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

A woman with a big white sack landed heavily on the lower step. Her daughter was with her. Together they upended the sack. Flowers and small pots tumbled out, along with what looked like disposable food trays: the leavings of some devotion performed elsewhere, which would only be completed once they had drowned the ritual scraps. Another couple overturned a bag of charcoal. Hydrocarbon rainbows spread across the water. A pair of boys standing in the river immediately started picking out the hunks.

But coins and charcoal were not the only things that got fished out at Ram Ghat. At the top of the stairs, we met Abdul Sattar, sitting cross-legged on a small rug he had rolled out on a shady bit of the parapet. He was in his mid-forties, and wore a black sweatshirt and a pencil mustache.

Sattar was the self-appointed lifeguard of Ram Ghat. By vocation he was a boatman, like Ravinder, but that was auxiliary to his real passion, which was pulling attempted suicides out of the river. He had been doing it for more than twenty-five years.

With Mansi translating, I asked him if a lot of people tried to kill themselves there. He waved his head emphatically. “Bahot,” he said. A lot. We were only a week and a half into March, and there had already been two attempts this month.

“I didn’t let it happen,” Sattar said. “I can see them coming in. They generally look distressed.” He had a crew of youngsters who hung out by the river. Whenever he spotted someone who looked upset, he would direct his helpers to follow the person around, so a rescuer would be close at hand in the case of a suicide attempt.

Sattar provided his services for free. And why not? All he had to do was sit in the shade, greet passersby, enjoy the view, and occasionally save somebody’s life. But he told us his family didn’t like it. They didn’t like that he would invariably rush off to the river when called, even in the middle of the night.

“Are people upset when they realize you’ve kept them from killing themselves?” I asked.

There was a faint smile on his face. “Usually the women get very upset. But the family is grateful.” He said there were a lot of students who tried. There was always a rush after exam results came out. Others were motivated by family disputes.

“Do people kill themselves because they can’t marry who they want?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes. There are plenty of love cases. It’s mostly students and lovers.”

He was staring at the barrage. I asked him whether he had ever lost anyone. He nodded without hesitation.

The defining moment of Sattar’s lifeguarding career had come on a cold, foggy November morning, nearly fifteen years earlier. A crowded school bus had come across the barrage from the east, the driver speeding in the fog. In those days, Sattar said, there was no fence on the bridge. The driver had veered to avoid a pile of sand in the roadway, and the bus skidded out of control and crashed over the downriver side of the barrage. It was seven- fifteen in the morning.

“I dived in straight away,” he said, pointing at a spot of water twenty feet from the bank. “Three boats charged, as well.” The men dove and dove into the cold water, pulling kids to safety before going back to find more. Soon, they were finding only bodies.

“Now that I’m describing it to you, it’s right there in front of me,” Sattar said. “Everywhere we put our hands, we found them. Under the seats. I pulled out the body of one boy, and two others came with him.” Out of 130 children on the bus, nearly 30 died.

The Wazirabad crash was a huge news story in Delhi, and Sattar received an award from the national government. There had been promises of money, too, but Sattar told us that had just been the chatter of politicians trying to look generous. They had never followed up.

But he didn’t care. Lifeguarding was its own reward. He told us of one girl who had survived the crash. In a television interview, she had said it was thanks to Sattar that she was alive.

“I save lots of people,” he said. “I’ve gotten used to it. But when that girl said that, it really touched me.”

He shook his head, still deep in the memory. He had been shivering for a week, he said. The river had been very cold.

My original plan had been to find a canoe or a rowboat and run the Yamuna from Delhi to Agra, a journey usually made by bus. My waterborne arrival at the Taj Mahal—likely to a throng of local media—would open up an entirely new tourist route, and possibly lead to economic development along the water, and a renewed campaign to restore the Yamuna. You’re welcome.

But my delusions faded fast. Just you try looking up kayak in the Delhi yellow pages. And although there are scores of whitewater rafting companies in the foothills of the Himalayas, I soon realized it was hopeless to try to entice them out of the mountains. I didn’t have the money. Besides, they were whitewater rafters, not brown. Finally, there were all those dams on the Yamuna, and diversions, and dry sections. How do you raft a river that’s not there?

On foot is how. I had learned there was a yatra under way. Yatra is a Sanskrit word for “procession” or “journey,” and in this case meant a large protest march undertaken by a group of sadhus. Hindu holy men. They were walking a four-hundred-mile stretch of the Yamuna, from its confluence with the Ganga in Allahabad all the way up to Delhi, to demonstrate against the government’s failure to clean up the river. If I could find the march, out there in the wilds of the state of Uttar Pradesh, I could tag along for a few days. What luck! Environmentalism, spirituality, a good hike—and it was free. Knowing I’d need some Hindi on my side, I asked Mansi if she wanted to come along. She agreed right away. She’s a photographer, and photographers are always down for an adventure.

Before I left Delhi for the trip downstream, though, I went to see the source of the trouble.

The Najafgarh drain was once a natural stream, but even more than the Yamuna, it has been completely overwhelmed by its use as a sewage channel. With a discharge approaching five hundred million gallons a day, including nearly four hundred tons of suspended solids—yes, those solids—the single drain of the Najafgarh accounts for up to a third of all the pollution in the entire, 850-mile-long river. It is the Yamuna’s ground zero.

We approached it on foot, picking our way around the hubbub of a construction site. There was a new highway bridge going up, bypassing the chokepoint of the road over the Wazirabad Barrage. Beyond the work area we found a footbridge that crossed the drain several hundred yards up from where it met the Yamuna.

The footbridge was a wide dirt path bordered by concrete parapets. Looking over the edge, we could see the wide, concrete-lined trough of the drain, perhaps two stories deep. A dark slurry surged along its bottom. The air nearly rang with the smell—that fermented, almost salty smell. Sewage. It was a smell somehow removed from actual feces. A smell that somehow distilled and concentrated whatever it is about feces that smells so bad.

I had smelled that smell before, but never had it smelled like it smelled that day at Najafgarh. It smelled so bad it gave me goose bumps. It smelled so bad it made my mouth water. The gag reflex scrambled up my throat, looking for purchase. I tried to take shallow breaths.

And yet.

I looked over the side again. Vegetation climbed the seams of concrete on the walls of the drain. Green, bullet-headed parrots flew over the dark water. Pigeons stepped and dipped on a concrete ledge. Butterflies flopped upward through the sunny air.

Moving to the downstream side of the bridge, I saw strings of flowers snagged on the electrical wires that crossed the drain. They had caught there when people had thrown them in. Even here, people offered.

And why not? Underneath the stink and the noise, the rationale unfolded. This was a tributary of the Yamuna. Are you not to venerate it, merely because it smells? Why not worship it, suspended solids and all? What could be more sacred than a river that springs from inside your neighbor’s belly?

The temple of Maan Mandir stands on a craggy hill outside the small, tangled city of Barsana, seventy-five miles south of Delhi. They worship Krishna there, and you could do a lot worse. Krishna comes in the guises of an infant-god, a young prankster, a musician, an ideal lover, a fierce warrior, and—depending who you ask—an incarnation of the ultimate creator. With Krishna, you get it all.

Maan Mandir is the headquarters of Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj. Shri Ramesh Baba Ji—screw it, I’m just going to call him Shri Baba—was the guru who had launched the Yamuna yatra, and I had been granted permission to join the march on the condition that I visit him first. A reluctant guru-visitor, I had agreed only grudgingly. I was