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 i
n. 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.
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