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

morning’s haul: several coconuts, a few paper booklets, and a single plastic sandal.

She stared at the water as she answered my questions. They had been in Delhi for ten or fifteen years, she said. Eight years ago, the government had pushed them out of the shantytown they had lived in. Now, they lived in a temporary shack on the floodplain. When the river rose each year with the monsoon, they had to retreat with the land.

When I asked how old she was, she hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think I’m twenty-five or twenty-six.” Then she continued upriver, raking her oar through the mat of flowers and trash that clung to the bank.

Ravinder sent us back out to the middle of the river, where he left off rowing and let us drift. He crossed his legs and opened a packet of tobacco. “So many people migrated to Delhi,” he said. “The waste going into the river has grown and grown with the city. But Yamuna is one. It has not multiplied.”

He still believed in the river, though. Yamuna was a goddess, he said. He might go for a week and a half without earning any money at all—only to make up for it in a single day’s work. The Yamuna didn’t take, he said. It gave.

With that, he put some tobacco in his mouth and we drifted for a while longer, spinning quiet circles in the breeze.

Where there are rivers or lakes in India, there are ghats: wide riverfront stairs that lead down to the water. Ghats are an indispensable part of the sacred Hindu love affair with water, and through history they have been places for worship, and worshipful bathing, and non-worshipful swimming, and for doing the laundry, and for cremating the dead—as at Nigambodh Ghat—and for pretty much anything else you might want to do at the riverside. But Delhi has few ghats. It is a city of sixteen million with barely any places, ghat or otherwise, where people interact with the river. I went looking for any that were left.

At the south end of its Delhi segment, the Yamuna is again made to jump its channel. The Okhla Barrage shunts it into the Agra Canal, through which it is destined to become the Taj Mahal city’s unenviable water supply. Just upstream of the barrage is the riverfront park of Kalindi Kunj. Unlike many riverfront parks, though, Kalindi Kunj offers no actual frontage to its river. A fence encloses the park, keeping visitors away from the actual river, which sits quiet and littered with trash. Ill-disposed to climb an eight-foot-tall fence topped with spikes, I resigned myself to wandering the leafy confines of the park.

The place was crawling with young couples in the throes of passionate hand-holding. With every corner I turned, I almost stepped on a pair of sweethearts. In a city where young couples have no apartments or cars of their own to disappear into, they go to the parks. It is so common here for couples to meet each other in parks or at historical monuments that it sometimes seems that these places have been designated by the city government as official make-out spots.

It ought to have sent me into a lovelorn tailspin, like everything else did. Instead, it was a respite. Since arriving in Delhi, I had been preoccupied with how Indian men and women interacted in public—or how they didn’t. It’s safe to say that the vast majority of Indians live under very conservative sexual mores, and it had been depressing the hell out of me.

Maybe it was the astounding numbers I had recently heard about child sexual abuse in India. The country is home to more than four hundred million children, nearly a fifth of the world’s below-eighteen population, and according to the government more than half are sexually abused. Incredible India, land of contrasts, awash in brutality.

I thought of this every time I boarded the Delhi Metro. There are separate cars for men and women—which itself says something—and as we filed on, I would think of those children growing up, of what my fellow male passengers must be carrying inside them, and of what they must have done, and of hundreds of millions of lives distorted by such epidemic violence and rape. By the time the train left the station, I’d have convinced myself that men were born only for cruelty, and that no living person, woman or man, would ever escape our planet-eating vortex of betrayal and isolation.

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,