
We walked a little farther.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
He looked at me in smiling disbelief.
“But God gives air, water, so many things! To not respect him and believe in him is ingratitude.”
I couldn’t disagree. But I couldn’t agree, either.
“I’m grateful,” I said. “And I respect him. I just don’t believe in him.”
Our conversation was interrupted by Jai, who sprang from between us and bolted for the truck, jabbing the air with his fingers as he went. A new song had started, and he wanted to be in the mosh pit.
The more I thought about the Yamuna yatra, the more it blew my mind what a diverse range of traditions it interwove. There was the forceful nonviolence of Gandhi’s political campaigns, of course. Then there was the ancient practice of religious pilgrimage, Hindu or otherwise. But since I’m an American, it was also impossible to spend any time with a troupe of scruffy, nature-worshipping activist holy men without stumbling, inevitably, over Henry David Thoreau.
It’s hard to believe that a single, self-proclaimed slacker could be largely responsible for delivering us two of the best ideas of the last 150 years, but in Thoreau’s case the slacker had some tricks up his sleeve. The first idea was that of civil disobedience, which Thoreau named and explained, and which he practiced in a limited, proof-of-concept kind of way. Half a century on, his ideas became a major inspiration for Gandhi, who credited Thoreau as an indispensable political strategist. (Another half century, and Thoreau’s ideas found their way in front of Martin Luther King Jr.)
The second idea was that nature is good, and good for you. The best way for a person to strive for spiritual perfection, he argued, is through the direct experience of wild, untamed nature, which will free the mind from civilization’s clotting noise. Thoreau wasn’t the only one to espouse this idea—the 1800s saw a whole transcendental crew on the loose—but he expressed it with such humor and good nature, and in a way still so accessible to readers, that we might as well give him most of the credit. Every time someone goes for a run in the woods, or donates to the Sierra Club, or maxes out their credit card at REI, the man with the neck beard and the bean patch ought to get royalties.
If there was one way that Thoreau thought was best for getting in touch with the environment, it was walking. The guy made a yatra of every afternoon. He championed not only walking but also ambling, strolling, moseying, and above all, sauntering. In his essay Walking, he makes the wry assertion that “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING.” From those rhapsodic capitals, he moves directly to the task of blurring the line between loafing and sacred pilgrimage, arguing that to saunter effectively is to be on a holy journey to nowhere in particular.
The transcendental notion is that nature and wildness aren’t mere symbols of cosmic truth, but its actual embodiment. So to steep yourself in them, it follows, is to allow your spirit to unfurl. But it requires more than your mere physical presence. You must saunter mentally as well, losing yourself in your senses, coaxing your mind to meander into nature as surely as your feet have. “What business have I in the woods,” Thoreau asks, “if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
But if you believe, as I do, that the concept of nature is pretty bankrupt these days, then the question becomes just where to meet your sauntering needs. It’s easy to understand what’s nice about a walk in the woods, but will less obvious places do the trick as well? Can you properly saunter across an oil sands mine? What about around a soy field? Is the tired ground of Spindletop somehow inherently unsaunterable?
Even Thoreau acknowledged that his own sauntering grounds—around Concord, Massachusetts—were only semi-wild at best, shot through as they were with logging trails, and old native American footpaths, and homesteads, and farms. And when he went to Maine, in 1846, in search of a truly primeval nature experience, Thoreau found himself badly freaked out by the more serious wildness he found. Nature wasn’t always beautiful or sacred-seeming. It could be uncaring and inhuman. Nature could crush your spirit as surely as it could raise it. He was honest enough to admit it, though, and incorporated the experience into his ideas, deciding that the healthiest thing for a person was to have one foot in nature and one in civilization. Nature’s American prophet preferred his wildness benign.
From our vantage point 150 years after his death, there are also darker undercurrents to be found in the environmental ecstasy of Thoreau’s ideas. In Walking, he goes to great lengths to point out not only that he sauntered, and where, but also in which direction. He went West, and it was no accident. A deeply moral man, an energetic campaigner for the abolition of slavery, and a founder of civil disobedience, he was nevertheless a kind of imperialist. He believed in his civilization, and in its growth. “I must walk toward Oregon,” he wrote from the East Coast. “And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.” There was a continent to despoil and plunder, and in his good-natured, wildness-loving way, Henry David helped carry the flag.
