Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

a coal miner—although you may look clean by comparison—you will find black dust on your every surface, in your pores, under your fingernails.

I washed my face, and stared at the smear of black on the washcloth, and sat on the edge of the bed, and I missed the Doctor. I missed her.

I thought of the motorcycle ride down the valley. We had run with the engine off, because even miners like to save gas, coasting down the steep mountainside at speed, the wind pulling tears out of my eyes, and when I got off the bike, the front of my jacket was streaked black where I had leaned against Sad Coal Man as he drove.

Seven THE GODS OF SEWAGE Downstream on India’s Most Polluted River

After Sati killed herself, her husband was inconsolable. It was Sati who had convinced him to love, and who had taught him desire. It was for Sati that he had emerged from a life of austerity and isolation to be part of the world. And it was for his honor that she had thrown herself on the pyre.

He pulled her body from the fire and carried it for days, wandering, crazed with grief and rage. Because he was Shiva, and a god, his fury was destruction—a chaos that threatened to engulf the whole world. Vishnu went to calm him down, dismembering Sati’s corpse as Shiva carried it. (Gods have their ways.) People still worship at the places where Sati’s body parts fell.

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 cliches 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.