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

fueled with patties of dried cow dung. The gulf—in culture, in economy, and above all, in class—was impossible to fathom.

I’ll just say it. India. Less tidy and homogenous than I’m used to.

We hit town at full Hare, equal parts spiritual revival, political rally, and Mardi Gras parade. People came out onto their front steps to watch us churn down the narrow, muddy road. The sadhus chanted and sang and hollered for all they were worth, going all-in with every drum, loudspeaker, and cymbal they had.

“Come walk a few steps with us!” Jai blared over the PA. But he was upstaged by the farmers’ union president, who had joined us that afternoon. I recognized him from his picture on the side of the truck, a glowering buffalo of a man with a slash of hair covering his mouth. At the edge of town, he climbed onto the truck and gave his best Huey Long impression, growling and yawping and waving his fist stiffly overhead. More water should be released into the river, he said. The sewage should be treated and diverted. It was a facile, rabble-rousing version of what I’d been told by boatmen in Delhi, by the coin collectors, by R. C. Trivedi. Everybody knows, in ways more or less sophisticated, how to restore the Yamuna: stop destroying it.

The music started up again, and the circus crawled out of town, trailing a crowd of fifty or sixty onlookers, all men. It quickly devolved into dancing and general hoopla, with a core group prancing around with epileptic fervor. The dancers included the union president’s two bodyguards, each of whom was armed with one of the small-caliber rifles ubiquitous to Indian security guards. I did some complementary dancing of my own as the bodyguards jumped and gyrated, waving the barrels of their guns around with way too much abandon. And like this, we danced and chanted and cavorted our way out of town and back to camp.

We had not seen the river that day. Tomorrow, Sunil said.

I lay in the tent. I was rereading Moby-Dick…sort of. The Melville spell that Art had cast aboard the Kaisei had yet to wear off. In New York, I had borrowed the Doctor’s old copy, a battered green paperback, and carried it with me ever since. Through Brazil, through China, on half a dozen twelve-hour flights. But I was still only two pages deep. It was hard to focus when I opened it. The text was overgrown with inky blue notes, written in the earnest script of an intelligent teenage girl. The Doctor had read it in high school. At nights on the yatra, lying in the tent, surrounded by the quiet clashing of cymbals, I thought of the curling spine of the book, of the paperclips lodged in its pages. I didn’t even have it with me. It was in my luggage, stowed in the corner of a friend’s house in Delhi. Some talismans you don’t need to carry with you.

Instead, on my phone, I read the news from Fukushima. There had been an earthquake. And after the earthquake there came a tsunami. And after the tsunami came the meltdowns. Each time I looked, there was more news. Reactor cores that overheated. Reactor buildings that exploded. From a tent in the Indian countryside, I watched the evacuation zone blossom from two, to ten, to twenty kilometers.

A sickening familiarity hung over it all. I remembered Dennis, in the briefing room in Chernobyl, tapping his pointer on the image of the firemen’s memorial. I saw his contamination map of the Exclusion Zone, a distorted starfish with a reactor at its heart. And now again. Another terrifying Eden erupting onto the landscape. Another fifty or hundred thousand people forced aside. Another ghost born to haunt the world.

It was a noisy camp. The generator ran all night, and the sadhus, too, working in shifts to ensure no break in the cymbal tinkling and the Hare Hare-ing. Underlying it all was a low murmur of conversation that I eventually realized was a recording of Shri Baba giving a sermon. Mahesh, the young man with the laptop and the webcam, also had an MP3 player with external speakers. The first thing he did upon reaching camp every afternoon was to connect the speakers to the generator and start Shri Baba up. I came to find it almost comforting, this never-ending sermon, a low lullaby beckoning me into sleep against the hard, uneven ground.

Five in the morning again, and we woke up, Mansi and I each in our individual mesh pods of mosquito netting. For Mansi, the mosquito net served double duty as a sadhu net. We didn’t put it past Creepy Baba or some other insufficiently detached holy man to come climbing in next to her, hoping to play Krishna to her Radha.