Thoreau and company have something else to answer for, too, if you ask me. It has to do with that mystical experience of nature they were so keen on. On the one hand, they convinced the world that the forest was essentially good—an idea that sparked the environmental movement and continues to nourish it today. But there was a side effect. Because they also convinced the world that the way for people to benefit from nature’s virtue was to go get it. Direct, individual experience was the ticket.
And so environmental rapture became yet another commodity to be extracted from the forest, or the savannah, or the ocean. And all the nature-loving, green-friendly people of the world are merely coveting the spiritual goods. We’re desperate to preserve what we call nature, but maybe that’s just because it’s the best place we know of to go mining for enlightenment.
In the morning they walked, but in the afternoon the sadhus napped. You shouldn’t overexert yourself in such heat.
We camped in a dusty grove a hundred yards off the road. After lunch, Mansi and I lounged in an open tent with Jai and Sunil and M.P., who had brought me the gift of a religious booklet called Preparations for Higher Life.
Sunil played his regular game: trying to get us to walk all the way to Delhi.
“You can’t leave!” he cried. “We love having you here. We’re going to put chains on you both!” He reached out and seized us each by an ankle.
Although he was a sadhu like everyone else, Sunil wore jeans and a shirt instead of robes. His parents hadn’t liked the idea of him becoming a holy man, he told us. “At least dress normally,” they had said, and so he did. The street clothes were appropriate to his air of easy competence. As yatra manager, he was the brains of the operation and by far the most sensible sadhu of the bunch. But he counterbalanced this with a maniacal sense of humor.
“Name change!” he shouted, pointing at me. “Gore Krishna!”
Mansi laughed. “He’s calling you white krishna,” she said. “He says you’re substituting the pen and the camera for the flute.”
Sunil rocked back and forth, slapping the floor of the tent as he laughed.
I asked them exactly what made a person a sadhu. Did you sign up? Did you have to be ordained?
“It’s someone’s way of life,” Sunil said. “Someone who just wants to be with God, who wants to serve.”
“Like you,” said Jai. “You’ve come here. You’re concerned for the world. Those who think for others are sadhus.”
“So I’m a sadhu?” I asked. Could you become a sadhu involuntarily?
Jai ignored the question. “This is not an easy fight,” he said. “Without pen and ink, it’s not possible.” And he wanted to make sure I had my story straight. “People used to drink Yamuna to purify themselves,” he said. “Now you can’t even touch it. Recently some pilgrims drank some Yamuna water and had to be hospitalized that same night.” The villages along the river couldn’t use it as a water source anymore.
“Can’t government provide people clean water?” he demanded. “If the government can put a Metro train a hundred feet underground, it can do this.” He chopped one hand against the other. Someone had to purify the purifier. “Until Yamuna is clean, we are not going to back off. This is higher than religion. Higher than human beings.”
Hiking with the sadhus is cheaper than taking the bus, and more scenic, but you will have to come to terms with crapping in the open, which for Westerners can be profoundly difficult. In the past, I had mocked people who worried too much about the bathroom arrangements of faraway places, but I now saw that I was one of them. Worrying about bathroom access, I realized, was a fundamental expression of my cultural heritage. All of Western civilization, in fact, had been built on a set of technologies whose only purpose was to abstract the process of dealing with one’s own feces. (Germany is the exception to this rule, with its lay-and-display toilet bowls.) In any case, I would happily have parted with a thick stack of rupees for some time alone with a chunk of porcelain.
Yatra-ing, you will also have to wrestle with the privacy issues inherent to certain parts of India: i.e., that there is none. There is someone hanging out, or working, or taking a nap, or a crap, behind every shrub and around every corner. I doubt this worries people who grew up in the Indian countryside; they don’t mind that someone could catch sight of them squatting in a field. But for a white man from New York—and for an educated young woman from Delhi, Mansi confirmed—this is just not okay. So you need a system.
