Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
orned with other precious objects, as they were placed on their pyre. Now these men were
poring through their sodden ashes to see what they could find. Gold fillings, maybe?
I asked Ravinder if this wasn't, you know,
bad manners.
He frowned, looking at the men on the bank. No, he said. It's not seen as disrespectful.
South of the cremation ground, we crossed wakes with a dark-skinned woman wearing
an olive-colored sari. She was squatting on a large plastic bag stuffed with scraps of poly-
styrene foam and mounted with a square wooden frame. Her raft listed forward steeply to
where she hunkered on its edge, working the water with a single, short oar.
Her name was Mamta. She lived with her husband on the opposite bank. They made
their living combing the margins of the river for paper, plastic, anything they could sell to
the recyclers. Her raft was littered with the morning's haul: several coconuts, a few paper
booklets, and a single plastic sandal.
She stared at the water as she answered my questions. They had been in Delhi for ten
or fifteen years, she said. Eight years ago, the government had pushed them out of the
shantytown they had lived in. Now, they lived in a temporary shack on the floodplain.
When the river rose each year with the monsoon, they had to retreat with the land.
When I asked how old she was, she hesitated. “I don't know,” she said. “But I think I'm
twenty-five or twenty-six.” Then she continued upriver, raking her oar through the mat of
flowers and trash that clung to the bank.
Ravinder sent us back out to the middle of the river, where he left off rowing and let
us drift. He crossed his legs and opened a packet of tobacco. “So many people migrated
to Delhi,” he said. “The waste going into the river has grown and grown with the city. But
Yamuna is one. It has not multiplied.”
He still believed in the river, though. Yamuna was a goddess, he said. He might go for a
week and a half without earning any money at all—only to make up for it in a single day's
work. The Yamuna didn't take, he said. It gave.
With that, he put some tobacco in his mouth and we drifted for a while longer, spinning
quiet circles in the breeze.
Where there are rivers or lakes in India, there are ghats: wide riverfront stairs that lead
down to the water. Ghats are an indispensable part of the sacred Hindu love affair with
water, and through history they have been places for worship, and worshipful bathing, and
non-worshipful swimming, and for doing the laundry, and for cremating the dead—as at
Nigambodh Ghat—and for pretty much anything else you might want to do at the riverside.
