Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Come walk a few steps with us!” Jai blared over the PA. But he was upstaged by the
farmers' union president, who had joined us that afternoon. I recognized him from his pic-
ture on the side of the truck, a glowering buffalo of a man with a slash of hair covering his
mouth. At the edge of town, he climbed onto the truck and gave his best Huey Long im-
pression, growling and yawping and waving his fist stiffly overhead. More water should be
released into the river, he said. The sewage should be treated and diverted. It was a facile,
rabble-rousing version of what I'd been told by boatmen in Delhi, by the coin collectors,
by R. C. Trivedi. Everybody knows, in ways more or less sophisticated, how to restore the
Yamuna: stop destroying it.
The music started up again, and the circus crawled out of town, trailing a crowd of fifty
or sixty onlookers, all men. It quickly devolved into dancing and general hoopla, with a
core group prancing around with epileptic fervor. The dancers included the union presid-
ent's two bodyguards, each of whom was armed with one of the small-caliber rifles ubiquit-
ous to Indian security guards. I did some complementary dancing of my own as the body-
guards jumped and gyrated, waving the barrels of their guns around with way too much
abandon. And like this, we danced and chanted and cavorted our way out of town and back
to camp.
We had not seen the river that day. Tomorrow, Sunil said.
I lay in the tent. I was rereading
Moby-Dick
…sort of. The Melville spell that Art had
cast aboard the
Kaisei
had yet to wear off. In New York, I had borrowed the Doctor's
old copy, a battered green paperback, and carried it with me ever since. Through Brazil,
through China, on half a dozen twelve-hour flights. But I was still only two pages deep. It
was hard to focus when I opened it. The text was overgrown with inky blue notes, written
in the earnest script of an intelligent teenage girl. The Doctor had read it in high school. At
nights on the yatra, lying in the tent, surrounded by the quiet clashing of cymbals, I thought
of the curling spine of the topic, of the paperclips lodged in its pages. I didn't even have
it with me. It was in my luggage, stowed in the corner of a friend's house in Delhi. Some
talismans you don't need to carry with you.
Instead, on my phone, I read the news from Fukushima. There had been an earthquake.
And after the earthquake there came a tsunami. And after the tsunami came the meltdowns.
Each time I looked, there was more news. Reactor cores that overheated. Reactor buildings
that exploded. From a tent in the Indian countryside, I watched the evacuation zone blos-
som from two, to ten, to twenty kilometers.