FIELD MANUAL FOR CRAPPING OUTDOORS WHILE HIKING WITH SADHUS
1. CHOOSE A TIME. Everyone else goes in the morning, but this may lead to co-crapping, or at least crap-camaraderie, among you and the sadhus, which you must avoid at all costs. Afternoon is best, when everyone else is taking a nap.
2. BRING YOUR OWN TOILET PAPER. Toilet paper does not exist for these guys, who instead take a small lunch pail of water along with them for the purpose of washing—a method for which you are not trained. So pack a roll or two. The drawback to toilet paper is that, since you will leave it behind, you are flagging your turd as your own. (You are, after all, one of only two people for miles around who believe in toilet paper.) Any sadhu who comes upon your work will therefore be able to scrutinize your method.
3. CHOOSE A LOCATION. You’ve got to work the sightlines. The second day on the yatra, for instance, I found a nice spot behind the ruins of a small, brick building that screened me off from the highway, as well as from a trio of truck drivers lounging by the dirt access road. That left forty-five degrees of exposure to the south, but with nobody in sight I liked my odds.
4. CRAP. Work quickly. This is no time for an e-mail check.
5. In standard North American al fresco procedure, this step would be FLEE. But I am introducing an additional, intermediate step: PAUSE. Pull up your pants, yes, but notice, as you do, how your turd, mere seconds into its existence, has already attracted several flies. Consider for a moment the miracle of this fact. That in the vast, hot, not particularly fly-infested flatness of the province of Uttar Pradesh, three or four flies will find your shit within in an instant and start laying eggs. That in the simple act of squatting behind a brick wall, you have provided untold wealth for a generation of minuscule beings, who will make your poop their home, getting born in it, burrowing through it, eating it, until one day, grown up, they will spread their translucent wings and leave your now desiccated turd behind, to search out new frontiers for their own children.
So, pause. You are walking with the holy men. Take a moment, and observe your humble pile of feces, and remember that in Delhi they worship entire canals of this stuff, and know that the wonders of the universe never cease.
6. FLEE.
At dusk, the teach-in went mobile. We emerged from our naps, the musicians among us climbed into the pickup truck, and we set out en masse for the closest town.
It was a tiny village, modest to an extreme, a densely packed assemblage of brick and earthen houses. A buffalo or goat twitched on every other stoop. With its total absence of cars—and air-conditioners, and televisions, and electricity—the town must have represented the platonic ideal of small carbon footprint. But it was disorientingly poor. Not even a day’s drive away, I had seen Delhi’s cosmopolitan set sipping twelve-dollar cocktails in bars and lounges as chic as anything in Manhattan. Now we were here, on the other side of the planet, in a world fueled with patties of dried cow dung. The gulf—in culture, in economy, and above all, in class—was impossible to fathom.
I’ll just say it. India. Less tidy and homogenous than I’m used to.
We hit town at full Hare, equal parts spiritual revival, political rally, and Mardi Gras parade. People came out onto their front steps to watch us churn down the narrow, muddy road. The sadhus chanted and sang and hollered for all they were worth, going all-in with every drum, loudspeaker, and cymbal they had.
“Come walk a few steps with us!” Jai blared over the PA. But he was upstaged by the farmers’ union president, who had joined us that afternoon. I recognized him from his picture on the side of the truck, a glowering buffalo of a man with a slash of hair covering his mouth. At the edge of town, he climbed onto the truck and gave his best Huey Long impression, growling and yawping and waving his fist stiffly overhead. More water should be released into the river, he said. The sewage should be treated and diverted. It was a facile, rabble-rousing version of what I’d been told by boatmen in Delhi, by the coin collectors, by R. C. Trivedi. Everybody knows, in ways more or less sophisticated, how to restore the Yamuna: stop destroying it.
The music started up again, and the circus crawled out of town, trailing a crowd of fifty or sixty onlookers, all men. It quickly devolved into dancing and general hoopla, with a core group prancing around with epileptic fervor. The dancers included the union president’s two bodyguards, each of whom was armed with one of the small-caliber rifles ubiquitous to Indian security guards. I did some complementary dancing of my own as the bodyguards jumped and gyrated, waving the barrels of their guns around with way too much abandon. And like this, we danced and chanted and cavorted our way out of town and back to camp.
We had not seen the river that day. Tomorrow, Sunil said.
