Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

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.”