Delhi had long since turned its back on the Yamuna. Now the river played a part in the city’s life only as an object of neglect and disgust.
On the riverbank, I gave a man called Ravinder a few hundred rupees and we went out in his flat-bottomed wooden rowboat. Sitting next to Kakoli, my translator for the day, I peered over the edge as Ravinder worked the oars. The surface of the water was a dark gradient of billowing grays interrupted by little bubbles. Methane, I assumed. We coasted into a stretch of water spread with an unfamiliar film, not quite as colorful as a petroleum rainbow, not quite as thick as the skin of milk on a boiling pot of chai. Lumpy black gobbets dotted its surface. We needed only our noses to understand that the water was dark with more than Shiva’s grief. We were floating not on a river, but on a great urban outflow, a stream of human sewage that was standing in for the river that had dug the channel.
The Yamuna was full of shit.
It gets this way in stages. Emerging clean from the Himalayas, the river receives periodic doses of sewage and industrial runoff as it crosses the plain. Then, about 140 miles upstream from Delhi, it meets the Hathnikund Barrage—a multi-gated dam built to control the river’s flow. At Hathnikund, the greater part of the river’s water is diverted into the Eastern and Western Yamuna Canals. These canals, both hundreds of years old, were originally devised for irrigation, but an increasing amount of the water they divert is used for city water supplies, especially Delhi’s. The city’s population has grown more than 600 percent over the past fifty years, drastically increasing its water use.
In India, as in so many places, tension over water is the driving force behind an incredible swath of environmental and political problems. In this case, to make up for water spirited away by the megalopolis downstream, farmers in the region pump massive volumes of groundwater. The overextraction is so intense that it has lowered the water table to below the level of the riverbed itself, meaning that south of Hathnikund, the Yamuna simply percolates straight into the ground. The river runs dry. Except during the several months of the monsoon, the Yamuna essentially ceases to exist as it approaches Delhi.
Because it would otherwise disappear into the riverbed, water extracted for Delhi is transported via the Munak Escape, a fork of the Western Yamuna Canal that itself receives a helping of industrial waste and domestic sewage. The water then collects behind the Wazirabad Barrage, on Delhi’s northern margin. (Here it is augmented with water brought from the Ganga, of all places, making the Ganga a tributary of one of its own tributaries.)
Thanks to these inputs, there is water in the river at Wazirabad. But this water does not flow south into Delhi, as the river once did. Instead, it is pumped out and treated, becoming the basis of the city’s water supply.
Nevertheless, there is water downstream of the Wazirabad Barrage, flowing the fourteen miles through the heart of Delhi. For this stretch, the Yamuna takes the city itself as its source, receiving something close to a billion gallons of wastewater each day, the vast majority of it domestic sewage, and more than half of it completely untreated.
So when local activists refer to the Yamuna as a
Nor is it much of an exaggeration when people refer to the Yamuna as
The oarlocks squeaked and knocked as Ravinder worked the oars. He wore a Levi Strauss T-shirt and blue track pants. The lifeless river was placid, almost pleasant. A light breeze took the edge off the sewage smell.
“Who told you this is water?” he said. He told us that when he was young, he had been able to see to the bottom of the river. Now, though, you could barely see a foot deep, and clouds of inky muck eddied against the surface as we passed through shallow areas, the ends of the oars black where they had touched the bottom.
Ravinder had grown up on the banks of the Yamuna, and still lived in one of the city’s few riverfront neighborhoods. And in his thirty-odd years he had seen the river change. “There were lots of tortoises, but people sold them off. There were fish, and snakes,” he said. “But now it’s just a drain.” Although he lived mere steps away from the river, he neither bathed in it nor allowed his family to. Only in July and August, during the annual floods of the monsoon, would they get in the water. “During that period, the river becomes very beautiful,” he said. “But within a month, it’s over.”
Ravinder earned his money by taking people out to the center of the river to drop offerings or cremation ashes in the water. Sometimes he made a thousand rupees in a day—about twenty dollars. Sometimes he made nothing.
“I took two people out on the river earlier today to drop eighty kilos of charcoal in the water,” he said. “A priest told them to. They invoked the name of the sun, and of Yamuna, and dropped handfuls of charcoal into the river. Then they dumped the rest out of the bags. Tomorrow morning, I’m taking a couple to put a hundred and twenty fish into the river.”
“Living fish?” I asked.
“Living fish,” he said.
Kakoli shook her head. “Those fish will die.”
A printed picture of a blue-skinned deity came floating downstream. Before I could make out if it was Shiva or Krishna, the oar struck it on the downstroke, folding the image and plunging it into the black water.
A pair of men were bathing on the riverbank. A gull flew over our heads. Upriver we saw a hawk, a tern. Over Ravinder’s right shoulder, Nigambodh Ghat was coming into view—the cremation ground. A trio of pyres burned on the shore, braiding the air into thick tangles of heat.
The cremation ground is one of the few lively spots on the riverside, and a surprisingly relaxing place to spend the morning. Kakoli and I had visited before going downriver to find Ravinder. We had sat on a large concrete step and watched a group of young men build one of the pyres now burning. (There was a gas-fired crematorium just down the bank, but no person in his right mind wants to be cremated in a dank, indoor, gas crematorium. Not if your family can afford the wood to burn you on the riverbank.)
On a low pallet, a man lay wrapped in white cloth, his head exposed. His face was old. He was dead. The younger generation dribbled water on him from a plastic bottle and sprinkled dirt over his body. Then they finished building the pyre, leaning planks and branches against the man until they had formed a teepee of wood four or five feet tall. It was ten in the morning.
“In Calcutta, people still go to bathe in the river,” Kakoli said. “Even wealthier people. But in Delhi, people will not look at it. People will only come to the river to use it as a cremation ground.”
A young man in black trousers and a red sweater walked around the pyre, holding a thin strip of burning wood. It was the dead man’s son, I assumed. He stopped at the head of the pyre and lit it near the ground. A thin trail of smoke trickled out. That’s where we all go—not back to dust, but into the atmosphere, to join our emissions. The young man and his five companions then retired to one of the concrete tiers facing the bank and began their wait, chatting casually. It would take several hours for the pyre to burn.
Riding by the pyres in Ravinder’s boat, I now noticed a pair of men standing knee-deep in the water, mucking out scoops of mud. They were collecting ashes that had been cast into the water from the riverbank. A cremated person may have been wearing rings, or been adorned with other precious objects, as they were placed on their pyre. Now these men were poring through their sodden ashes to see what they could find. Gold fillings, maybe?
I asked Ravinder if this wasn’t, you know,
He frowned, looking at the men on the bank. No, he said. It’s not seen as disrespectful.
South of the cremation ground, we crossed wakes with a dark-skinned woman wearing an olive-colored sari. She was squatting on a large plastic bag stuffed with scraps of polystyrene foam and mounted with a square wooden frame. Her raft listed forward steeply to where she hunkered on its edge, working the water with a single, short oar.
Her name was Mamta. She lived with her husband on the opposite bank. They made their living combing the margins of the river for paper, plastic, anything they could sell to the recyclers. Her raft was littered with the
