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

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.

Eternal, but it didn’t last. The time came when Krishna left the hills of his youth and went to fulfill his destiny as a warrior and lord. It is said that without Radha to animate his music, he laid down his legendary flute. Later, he married and had children with a princess in Dvaraka. I don’t know what happened to the milkmaid Radha.

We walked. It was a good way to travel, watching the fields creep by, and smelling the air, and feeling the exhaust of passing trucks. There was still no Yamuna in sight—later today, Sunil told me—and we were hiking, as always, along the side of the highway. The trucks would blare their elaborate horns as they rushed past, sometimes melodious, sometimes earsplitting. It would be nice to think they were honking in solidarity with the yatra, but in India as in many countries, it is simply a part of driving to blast your horn when you are passing another vehicle, or being passed, or when you see something by the side of the road, or when you don’t.

It was morning. I saw things. A dot of orange crossing an expanse of feathered grain. She turned, a woman, the tangerine cloth of her sari covering her head, just visible above the wheat. A sadhu with an ochre stripe painted across his forehead grabbed a handful of chickpeas from the edge of a field and handed me a sprig, and we ate the beans raw. The tall chimney of a brick factory, and another, and another. They drew dark plumes across the sky. We passed close to one. In a compound enclosed by walls of brick, men carted bricks to a kiln made of bricks under a tall chimney made of bricks. A peacock stood on a crumbling brick wall, iridescent in the dust. At the sound of our loudspeaker, the workers paused and watched us go, and we waved to each other.

“All the farmers, come to Delhi!” the sadhus chanted. “All the people, come to Delhi!” There were thirty of us.

A burst of parrots, and then a group of Sarus cranes coasted over our heads and landed in a field, each of them tall as a man, and more beautiful. Smooth, gray feathers lined their bodies, a flash of crimson around the head. In India, I hear, they are revered as symbols of marital happiness, of unconditional love and devotion. The species is classified as vulnerable, if not yet endangered.

The Doctor and I had been e-mailing. From New York to Linfen, and Delhi, and here on the road, sympathetic words echoed over the space between two diverging lives, building our goodbye.

“Please do not be sad,” she wrote. “My love goes with you everywhere.”

We walked.

I should be wrapping it up, I thought. The end of the story was somewhere nearby, just down the highway, where the road found the river. I should be ready for that moment. I should be thinking, reflecting on my journeys in polluted places, looking back across thousands of miles, distilling each location into its essence, saying what it all meant. Hadn’t I already said it? That to chase after the beautiful and the pristine was to abandon most of the world? That the unnatural, too, was natural? Or was it the reverse?

It began on a train to Chernobyl. And I had tried to follow it, through oceans and mines and forests, past a chain of uncanny monuments to our kind. There was something I was trying to see. An asteroid was striking the planet. I just wanted to catch a glimpse. But it was impossible, because we were the asteroid. The world had already ended, with a whimper, and also it didn’t end. Now we inhabit the ended, unending world that came afterward. The world with us. The world transformed. A crater yawns open from its center and a new nature floods across it.

It is the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.

But mostly, we walked. And I waited for that feeling. It found me in the mornings. On the road before sunup, the sadhus falling into rank, Potbellied Baba narrowly avoiding being run down by an oncoming truck, and we would set out. Someone had garlanded the pickup truck with a white flag, bordered in green—the fluttering standard of the farmers’ union. I stayed in the back and watched us as we went, our tiny band of misfits, a ragged line of men, supposedly holy, straggling along the shoulder of the highway, down to Delhi, with the night’s mist settling on the fields, and the sun just short of the horizon behind us, and it would find me. Somehow, that feeling. It started in the bones of my legs, and into my spine, and up the back of my neck, washing over my ears and face and my eyes, coursing through my scalp, streaming into the air above my head, lit with the fresh sun and then it was day. This happened. Every morning, this attack of gratitude, swarming over me, as we walked and walked, puppets to an uncertain music.