I lay in the tent. I was rereading Moby-Dick…sort of. The Melville spell that Art had cast aboard the Kaisei had yet to wear off. In New York, I had borrowed the Doctor’s old copy, a battered green paperback, and carried it with me ever since. Through Brazil, through China, on half a dozen twelve-hour flights. But I was still only two pages deep. It was hard to focus when I opened it. The text was overgrown with inky blue notes, written in the earnest script of an intelligent teenage girl. The Doctor had read it in high school. At nights on the yatra, lying in the tent, surrounded by the quiet clashing of cymbals, I thought of the curling spine of the book, of the paperclips lodged in its pages. I didn’t even have it with me. It was in my luggage, stowed in the corner of a friend’s house in Delhi. Some talismans you don’t need to carry with you.
Instead, on my phone, I read the news from Fukushima. There had been an earthquake. And after the earthquake there came a tsunami. And after the tsunami came the meltdowns. Each time I looked, there was more news. Reactor cores that overheated. Reactor buildings that exploded. From a tent in the Indian countryside, I watched the evacuation zone blossom from two, to ten, to twenty kilometers.
A sickening familiarity hung over it all. I remembered Dennis, in the briefing room in Chernobyl, tapping his pointer on the image of the firemen’s memorial. I saw his contamination map of the Exclusion Zone, a distorted starfish with a reactor at its heart. And now again. Another terrifying Eden erupting onto the landscape. Another fifty or hundred thousand people forced aside. Another ghost born to haunt the world.
It was a noisy camp. The generator ran all night, and the sadhus, too, working in shifts to ensure no break in the cymbal tinkling and the Hare Hare-ing. Underlying it all was a low murmur of conversation that I eventually realized was a recording of Shri Baba giving a sermon. Mahesh, the young man with the laptop and the webcam, also had an MP3 player with external speakers. The first thing he did upon reaching camp every afternoon was to connect the speakers to the generator and start Shri Baba up. I came to find it almost comforting, this never-ending sermon, a low lullaby beckoning me into sleep against the hard, uneven ground.
Five in the morning again, and we woke up, Mansi and I each in our individual mesh pods of mosquito netting. For Mansi, the mosquito net served double duty as a sadhu net. We didn’t put it past Creepy Baba or some other insufficiently detached holy man to come climbing in next to her, hoping to play Krishna to her Radha.
It was Mansi’s last morning on the yatra. She had things to do back in Delhi. When she announced that she would be leaving, though, Creepy Baba had suddenly announced that he, too, needed to go to Delhi.
Oh god, Mansi said. I’ll never get rid of him.
I emerged to the sight of the pre-dawn mortifications. There was always a sadhu balanced on his head in the tent across the way, or complicating his nostrils with yogic breathing, or inflicting himself with some other reverent difficulty. Somehow it always took me by surprise. When I leave a tent, I guess I’m expecting a campfire, or some beef jerky—not a holy man tied in a square knot.
More substantially, I wondered why there weren’t any young environmental types kicking around. Where were the young green-niks of Delhi and Agra? R. C. Trivedi and Bharat Lal Seth had both suggested that secular environmentalists and Hindu spiritual groups were finally working together, after decades of pointless division. I had thought India was the place where someone was finally building the bridge between conservation and religion. And maybe so. But then where was everybody?
Mansi made her escape shortly after we started walking, hitching a ride to the bus station in Sunil’s jeep. For a moment it looked like she would get away without Creepy Baba in tow, but at the last minute he realized what was going on. Running to the jeep, he piled in next to her, and they rode off together, Mansi staring at the ceiling.
A month later I would e-mail her from New York, asking how things had turned out when the yatra had reached Delhi. I hadn’t found much in the papers.
She would tell me she had gone to see the protest. There had been nothing like the predicted half million people, she said, but there were sadhus from all over the world, and a strong showing from the farmers’ union. Creepy Baba had said hello, and another sadhu had grabbed Mansi by the hand and dragged her up front to sit by the podium. There were speeches, and some loose talk about taking a sledgehammer to the dam at Wazirabad. But nobody in Delhi noticed.
