Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It began on a train to Chernobyl. And I had tried to follow it, through oceans and mines
and forests, past a chain of uncanny monuments to our kind. There was something I was
trying to see. An asteroid was striking the planet. I just wanted to catch a glimpse. But it
was impossible, because we
were
the asteroid. The world had already ended, with a whim-
per, and also it didn't end. Now we inhabit the ended, unending world that came afterward.
The world with us. The world transformed. A crater yawns open from its center and a new
nature floods across it.
It is the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.
But mostly, we walked. And I waited for that feeling. It found me in the mornings. On
the road before sunup, the sadhus falling into rank, Potbellied Baba narrowly avoiding be-
ing run down by an oncoming truck, and we would set out. Someone had garlanded the
pickup truck with a white flag, bordered in green—the fluttering standard of the farmers'
union. I stayed in the back and watched us as we went, our tiny band of misfits, a ragged
line of men, supposedly holy, straggling along the shoulder of the highway, down to Delhi,
with the night's mist settling on the fields, and the sun just short of the horizon behind us,
and it would find me. Somehow, that feeling. It started in the bones of my legs, and into my
spine, and up the back of my neck, washing over my ears and face and my eyes, coursing
through my scalp, streaming into the air above my head, lit with the fresh sun and then it
was day. This happened. Every morning, this attack of gratitude, swarming over me, as we
walked and walked, puppets to an uncertain music.
Only after we had been in camp for several minutes did I realize it. We hadn't made the
river. I was leaving for Delhi in the morning. My Yamuna yatra had been completely
Yamuna-less.
What the hell, Sunil?
“Gore Krishna!” he cried, and told me not to worry. We would see the river that after-
noon. He had planned a field trip. I crammed into the jeep with half a dozen other people,
and Sunil hit the gas.
As we headed west, the air became hotter, the earth tougher, the fields of wheat taller
and blonder. Forty minutes and half a dozen quick stops for directions, and Sunil turned
left down a small, barren gully. There were rowboats tied up in the dust. It was the edge of
the floodplain.
We came out the bottom of the ravine and saw a stripe of water in the distance, beyond
a wide sweep of sandy scrubland. The Yamuna at last.
