Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
grims drank some Yamuna water and had to be hospitalized that same night.” The villages
along the river couldn't use it as a water source anymore.
“Can't government provide people clean water?” he demanded. “If the government can
put a Metro train a hundred feet underground, it can do this.” He chopped one hand against
the other. Someone had to purify the purifier. “Until Yamuna is clean, we are not going to
back off. This is higher than religion. Higher than human beings.”
Hiking with the sadhus is cheaper than taking the bus, and more scenic, but you will have to
come to terms with crapping in the open, which for Westerners can be profoundly difficult.
In the past, I had mocked people who worried too much about the bathroom arrangements
of faraway places, but I now saw that I was one of them. Worrying about bathroom access,
I realized, was a fundamental expression of my cultural heritage. All of Western civiliza-
tion, in fact, had been built on a set of technologies whose only purpose was to abstract the
process of dealing with one's own feces. (Germany is the exception to this rule, with its
lay-and-display toilet bowls.) In any case, I would happily have parted with a thick stack
of rupees for some time alone with a chunk of porcelain.
Yatra-ing, you will also have to wrestle with the privacy issues inherent to certain parts
of India: i.e., that there is none. There is someone hanging out, or working, or taking a nap,
or a crap, behind every shrub and around every corner. I doubt this worries people who
grew up in the Indian countryside; they don't mind that someone could catch sight of them
squatting in a field. But for a white man from New York—and for an educated young wo-
man from Delhi, Mansi confirmed—this is just
not okay.
So you need a system.
FIELD MANUAL FOR CRAPPING OUTDOORS WHILE HIKING WITH SADHUS
1. CHOOSE A TIME.
Everyone else goes in the morning, but this may lead to co-crapping,
or at least crap-camaraderie, among you and the sadhus, which you must avoid at all costs.
Afternoon is best, when everyone else is taking a nap.
2. BRING YOUR OWN TOILET PAPER.
Toilet paper does not exist for these guys, who instead
take a small lunch pail of water along with them for the purpose of washing—a method for
which you are not trained. So pack a roll or two. The drawback to toilet paper is that, since
you will leave it behind, you are flagging your turd as your own. (You are, after all, one of
only two people for miles around who believe in toilet paper.) Any sadhu who comes upon
your work will therefore be able to scrutinize your method.
3. CHOOSE A LOCATION.
You've got to work the sightlines. The second day on the yatra,
for instance, I found a nice spot behind the ruins of a small, brick building that screened
