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

“Please do not be sad,” she wrote. “My love goes with you everywhere.”

We walked.

I should be wrapping it up, I thought. The end of the story was somewhere nearby, just down the highway, where the road found the river. I should be ready for that moment. I should be thinking, reflecting on my journeys in polluted places, looking back across thousands of miles, distilling each location into its essence, saying what it all meant. Hadn’t I already said it? That to chase after the beautiful and the pristine was to abandon most of the world? That the unnatural, too, was natural? Or was it the reverse?

It began on a train to Chernobyl. And I had tried to follow it, through oceans and mines and forests, past a chain of uncanny monuments to our kind. There was something I was trying to see. An asteroid was striking the planet. I just wanted to catch a glimpse. But it was impossible, because we were the asteroid. The world had already ended, with a whimper, and also it didn’t end. Now we inhabit the ended, unending world that came afterward. The world with us. The world transformed. A crater yawns open from its center and a new nature floods across it.

It is the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.

But mostly, we walked. And I waited for that feeling. It found me in the mornings. On the road before sunup, the sadhus falling into rank, Potbellied Baba narrowly avoiding being run down by an oncoming truck, and we would set out. Someone had garlanded the pickup truck with a white flag, bordered in green—the fluttering standard of the farmers’ union. I stayed in the back and watched us as we went, our tiny band of misfits, a ragged line of men, supposedly holy, straggling along the shoulder of the highway, down to Delhi, with the night’s mist settling on the fields, and the sun just short of the horizon behind us, and it would find me. Somehow, that feeling. It started in the bones of my legs, and into my spine, and up the back of my neck, washing over my ears and face and my eyes, coursing through my scalp, streaming into the air above my head, lit with the fresh sun and then it was day. This happened. Every morning, this attack of gratitude, swarming over me, as we walked and walked, puppets to an uncertain music.

Only after we had been in camp for several minutes did I realize it. We hadn’t made the river. I was leaving for Delhi in the morning. My Yamuna yatra had been completely Yamuna-less.

What the hell, Sunil?

“Gore Krishna!” he cried, and told me not to worry. We would see the river that afternoon. He had planned a field trip. I crammed into the jeep with half a dozen other people, and Sunil hit the gas.

As we headed west, the air became hotter, the earth tougher, the fields of wheat taller and blonder. Forty minutes and half a dozen quick stops for directions, and Sunil turned left down a small, barren gully. There were rowboats tied up in the dust. It was the edge of the floodplain.

We came out the bottom of the ravine and saw a stripe of water in the distance, beyond a wide sweep of sandy scrubland. The Yamuna at last.

But if I thought the sight of the river would be greeted with any reverence by the sadhus of the Yamuna yatra, I was mistaken. They seemed not to notice. Sunil was in the middle of a long set of stories that had reduced the car to uproarious laughter.

“What is he saying?” I asked Mahesh.

“He is telling a joke,” he said, between gasps.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “What’s the joke about?”

“Yes!” he said, still laughing.

“No, Mahesh. What was the joke?”

“It is a… very different, something kind of joke.”

Our destination was a temple overlook on the bluff opposite. We crossed a temporary bridge constructed of large steel pontoons and cracked timbers, and manned by a quintet of men sitting by a shack. The Yamuna glimmered in the late-afternoon light. On the other side, Sunil sent us shooting up the dirt road that climbed the hill, past low adobe houses, past a huge banyan tree, and finally parked by the temple. We spilled out of the jeep and walked by a pair of ruined towers to find the overlook. From the promontory, we could see green fields descending to the riverbank. A pair of fishermen plied the water in small boats.

This was Panchnada, the confluence that R. C. Trivedi had told me about. Nearly three hundred miles downstream from Delhi, four tributaries joined to feed the Yamuna a massive dose of new water, finally diluting the river’s oxygen-starved flow. We could see the confluence in the distance—the confluences. From a confusing tangle of sinuous bends and meandering inflows, the Yamuna emerged clean at last—or cleanish—despite everything that had been done to it. It had been made to flow into the ground, to slosh along canals and up against barrages, to wind through the intestines of sixteen million people, to suffer any number of other transformations, and still it flowed. It may have to wait out humankind to find a less tortured course.

On the way back, about a hundred yards past the bridge, the deep, dry sand of the floodplain swallowed the wheels up to their axles. We got out and started pushing the jeep in different, uncoordinated directions. In the distance, we saw a truck having the same problem, and another jeep. The place was a car trap.

“Gore Krishna has caused us complications!” shouted Sunil, gunning the engine and spinning the wheels. (Don’t look at me, Sunil—I wanted to walk.) Mahesh crouched by the tire, shoveling sand out with his hands. “With Krishna all things are possible!” he said. Behind every handful he scooped away, more sand ran in.

I wandered back to the pontoon bridge. The men sitting by the bridge-keeper’s hut let me climb the ramp and stand on the steel plates of the roadway. I watched the river flow gently against the bridge, steel cables creaking with the strain. A fresh, sweet air came off the water. Downstream, a new bridge was under construction, a proper highway bridge, built on tall concrete pylons.

The men climbed the ramp to see what I was doing. Their English was almost as bad as my Hindi, but somehow we started a conversation. The bridgekeeper said his name was Tiwari, and he introduced me to everyone else. I took their picture and showed it to them.

Tiwari got it across that the bridge was seasonal. It was installed only for the dry months, from November to the middle of June. During the monsoonal flood, he became a boatman, ferrying people across on a square, flat- bottomed boat that he kept tied up next to the bridge. I didn’t know how to ask him if he would still have a job when the new bridge opened.

They asked my name. Andrew, I said. Andru, they said. They didn’t ask me why I was here, or who I was, or where I was going. They asked me if I had been on the river.

Not here, I said. I had been on the river in Delhi. I held my nose. They shook their heads and clucked their tongues in disapproval. But they were smiling. I shook Gorokhpur’s hand—I think it was Gorokhpur—and his wizened face creased with laughter, and I laughed, too.

I realized that, among my five or six words of Hindi, I had several that might apply.

“Ye pani acha hai?” I offered. This water is good?

They nearly broke into applause. Yes! they said. This water is good.

“Delhi pani bahot acha nehi hai,” I said, getting ambitious. Delhi water is not very good.

No, they said. It’s not. One of them pointed upstream. Panchnada, he said, and his sentence dissolved in a filigree of Hindi. I pulled out my notebook and we started drawing. We drew the Yamuna, and the four rivers feeding it, the fingers of a watery hand, with the bracelet of a pontoon bridge riding up against its palm.

Once the five rivers come together, the water is good, they said. Tiwari gestured up and down the river, his arm outstretched. He had the English word.

“Purify,” he said. “Purify Yamuna.”

Upstream, the sun was setting. A temple on the rise of the opposite bank had descended into silhouette. The breeze off the water had cooled. I took a last look at the Yamuna. At the place where it became a river again.

Then I said goodbye to the bridgekeepers and started back across the floodplain, to where the jeep was still trapped in the sand.