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

by Andrew Blackwell

  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 envi
ronmentalists 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.