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

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.

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.