“Sad,” she wrote me. “There’s so many of them, and zero press coverage.” It seemed the media had exhausted itself earlier in the month, covering an anti-corruption hunger strike. In the end, Delhi would pay the Yamuna yatra about as much attention as it does the Yamuna itself.
I continued with the yatra for a few more days. Because he spoke decent English, Mahesh installed himself as my new minder.
“I will be your translator!” he said, walking beside me, his arms swinging wide. “I am going to tell you SO many stories about Lord Krishna!”
An earnest, ever-smiling man in his mid-twenties, Mahesh looked more like a young computer science graduate than a sadhu, but his enthusiasm for Krishna was unrivaled. Thus was I treated to stories and digressions about Krishna and heaven, about Krishna and the boy stuck in the well, about how Krishna had been “naughty” and gone “thief-ing water.” About how Krishna had ordered his minister to “make women more lusty,” and had then vanquished the minister for criticizing him about it. About how Krishna had told the people to worship the forests and the hills instead of the lord Indra.
Mahesh on sin. Mahesh on how if you invoke Krishna you will prevent illness. Mahesh on sin, again. Mahesh on how he had so many sins. SO many sins! I began to wonder just what kind of sins we were talking about. The sin of attachment? The sin of being full of stool and urine? The sin of being member to a ruinous species? Or something else that shouldn’t count as sin? Was his sin something he had done? Something he wanted to do? Something that had been done to him?
We walked. We sauntered. We made embalmed relics of our hearts. Mahesh on how with Krishna at your side, you will avoid car crashes at the last instant. How if someone tries to hit you, they will fail. How if they shoot at you, they will miss. So many things. SO many things, Gore Krishna! The stories of Lord Krishna are real history. This is not only scripture, no. It is scientific!
I began to wither in the grip of the sadhus’ hospitality, guiltily dreading the second and third and fourth helpings of food, served with smiling insistence. My belly became bloated with lentils and bread. But I had no choice. When I chose to skip lunch one afternoon, it threw the yatra into a near uproar of concern.
And Mahesh’s solicitude knew no bounds. Had I eaten? Had I eaten enough? Had I washed my hands? Had I used soap? Did I need a bath? Did I know I could take a bath under the spigot of the water tank? Would I like him to show me where this bath could happen? Was I going to take a bath? When was the last time I took a bath? I didn’t like being reminded that out here I was less competent than a five-year-old.
“You have been to the forest?” he asked me after lunch.
“The forest?” I said.
“The forest! Did you not go, for letting? Toilet? Two or three days…”
“Oh. Yes.” I gave my report. “I went yesterday and the day before. Don’t worry. Three days without, that’s not possible.”
“Everything is possible!” he said.
And still we hadn’t seen the river. Tomorrow, Sunil said. We’ll get there tomorrow.
At the same time, part of me became convinced of the sadhu life. The evening found a dozen of us crammed into a single tent, singing, drumming, clashing symbols. The young man leading the songs was the best singer and drummer on the yatra. He probably spent a good five hours a day in rapturous musical performance, whether on the pickup truck or in the evening, in camp. Tonight, he drew verses from an open book of scripture, knitting his brow as he strung out a melody, before throwing it out to the group, to repeat in a throaty, musical roar.
On my last night, sitting on the ground eating dinner, I was befriended by Ravi and Ramjeet, two fifteen-year-old sadhus who had worked up the nerve to try out their English on me. I wondered if they were runaways, but they said their families had both endorsed the move to Maan Mandir. They were inseparable. Like Gabe and Henry on the Kaisei, they had known each other since early childhood.
“Ramjeet is ideal friend,” Ravi said, clapping him on the back.
Our conversation was soon joined by Ravinder—a hotel manager from Calcutta who spoke perfect English—and another sadhu, a fierce-looking man with a shaved head and goatee. After dinner, we retired to one of the tents to practice English and talk about how I should stay on with the yatra, go to live at Maan Mandir, and devote myself to Krishna.
I couldn’t, I said. I had to go home. I was done traveling. I missed my friends. I missed my family.
“But God wants you to be here, wants you to be at Maan Mandir,” Ravinder said.
