Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
on in those micro-zones of privacy? Everyone was smitten. On a perfect spring day, thirty
yards upwind from the shittiest stretch of river in the world, I believed in love for a little
while.
There once were ghats up by the ISBT highway bridge, but for no good reason the city
government ripped them out in the early 2000s. Now the overpass itself serves as a kind
of high-altitude, drive-thru ghat. As on other bridges over the river, people pause day and
night to throw offerings or trash into the water. It's hard to tell the worship from the litter-
ing.
My friend Mansi brought her camera, and we spent a morning underneath the overpass,
where a slope of packed dirt led down to the river. Every minute or two, an untidy rain of
flowers would sift down from the bridge, or a full plastic bag would hit the water with a
dank
plop.
We would look heavenward, sometimes catching a motorcycle helmet peering
down from the railing. The city government had erected fences on most bridges to keep
people from throwing over so many offerings; invariably the fences become tufted with
flowers and bags that snag as someone tries to throw them over. Here, though, people had
found an unprotected spot where they could throw their offerings unhindered. It was the
same kind of unceremonious ceremony that I had seen at the cremation grounds, a sacred-
ness that had no use for aesthetics.
And as with the cremation grounds, anything of value that goes into the water here must
also come out. Wherever offerings are made, there are coin collectors, men who scour the
river bottom with their hands. Although they are called coin collectors, they are compre-
hensive in their religious recycling, and actually collect anything that can be sold or reused.
The sun had just come up, murky over the Yamuna, and on the bank four collectors were
finishing their morning chores before getting down to work.
“In the summer,” one of them told me, “the smell gets so strong here, your eyes water.”
His name was Jagdish, and he had been in the reverse-offering business for nearly twenty
years, since he was a teenager. He made enough to support his wife and ten-year-old daugh-
ter.
Jagdish reeled off a list of what you could find in the water here: gold and silver rings,
gold chains hung with devotional pendants, coins with images of gods. But only once in a
while was the score so good. “If that happened every day,” he said, “I wouldn't be here.”
When he found coal, he sold it to the men who ironed clothes on the side of the road. When
he found paper, he sold it for recycling. Coconuts he sold to people to sell on the street, or
to be pressed for coconut oil if they were dry.
