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 earni
ng 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.
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