Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  “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 r
ivers 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, an
d 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.