Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
SEVEN
THE GODS OF SEWAGE
After Sati killed herself, her husband was inconsolable. It was Sati who had convinced him
to love, and who had taught him desire. It was for Sati that he had emerged from a life of
austerity and isolation to be part of the world. And it was for his honor that she had thrown
herself on the pyre.
He pulled her body from the fire and carried it for days, wandering, crazed with
grief and rage. Because he was Shiva, and a god, his fury was destruction—a chaos that
threatened to engulf the whole world. Vishnu went to calm him down, dismembering Sati's
corpse as Shiva carried it. (Gods have their ways.) People still worship at the places where
Sati's body parts fell.
Empty-handed, Shiva went to the river, to the Yamuna. Yamuna, daughter of the sun,
twin sister of death, goddess of love and compassion. He bathed in the river, and as the
madness of his grief cooled, it scorched the water black.
This, they say, explains the color of the Yamuna—so distinct from the milky waters of
the Ganges. The holy Yamuna is a river that accepts and dilutes grief and rage, a fount of
love and understanding for everyone from the gods on down. Maybe it is mythologically
appropriate, then, that it accepts so much else.
India is full of holy rivers, and even derives its name from a river. It is the
land beyond
the Indus,
a river whose own name, just to be safe, derives from an ancient Sanskrit word
for river. And as with Hindu deities, so with Indian waterways. The name of the game is
multiplicity. Each is the incarnation or avatar or consort or child of every other, and there
is hardly a creek in the subcontinent that can escape the burden of some pretty hard-core
metaphysical freight. How holy are India's rivers? So holy that even certain bodies of wa-
ter in Queens are also holy. So holy that you can't spill your drink without worrying that
someone will show up to venerate it.
The Ganges—or
Ganga,
as it is called in India—is, by many accounts, the holiest of all.
Heart of Varanasi, consort of Vishnu, flowing through the hair of Shiva, etc., etc. It is the
apotheosis and parent of all other rivers. And it was on the Ganga's banks, nearly a decade
earlier, that I had first seen the light as a pollution tourist. I had lived in New Delhi for six
months and had happened to visit Kanpur, where the Ganga received a crippling infusion of
industrial effluent and municipal sewage. It was supposedly the most polluted city in India.
But I
liked
visiting Kanpur. I liked how you could walk from the tanneries to the river, from
