Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
We walked. It was a good way to travel, watching the fields creep by, and smelling the air,
and feeling the exhaust of passing trucks. There was still no Yamuna in sight—later today,
Sunil told me—and we were hiking, as always, along the side of the highway. The trucks
would blare their elaborate horns as they rushed past, sometimes melodious, sometimes
earsplitting. It would be nice to think they were honking in solidarity with the yatra, but
in India as in many countries, it is simply a part of driving to blast your horn when you
are passing another vehicle, or being passed, or when you see something by the side of the
road, or when you don't.
It was morning. I saw things. A dot of orange crossing an expanse of feathered grain.
She turned, a woman, the tangerine cloth of her sari covering her head, just visible above
the wheat. A sadhu with an ochre stripe painted across his forehead grabbed a handful of
chickpeas from the edge of a field and handed me a sprig, and we ate the beans raw. The
tall chimney of a brick factory, and another, and another. They drew dark plumes across the
sky. We passed close to one. In a compound enclosed by walls of brick, men carted bricks
to a kiln made of bricks under a tall chimney made of bricks. A peacock stood on a crum-
bling brick wall, iridescent in the dust. At the sound of our loudspeaker, the workers paused
and watched us go, and we waved to each other.
“All the farmers, come to Delhi!” the sadhus chanted. “All the people, come to Delhi!”
There were thirty of us.
A burst of parrots, and then a group of Sarus cranes coasted over our heads and landed
in a field, each of them tall as a man, and more beautiful. Smooth, gray feathers lined their
bodies, a flash of crimson around the head. In India, I hear, they are revered as symbols of
marital happiness, of unconditional love and devotion. The species is classified as vulner-
able, if not yet endangered.
The Doctor and I had been e-mailing. From New York to Linfen, and Delhi, and here on
the road, sympathetic words echoed over the space between two diverging lives, building
our goodbye.
“Please do not be sad,” she wrote. “My love goes with you everywhere.”
We walked.
I should be wrapping it up, I thought. The end of the story was somewhere nearby, just
down the highway, where the road found the river. I should be ready for that moment. I
should be thinking, reflecting on
my journeys in polluted places,
looking back across thou-
sands of miles, distilling each location into its essence, saying what it all meant. Hadn't I
already said it? That to chase after the beautiful and the pristine was to abandon most of the
world? That the unnatural, too, was natural? Or was it the reverse?
