Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the open sewers to the farms, and see for yourself how they were all connected. I liked how
you could stand on the banks of the reeking Ganga, almost as sludgy as it was holy, and
watch pilgrims take their holy baths, confident in the purifying power of the impure water.
All this, and cheap hotels. Yet in the guidebooks, Kanpur didn't exist.
Well
that's
not fair, I'd thought.
And in Delhi, I had met a different species of environmentalism from that in the United
States. Back home, however much you thought you cared about the environment, it was
an impersonal concern. After all, your daily surroundings, whether in suburb or city, were
likely to be pleasant, or at least clean, or at least nontoxic. In India, though, environmental-
ism was more than an abstract moral value. It was more than a way to signal your politics
and your socioeconomic status. Here, in the daily confrontation with poor air and adulter-
ated drinking water, it took on the urgency of a civil rights struggle. Only in the polluted
places could you properly understand what was at stake.
This time I skipped Kanpur. Skipped Ganga. It might be India's holiest river, but the
Yamuna is its most polluted, and I had priorities. I wanted to know why, with all the Hindu
rumpus about rivers, a river goddess can't actually catch a break. For although the Yamuna
might be a goddess, by the time she leaves Delhi, she is no longer a river.
I hadn't gone home. I had none. I had come straight from China. From Linfen to Beijing,
from Beijing to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Delhi. Delhi, where, not five minutes from the
airport, the cabdriver resumed where the Han family had left off.
“You are married?” he asked.
Had entire continents been populated only to make me say it? I was alone. Not with the
Doctor, not newly married, but alone, and alone, and alone.
“No,” I said. “Are you?”
He nodded. He had a child, too.
“Your country, all love marriages. No arranged marriages. This is good,” he said. “Ar-
ranged marriage, father and mother choose the girl. You choose different girl.”
“You had an arranged marriage?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you love your wife?”
“Yes,” he said. His eyes were on the road. “But I loved another woman.”