Maybe I should have considered it. I’m sure there was a bedroll for me up in the temple building. I could sleep under a mosquito net in a row of sadhus. I could wake up to the words of Shri Baba, and a view over the hills and ponds of Braj. Was that so much less than I had to look forward to in New York? And I liked these guys. Usually I bristle at people trying to convert me to their religion, but sitting here I was somehow gratified by how they didn’t insist.
In my eyes, they were also pioneers. They were among the few people in the world who would purposefully make a sacred pilgrimage to a river full of shit. They were expanding the sauntering possibilities of the human race. It was precisely because the Yamuna was so desecrated, in fact, that they were pursuing this additional reverence.
And because Shri Baba’s strand of environmentalism doesn’t require a sacred place to be pristine or free of human settlement, it lacks the kernel of misanthropy that nestles at the core of Western environmentalism. A paradox of the conservation movement is that it both depends on personal experience of nature for its motivation—and clings to the idea that modern humans have no place in a truly natural world. To include people in the equation—as with the loggers of the Ambé project—seems like a concession, or at best a necessary compromise. In the minds of many environmentalists, whether they admit it or not, the ideal environment would be one in which people were sparse, or absent. But the problems with this as a conceptual starting point are obvious. We’re here. And Shri Baba and his sadhus, it seemed to me, offered the possibility of a different mindset, in which one could fight for the environment without pining for Eden.
Since I had Ravinder and company there, I tried to nail down a few Krishna basics. Could someone please tell me the exact words to the Hare Krishna chant?
“It is called the Harenam Mahamantra,” Ravinder said, writing it out in my notebook in capital letters.
“Like we use soap for cleaning clothes,” Fierce Baba said, “we use the Harenam Mahamantra to clean our minds. To clean ourselves from within.”
We went from there, and soon the tent was in a holy tumult, with Ravinder and Fierce Baba debating and correcting each other’s storytelling and theology, and Ravi and Ramjeet paying rapt attention, and piling more questions on top of my own. There were 330 million gods, I was told, with Krishna on top. He had created the others. But then a bunch of Krishna devotees would say that, wouldn’t they?
They told me about Krishna. They told me about his life in Braj. They told me about Shiva turning into a woman so he could join the milkmaids and watch Krishna dance. And they told me about the love between Krishna and Radha, always about Krishna and Radha.
I asked them about attachment and self-denial. Why renounce worldly pleasure when Krishna had himself been such a playboy? This provoked an extended melee about whether Krishna had been a sadhu, and whether, perhaps by dint of successful sadhu-hood, through which he entered into godliness, he had earned a kind of free pass to enjoy himself as a young man in Braj. They were still debating when I left.
Later that night, as all the sadhus slept, I crept out of my tent and walked to the nearby woods, for “letting,” as Mahesh would call it. On my way back, I stopped in the patch of herdland behind the camp.
The full moon shone clear and cool and magnificently bright. It was a perigee moon—the closest, largest full moon in twenty years. The landscape shimmered in monochrome, the silent forms of cows and buffalo lying like dark boulders on the packed dirt. A cowherd rustled under a blanket.
The puzzle of Krishna and Radha flickered in my mind. I had found it hard to distinguish which of them the sadhus were actually worshipping, or if it was the relationship itself that commanded the deepest veneration, a love affair that was somehow a deity in its own right.
“Two bodies, but single body,” Ravinder had said.
The love between Radha and Krishna had been no mere love. It was a love that had created the human love for God. It was the ideal connection between the human and the divine, embodied in the eternal romance of two young deities.
Eternal, but it didn’t last. The time came when Krishna left the hills of his youth and went to fulfill his destiny as a warrior and lord. It is said that without Radha to animate his music, he laid down his legendary flute. Later, he married and had children with a princess in Dvaraka. I don’t know what happened to the milkmaid Radha.
We walked. It was a good way to travel, watching the fields creep by, and smelling the air, and feeling the exhaust of passing trucks. There was still no Yamuna in sight—later today, Sunil told me—and we were hiking, as always, along the side of the highway. The trucks would blare their elaborate horns as they rushed past, sometimes melodious, sometimes earsplitting. It would be nice to think they were honking in solidarity with the yatra, but in India as in many countries, it is simply a part of driving to blast your horn when you are passing another vehicle, or being passed, or when you see something by the side of the road, or when you don’t.
