Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
On foot is how. I had learned there was a yatra under way.
Yatra
is a Sanskrit word
for “procession” or “journey,” and in this case meant a large protest march undertaken by
a group of
sadhus.
Hindu holy men. They were walking a four-hundred-mile stretch of
the Yamuna, from its confluence with the Ganga in Allahabad all the way up to Delhi, to
demonstrate against the government's failure to clean up the river. If I could find the march,
out there in the wilds of the state of Uttar Pradesh, I could tag along for a few days. What
luck! Environmentalism, spirituality, a good hike—and it was free. Knowing I'd need some
Hindi on my side, I asked Mansi if she wanted to come along. She agreed right away. She's
a photographer, and photographers are always down for an adventure.
Before I left Delhi for the trip downstream, though, I went to see the source of the
trouble.
The Najafgarh drain was once a natural stream, but even more than the Yamuna, it has
been completely overwhelmed by its use as a sewage channel. With a discharge approach-
ing five hundred million gallons a day, including nearly four hundred tons of suspended
solids—yes,
those
solids—the single drain of the Najafgarh accounts for up to a third of all
the pollution in the entire, 850-mile-long river. It is the Yamuna's ground zero.
We approached it on foot, picking our way around the hubbub of a construction site.
There was a new highway bridge going up, bypassing the chokepoint of the road over the
Wazirabad Barrage. Beyond the work area we found a footbridge that crossed the drain
several hundred yards up from where it met the Yamuna.
The footbridge was a wide dirt path bordered by concrete parapets. Looking over the
edge, we could see the wide, concrete-lined trough of the drain, perhaps two stories deep.
A dark slurry surged along its bottom. The air nearly rang with the smell—that fermented,
almost salty smell. Sewage. It was a smell somehow removed from actual feces. A smell
that somehow distilled and concentrated whatever it is about feces that smells so bad.
I had smelled that smell before, but never had it smelled like it smelled that day at Na-
jafgarh. It smelled so bad it gave me goose bumps. It smelled so bad it made my mouth
water. The gag reflex scrambled up my throat, looking for purchase. I tried to take shallow
breaths.
And yet.
I looked over the side again. Vegetation climbed the seams of concrete on the walls
of the drain. Green, bullet-headed parrots flew over the dark water. Pigeons stepped and
dipped on a concrete ledge. Butterflies flopped upward through the sunny air.
Moving to the downstream side of the bridge, I saw strings of flowers snagged on the
electrical wires that crossed the drain. They had caught there when people had thrown them
in. Even here, people offered.
