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

Shri Baba was sitting on another low stage facing the audience. He spoke. Brahmini leaned over to me so I could hear him as he murmured into the recorder.

“The greatest mental disease is attachment,” he said. “Suppose a man is attached to a woman.”

I sat up.

“Don’t see the outside,” Shri Baba told us. “See the inside. The body is full of bones, blood, urine, and stool. It gets old and dies.” Brahmini’s translation was rhythmic and precise. “There are nine holes in the body,” he said. “Only dirt and pollution is coming out. And think about that stool.”

That was the key, according to Lord Krishna. “If you see the errors in the object, in the body,” Shri Baba said, “your attachment will be destroyed.”

I decided to give it a try. I thought about the Doctor, to whom I was still most abjectly attached. I thought about how she was full of stool and urine. About how she was nothing but flesh and bone. About how she would grow old and die. I saw her in a hospital bed, old and dying, full of stool and urine. A tourniquet of compassion seized me across the chest. My eyes filled with tears. It wasn’t working.

Shri Baba was still talking. He wanted to get some things straight about stool. He was, dare I say, attached to the topic. There were twelve kinds of it, he said, and proceeded to lay out the whole taxonomy, stool by stool. The body was a factory of stools, he said. It was folly to perfume and beautify something so polluted.

I know he was just trying to help his sadhus control their libido. But seriously, why so down on stool? Is our human plumbing really so vile? And wasn’t the Yamuna itself full of stool and urine?

I sat back, tuning out. As Shri Baba segued into a disquisition on lust, I watched two pigeons fornicate enthusiastically on a ledge above the doorway. A third pigeon arrived, and there was a fight, and then some more pigeon sex. It was hard to tell the sex from the fighting.

The sermon went on, in the gentle, alternating monotones of Shri Baba’s words and Brahmini’s translation. In a daze, I saw a fly circle out of the air and land on my forearm. I watched its head of eyes pivot back and forth. Then, hesitant, it lowered the mouth of its proboscis, and touched it to my skin.

“Baba is calling you,” Brahmini said, and we went in for our audience.

Shri Baba was sitting on a small dais in a long, bright chamber on the temple’s upper floor, profoundly expressionless, profoundly bald, cross-legged. We put our hands together and sat at his feet. It was like the scene near the end of Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen meets Marlon Brando, except Shri Baba wasn’t scary like Colonel Kurtz, and it was daytime, and I wasn’t there to kill him. A dull roar of drumming and chanting emanated from downstairs.

He began talking in Hindi. I had feared he would tell us that only by the chanting of holy names could Yamuna be “salvated,” but I detected a practical mind-set even before Brahmini started translating. Between my few words of Hindi and the language’s liberal borrowing of English, I could get the gist. Yamuna. Eighty percent. Water. Wazirabad. Twenty percent. Government not honest. No awareness.

Brahmini translated, and then indicated that I should ask some questions.

I told Shri Baba that I understood the Yamuna was important because of its connection to Krishna. But what about places Krishna had nothing to do with? What about the rest of the world? Did Shri Baba care only for Braj?

“The importance of environment is all over the world,” he said. “Without the non-human life there is no human life.”

What Shri Baba really wanted to talk about was corruption. And he didn’t mean it in the spiritual sense. He said India was corrupt from top to bottom, especially as related to the environment. The supreme court had decreed that fresh water should come to Braj through the Yamuna, and yet it didn’t happen. The yatra’s purpose was to confront that fact.

“Not even 1 percent of India’s people think about purifying Ganga and Yamuna,” he said. “People who make efforts for sacred works are crushed.” He said a price had been put on his head during the fight to save the hills from mining. People had been kidnapped. Shri Baba had been poisoned.

He ran his hand over the dome of his head, his face still impassive. “But we don’t fear death,” he said. “I consider myself as dead.”

We found the yatra that night, ten or fifteen miles southeast of Auraiya. They were camping in a grassy compound off a minor rural highway. The river was nowhere in sight. The roads and paths along its banks, I was told, had become almost impassable, especially for the support trucks. Sunil, the march’s logistical manager, had chosen to take the yatra along Highway 2 for a little while. We’d get back to the Yamuna soon, he assured me.

It had taken us all day to get there. Mansi and I had traveled from Maan Mandir alongside a tall, dark sadhu with a grandly overgrown beard. He wore a plain white robe and his only possessions were a small digital camera and a nonfunctional cellphone. He had a kindly face, but we dubbed him Creepy Baba, for the way he kept trying to put his hand on Mansi’s knee.

The idea had been for Creepy Baba to help us find the yatra, but over the course of multiple jeeps, buses, and one badly crowded jeep-bus, he proved blinkingly inadequate to the task. In Agra, he convinced us to board the wrong connecting bus, which we could only un-board after a quick shouting match with the driver and most of the passengers.

Oh god, said Mansi. Who knows where Creepy Baba is taking us.

Sunil picked us up in Auraiya and drove us to camp, where a pod of sadhus descended on us in greeting. Through Mansi, they asked me over and over how I had found out about the yatra. When I said I had read about it in a newspaper, online, they wanted to know which newspaper. I had no idea.

“Was it the Times of India?” asked one man.

I did know of the Times of India—and knew it was in English. “It could have been,” I said.

“Times of India!” he cried to the assembled crowd.

Soon a cellphone was thrust into my hand. When, moments later, it was snatched away, I had been interviewed by a newspaper in Agra. I know this because Mansi later read me an extensive quote—attributed to me, but none of which I actually said—from a Hindi-language Agra daily.

The man who had asked me about the Times was called Jai. In Shri Baba’s absence, he was lead sadhu on the march. Shri Baba never leaves the land of Krishna, and so would join the yatra only when it reached Braj. The sadhus were carrying a pair of his shoes on the march, though, so he could be there in spirit.

Jai had been following Shri Baba for ten years now. A former social worker, he lived at Maan Mandir and was an almost frantically amiable man. In Hindi, he apologized for not speaking English. In English, I apologized for not speaking Hindi. Not to be outdone, he made an elaborate pantomime of seizing the air in front of my mouth, inserting it into his ear, and then raising his hands once more in apology.

No, I said. It is I who must apologize.

Conditions on the yatra were spartan but well managed. The tents were large, sturdy structures of green canvas, perhaps handed down by the British upon their departure in 1948. Each tent was strung with a single, blinding lightbulb hanging from an old wire connecting it to the generator. There was a steel water tank on a trailer, and a truck mounted with an oven for baking flatbread, and a crew of at least half a dozen guys whose job it was to drive ahead of the march, set up camp, and cook. All we had to do was walk.

There is a long tradition of political walking in India, and this particular yatra happened to coincide with the anniversary of Ghandi’s famous Salt March, the yatra of yatras. For more than three weeks in the spring of 1930, Gandhi and an ever-increasing army of followers marched toward the sea, where they would make salt from seawater, symbolically violating the Salt Act imposed by Britain fifty years earlier. Along the way, Gandhi made evening speeches to the marchers and to the thousands of local people who came to investigate.

Covered widely in the international media, the Salt March gave a huge symbolic boost to the Indian independence movement, and put civil disobedience on the map as a major political strategy. The marches of the American civil rights movement were yatras. And it was in hope of a similar runaway train of popular righteousness that Shri Baba and company had launched the Yamuna yatra. So far, though, he had motivated somewhat fewer marchers than Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. had. It was hard to be sure in the dark, but I counted about twenty