It was morning. I saw things. A dot of orange crossing an expanse of feathered grain. She turned, a woman, the tangerine cloth of her sari covering her head, just visible above the wheat. A sadhu with an ochre stripe painted across his forehead grabbed a handful of chickpeas from the edge of a field and handed me a sprig, and we ate the beans raw. The tall chimney of a brick factory, and another, and another. They drew dark plumes across the sky. We passed close to one. In a compound enclosed by walls of brick, men carted bricks to a kiln made of bricks under a tall chimney made of bricks. A peacock stood on a crumbling brick wall, iridescent in the dust. At the sound of our loudspeaker, the workers paused and watched us go, and we waved to each other.
“All the farmers, come to Delhi!” the sadhus chanted. “All the people, come to Delhi!” There were thirty of us.
A burst of parrots, and then a group of Sarus cranes coasted over our heads and landed in a field, each of them tall as a man, and more beautiful. Smooth, gray feathers lined their bodies, a flash of crimson around the head. In India, I hear, they are revered as symbols of marital happiness, of unconditional love and devotion. The species is classified as vulnerable, if not yet endangered.
The Doctor and I had been e-mailing. From New York to Linfen, and Delhi, and here on the road, sympathetic words echoed over the space between two diverging lives, building our goodbye.
“Please do not be sad,” she wrote. “My love goes with you everywhere.”
We walked.
I should be wrapping it up, I thought. The end of the story was somewhere nearby, just down the highway, where the road found the river. I should be ready for that moment. I should be thinking, reflecting on my journeys in polluted places, looking back across thousands of miles, distilling each location into its essence, saying what it all meant. Hadn’t I already said it? That to chase after the beautiful and the pristine was to abandon most of the world? That the unnatural, too, was natural? Or was it the reverse?
It began on a train to Chernobyl. And I had tried to follow it, through oceans and mines and forests, past a chain of uncanny monuments to our kind. There was something I was trying to see. An asteroid was striking the planet. I just wanted to catch a glimpse. But it was impossible, because we were the asteroid. The world had already ended, with a whimper, and also it didn’t end. Now we inhabit the ended, unending world that came afterward. The world with us. The world transformed. A crater yawns open from its center and a new nature floods across it.
It is the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.
But mostly, we walked. And I waited for that feeling. It found me in the mornings. On the road before sunup, the sadhus falling into rank, Potbellied Baba narrowly avoiding being run down by an oncoming truck, and we would set out. Someone had garlanded the pickup truck with a white flag, bordered in green—the fluttering standard of the farmers’ union. I stayed in the back and watched us as we went, our tiny band of misfits, a ragged line of men, supposedly holy, straggling along the shoulder of the highway, down to Delhi, with the night’s mist settling on the fields, and the sun just short of the horizon behind us, and it would find me. Somehow, that feeling. It started in the bones of my legs, and into my spine, and up the back of my neck, washing over my ears and face and my eyes, coursing through my scalp, streaming into the air above my head, lit with the fresh sun and then it was day. This happened. Every morning, this attack of gratitude, swarming over me, as we walked and walked, puppets to an uncertain music.
Only after we had been in camp for several minutes did I realize it. We hadn’t made the river. I was leaving for Delhi in the morning. My Yamuna yatra had been completely Yamuna-less.
What the hell, Sunil?
“Gore Krishna!” he cried, and told me not to worry. We would see the river that afternoon. He had planned a field trip. I crammed into the jeep with half a dozen other people, and Sunil hit the gas.
As we headed west, the air became hotter, the earth tougher, the fields of wheat taller and blonder. Forty minutes and half a dozen quick stops for directions, and Sunil turned left down a small, barren gully. There were rowboats tied up in the dust. It was the edge of the floodplain.
We came out the bottom of the ravine and saw a stripe of water in the distance, beyond a wide sweep of sandy scrubland. The Yamuna at last.
But if I thought the sight of the river would be greeted with any reverence by the sadhus of the Yamuna yatra, I was mistaken. They seemed not to notice. Sunil was in the middle of a long set of stories that had reduced the car to uproarious laughter.
“What is he saying?” I asked Mahesh.
“He is telling a joke,” he said, between gasps.
