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

by Andrew Blackwell

  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 ex
ist. 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 conc
erned 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.