It was Mansi’s last morning on the yatra. She had things to do back in Delhi. When she announced that she would be leaving, though, Creepy Baba had suddenly announced that he, too, needed to go to Delhi.

Oh god, Mansi said. I’ll never get rid of him.

I emerged to the sight of the pre-dawn mortifications. There was always a sadhu balanced on his head in the tent across the way, or complicating his nostrils with yogic breathing, or inflicting himself with some other reverent difficulty. Somehow it always took me by surprise. When I leave a tent, I guess I’m expecting a campfire, or some beef jerky—not a holy man tied in a square knot.

More substantially, I wondered why there weren’t any young environmental types kicking around. Where were the young green-niks of Delhi and Agra? R. C. Trivedi and Bharat Lal Seth had both suggested that secular environmentalists and Hindu spiritual groups were finally working together, after decades of pointless division. I had thought India was the place where someone was finally building the bridge between conservation and religion. And maybe so. But then where was everybody?

Mansi made her escape shortly after we started walking, hitching a ride to the bus station in Sunil’s jeep. For a moment it looked like she would get away without Creepy Baba in tow, but at the last minute he realized what was going on. Running to the jeep, he piled in next to her, and they rode off together, Mansi staring at the ceiling.

A month later I would e-mail her from New York, asking how things had turned out when the yatra had reached Delhi. I hadn’t found much in the papers.

She would tell me she had gone to see the protest. There had been nothing like the predicted half million people, she said, but there were sadhus from all over the world, and a strong showing from the farmers’ union. Creepy Baba had said hello, and another sadhu had grabbed Mansi by the hand and dragged her up front to sit by the podium. There were speeches, and some loose talk about taking a sledgehammer to the dam at Wazirabad. But nobody in Delhi noticed.

“Sad,” she wrote me. “There’s so many of them, and zero press coverage.” It seemed the media had exhausted itself earlier in the month, covering an anti-corruption hunger strike. In the end, Delhi would pay the Yamuna yatra about as much attention as it does the Yamuna itself.

I continued with the yatra for a few more days. Because he spoke decent English, Mahesh installed himself as my new minder.

“I will be your translator!” he said, walking beside me, his arms swinging wide. “I am going to tell you SO many stories about Lord Krishna!”

An earnest, ever-smiling man in his mid-twenties, Mahesh looked more like a young computer science graduate than a sadhu, but his enthusiasm for Krishna was unrivaled. Thus was I treated to stories and digressions about Krishna and heaven, about Krishna and the boy stuck in the well, about how Krishna had been “naughty” and gone “thief-ing water.” About how Krishna had ordered his minister to “make women more lusty,” and had then vanquished the minister for criticizing him about it. About how Krishna had told the people to worship the forests and the hills instead of the lord Indra.

Mahesh on sin. Mahesh on how if you invoke Krishna you will prevent illness. Mahesh on sin, again. Mahesh on how he had so many sins. SO many sins! I began to wonder just what kind of sins we were talking about. The sin of attachment? The sin of being full of stool and urine? The sin of being member to a ruinous species? Or something else that shouldn’t count as sin? Was his sin something he had done? Something he wanted to do? Something that had been done to him?

We walked. We sauntered. We made embalmed relics of our hearts. Mahesh on how with Krishna at your side, you will avoid car crashes at the last instant. How if someone tries to hit you, they will fail. How if they shoot at you, they will miss. So many things. SO many things, Gore Krishna! The stories of Lord Krishna are real history. This is not only scripture, no. It is scientific!

I began to wither in the grip of the sadhus’ hospitality, guiltily dreading the second and third and fourth helpings of food, served with smiling insistence. My belly became bloated with lentils and bread. But I had no choice. When I chose to skip lunch one afternoon, it threw the yatra into a near uproar of concern.

And Mahesh’s solicitude knew no bounds. Had I eaten? Had I eaten enough? Had I washed my hands? Had I used soap? Did I need a bath? Did I know I could take a bath under the spigot of the water tank? Would I like him