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

to show me where this bath could happen? Was I going to take a bath? When was the last time I took a bath? I didn’t like being reminded that out here I was less competent than a five-year-old.

“You have been to the forest?” he asked me after lunch.

“The forest?” I said.

“The forest! Did you not go, for letting? Toilet? Two or three days…”

“Oh. Yes.” I gave my report. “I went yesterday and the day before. Don’t worry. Three days without, that’s not possible.”

“Everything is possible!” he said.

And still we hadn’t seen the river. Tomorrow, Sunil said. We’ll get there tomorrow.

At the same time, part of me became convinced of the sadhu life. The evening found a dozen of us crammed into a single tent, singing, drumming, clashing symbols. The young man leading the songs was the best singer and drummer on the yatra. He probably spent a good five hours a day in rapturous musical performance, whether on the pickup truck or in the evening, in camp. Tonight, he drew verses from an open book of scripture, knitting his brow as he strung out a melody, before throwing it out to the group, to repeat in a throaty, musical roar.

On my last night, sitting on the ground eating dinner, I was befriended by Ravi and Ramjeet, two fifteen- year-old sadhus who had worked up the nerve to try out their English on me. I wondered if they were runaways, but they said their families had both endorsed the move to Maan Mandir. They were inseparable. Like Gabe and Henry on the Kaisei, they had known each other since early childhood.

“Ramjeet is ideal friend,” Ravi said, clapping him on the back.

Our conversation was soon joined by Ravinder—a hotel manager from Calcutta who spoke perfect English— and another sadhu, a fierce-looking man with a shaved head and goatee. After dinner, we retired to one of the tents to practice English and talk about how I should stay on with the yatra, go to live at Maan Mandir, and devote myself to Krishna.

I couldn’t, I said. I had to go home. I was done traveling. I missed my friends. I missed my family.

“But God wants you to be here, wants you to be at Maan Mandir,” Ravinder said.

Maybe I should have considered it. I’m sure there was a bedroll for me up in the temple building. I could sleep under a mosquito net in a row of sadhus. I could wake up to the words of Shri Baba, and a view over the hills and ponds of Braj. Was that so much less than I had to look forward to in New York? And I liked these guys. Usually I bristle at people trying to convert me to their religion, but sitting here I was somehow gratified by how they didn’t insist.

In my eyes, they were also pioneers. They were among the few people in the world who would purposefully make a sacred pilgrimage to a river full of shit. They were expanding the sauntering possibilities of the human race. It was precisely because the Yamuna was so desecrated, in fact, that they were pursuing this additional reverence.

And because Shri Baba’s strand of environmentalism doesn’t require a sacred place to be pristine or free of human settlement, it lacks the kernel of misanthropy that nestles at the core of Western environmentalism. A paradox of the conservation movement is that it both depends on personal experience of nature for its motivation —and clings to the idea that modern humans have no place in a truly natural world. To include people in the equation—as with the loggers of the Ambe project—seems like a concession, or at best a necessary compromise. In the minds of many environmentalists, whether they admit it or not, the ideal environment would be one in which people were sparse, or absent. But the problems with this as a conceptual starting point are obvious. We’re here. And Shri Baba and his sadhus, it seemed to me, offered the possibility of a different mindset, in which one could fight for the environment without pining for Eden.

Since I had Ravinder and company there, I tried to nail down a few Krishna basics. Could someone please tell me the exact words to the Hare Krishna chant?

“It is called the Harenam Mahamantra,” Ravinder said, writing it out in my notebook in capital letters.

“Like we use soap for cleaning clothes,” Fierce Baba said, “we use the Harenam Mahamantra to clean our minds. To clean ourselves from within.”

We went from there, and soon the tent was in a holy tumult, with Ravinder and Fierce Baba debating and correcting each other’s storytelling and theology, and Ravi and Ramjeet paying rapt attention, and piling more questions on top of my own. There were 330 million gods, I was told, with Krishna on top. He had created the others. But then a bunch of Krishna devotees would say that, wouldn’t they?

They told me about Krishna. They told me about his life in Braj. They told me about Shiva turning into a woman so he could join the milkmaids and watch Krishna dance. And they told me about the love between Krishna and Radha, always about Krishna and Radha.

I asked them about attachment and self-denial. Why renounce worldly pleasure when Krishna had himself been such a playboy? This provoked an extended melee about whether Krishna had been a sadhu, and whether, perhaps by dint of successful sadhu-hood, through which he entered into godliness, he had earned a kind of free pass to enjoy himself as a young man in Braj. They were still debating when I left.

Later that night, as all the sadhus slept, I crept out of my tent and walked to the nearby woods, for “letting,” as Mahesh would call it. On my way back, I stopped in the patch of herdland behind the camp.

The full moon shone clear and cool and magnificently bright. It was a perigee moon—the closest, largest full moon in twenty years. The landscape shimmered in monochrome, the silent forms of cows and buffalo lying like dark boulders on the packed dirt. A cowherd rustled under a blanket.

The puzzle of Krishna and Radha flickered in my mind. I had found it hard to distinguish which of them the sadhus were actually worshipping, or if it was the relationship itself that commanded the deepest veneration, a love affair that was somehow a deity in its own right.

“Two bodies, but single body,” Ravinder had said.

The love between Radha and Krishna had been no mere love. It was a love that had created the human love for God. It was the ideal connection between the human and the divine, embodied in the eternal romance of two young deities.

Eternal, but it didn’t last. The time came when Krishna left the hills of his youth and went to fulfill his destiny as a warrior and lord. It is said that without Radha to animate his music, he laid down his legendary flute. Later, he married and had children with a princess in Dvaraka. I don’t know what happened to the milkmaid Radha.

We walked. It was a good way to travel, watching the fields creep by, and smelling the air, and feeling the exhaust of passing trucks. There was still no Yamuna in sight—later today, Sunil told me—and we were hiking, as always, along the side of the highway. The trucks would blare their elaborate horns as they rushed past, sometimes melodious, sometimes earsplitting. It would be nice to think they were honking in solidarity with the yatra, but in India as in many countries, it is simply a part of driving to blast your horn when you are passing another vehicle, or being passed, or when you see something by the side of the road, or when you don’t.

It was morning. I saw things. A dot of orange crossing an expanse of feathered grain. She turned, a woman, the tangerine cloth of her sari covering her head, just visible above the wheat. A sadhu with an ochre stripe painted across his forehead grabbed a handful of chickpeas from the edge of a field and handed me a sprig, and we ate the beans raw. The tall chimney of a brick factory, and another, and another. They drew dark plumes across the sky. We passed close to one. In a compound enclosed by walls of brick, men carted bricks to a kiln made of bricks under a tall chimney made of bricks. A peacock stood on a crumbling brick wall, iridescent in the dust. At the sound of our loudspeaker, the workers paused and watched us go, and we waved to each other.

“All the farmers, come to Delhi!” the sadhus chanted. “All the people, come to Delhi!” There were thirty of us.

A burst of parrots, and then a group of Sarus cranes coasted over our heads and landed in a field, each of them tall as a man, and more beautiful. Smooth, gray feathers lined their bodies, a flash of crimson around the head. In India, I hear, they are revered as symbols of marital happiness, of unconditional love and devotion. The species is classified as vulnerable, if not yet endangered.

The Doctor and I had been e-mailing. From New York to Linfen, and Delhi, and here on the road, sympathetic words echoed over the space between two diverging lives, building our goodbye.