Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
When you make an offering to the Yamuna, then, you are not making a permanent trans-
fer of spiritual wealth, but playing part in a cycle, leaving tributes that will go into the river
this morning only to be fished out, sold again, and reoffered this afternoon.
Jagdish worked this part of the riverbank with his brother and two other men, and while
Jagdish lived five or six kilometers away, his brother Govind lived here by the water, in a
tiny, tent-like shack. Govind, a friendly man in a green baseball cap, was also in his late
thirties. He explained that because the water was too dark to see through, the collectors
worked by touch, bringing handfuls of mud off the bottom to inspect. Govind wasn't a good
swimmer, so he only waded in to his neck. His brother did the diving, when it was neces-
sary.
A bag of trash or offerings dropped from the overpass. In the dirt, Jagdish's pet monkey,
Rani, was lying on top of his dog, Michael. Rani idly scratched the snoozing dog's stom-
ach, a picture of interspecies peace. This was the kind of symbiotic friendship the human
race needed with the rest of the natural world, I thought. But then Rani started picking at
Michael's anus, and he snarled and kicked her off.
Like the boatman Ravinder and the workers at the cremation grounds, Jagdish and
Govind and their colleagues were among the last people in Delhi for whom the Yamuna
was a life-giver not merely in a spiritual sense but in a practical one. And Govind told us he
liked the work. “We're our own boss,” he said. “We go in whenever we want. We're here
tension-free.”
When I asked him if he was religious, he shrugged. “Because the world follows God, we
have to follow God, too,” he said. I wasn't sure if that meant he was a devotee or not. Did
they make offerings? He waggled his head. Sometimes they would give flowers or incense.
But that was it.
“We take it out,” he said. “We don't put it in.”
India's credentials as a pollution superpower go beyond its rivers. There are the astounding
shipbreaking beaches of Alang, and the lead smelters of Tiljala. And let's not forget Kan-
pur, with its tannery effluent, rich in heavy metals. All of South Asia, really, is a wonder-
land of untreated toxic waste. And while India's per capita carbon emissions are still low,
its growing economy and the fact that there are 1.2 billion of those capitas mean that it is
still a huge source of climate-changing gases.
The irony is that, in terms of environmental law, India is extremely advanced. Its very
constitution mandates that “the State shall endeavour to protect and improve the environ-
ment and to safeguard the forests and wildlife of the country.” As if that weren't enough to
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