“Yes, I know,” I said. “What’s the joke about?”
“Yes!” he said, still laughing.
“No, Mahesh. What was the joke?”
“It is a… very different, something kind of joke.”
Our destination was a temple overlook on the bluff opposite. We crossed a temporary bridge constructed of large steel pontoons and cracked timbers, and manned by a quintet of men sitting by a shack. The Yamuna glimmered in the late-afternoon light. On the other side, Sunil sent us shooting up the dirt road that climbed the hill, past low adobe houses, past a huge banyan tree, and finally parked by the temple. We spilled out of the jeep and walked by a pair of ruined towers to find the overlook. From the promontory, we could see green fields descending to the riverbank. A pair of fishermen plied the water in small boats.
This was Panchnada, the confluence that R. C. Trivedi had told me about. Nearly three hundred miles downstream from Delhi, four tributaries joined to feed the Yamuna a massive dose of new water, finally diluting the river’s oxygen-starved flow. We could see the confluence in the distance—the confluences. From a confusing tangle of sinuous bends and meandering inflows, the Yamuna emerged clean at last—or cleanish—despite everything that had been done to it. It had been made to flow into the ground, to slosh along canals and up against barrages, to wind through the intestines of sixteen million people, to suffer any number of other transformations, and still it flowed. It may have to wait out humankind to find a less tortured course.
On the way back, about a hundred yards past the bridge, the deep, dry sand of the floodplain swallowed the wheels up to their axles. We got out and started pushing the jeep in different, uncoordinated directions. In the distance, we saw a truck having the same problem, and another jeep. The place was a car trap.
“Gore Krishna has caused us complications!” shouted Sunil, gunning the engine and spinning the wheels. (Don’t look at me, Sunil—I wanted to walk.) Mahesh crouched by the tire, shoveling sand out with his hands. “With Krishna all things are possible!” he said. Behind every handful he scooped away, more sand ran in.
I wandered back to the pontoon bridge. The men sitting by the bridge-keeper’s hut let me climb the ramp and stand on the steel plates of the roadway. I watched the river flow gently against the bridge, steel cables creaking with the strain. A fresh, sweet air came off the water. Downstream, a new bridge was under construction, a proper highway bridge, built on tall concrete pylons.
The men climbed the ramp to see what I was doing. Their English was almost as bad as my Hindi, but somehow we started a conversation. The bridgekeeper said his name was Tiwari, and he introduced me to everyone else. I took their picture and showed it to them.
Tiwari got it across that the bridge was seasonal. It was installed only for the dry months, from November to the middle of June. During the monsoonal flood, he became a boatman, ferrying people across on a square, flat-bottomed boat that he kept tied up next to the bridge. I didn’t know how to ask him if he would still have a job when the new bridge opened.
They asked my name. Andrew, I said. Andru, they said. They didn’t ask me why I was here, or who I was, or where I was going. They asked me if I had been on the river.
Not here, I said. I had been on the river in Delhi. I held my nose. They shook their heads and clucked their tongues in disapproval. But they were smiling. I shook Gorokhpur’s hand—I think it was Gorokhpur—and his wizened face creased with laughter, and I laughed, too.
I realized that, among my five or six words of Hindi, I had several that might apply.
“Ye pani acha hai?” I offered. This water is good?
They nearly broke into applause. Yes! they said. This water is good.
“Delhi pani bahot acha nehi hai,” I said, getting ambitious. Delhi water is not very good.
No, they said. It’s not. One of them pointed upstream. Panchnada, he said, and his sentence dissolved in a filigree of Hindi. I pulled out my notebook and we started drawing. We drew the Yamuna, and the four rivers feeding it, the fingers of a watery hand, with the bracelet of a pontoon bridge riding up against its palm.
Once the five rivers come together, the water is good, they said. Tiwari gestured up and down the river, his arm outstretched. He had the English word.
“Purify,” he said. “Purify Yamuna.”
Upstream, the sun was setting. A temple on the rise of the opposite bank had descended into silhouette. The breeze off the water had cooled. I took a last look at the Yamuna. At the place where it became a river again.
Then I said goodbye to the bridgekeepers and started back across the floodplain, to where the jeep was still trapped in the sand.