Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
But if I thought the sight of the river would be greeted with any reverence by the sadhus
of the Yamuna yatra, I was mistaken. They seemed not to notice. Sunil was in the middle
of a long set of stories that had reduced the car to uproarious laughter.
“What is he saying?” I asked Mahesh.
“He is telling a joke,” he said, between gasps.
“Yes, I know,” I said. “What's the joke about?”
“Yes!” he said, still laughing.
“No, Mahesh.
What was the joke?
”
“It is a…very different, something kind of joke.”
Our destination was a temple overlook on the bluff opposite. We crossed a temporary
bridge constructed of large steel pontoons and cracked timbers, and manned by a quintet
of men sitting by a shack. The Yamuna glimmered in the late-afternoon light. On the other
side, Sunil sent us shooting up the dirt road that climbed the hill, past low adobe houses,
past a huge banyan tree, and finally parked by the temple. We spilled out of the jeep and
walked by a pair of ruined towers to find the overlook. From the promontory, we could see
green fields descending to the riverbank. A pair of fishermen plied the water in small boats.
This was Panchnada, the confluence that R. C. Trivedi had told me about. Nearly
three hundred miles downstream from Delhi, four tributaries joined to feed the Yamuna
a massive dose of new water, finally diluting the river's oxygen-starved flow. We could
see the confluence in the distance—the confluences. From a confusing tangle of sinuous
bends and meandering inflows, the Yamuna emerged clean at last—or cleanish—despite
everything that had been done to it. It had been made to flow into the ground, to slosh along
canals and up against barrages, to wind through the intestines of sixteen million people, to
suffer any number of other transformations, and still it flowed. It may have to wait out hu-
mankind to find a less tortured course.
On the way back, about a hundred yards past the bridge, the deep, dry sand of the flood-
plain swallowed the wheels up to their axles. We got out and started pushing the jeep in
different, uncoordinated directions. In the distance, we saw a truck having the same prob-
lem, and another jeep. The place was a car trap.
“Gore Krishna has caused us complications!” shouted Sunil, gunning the engine and
spinning the wheels. (Don't look at me, Sunil—I wanted to walk.) Mahesh crouched by
the tire, shoveling sand out with his hands. “With Krishna all things are possible!” he said.
Behind every handful he scooped away, more sand ran in.
I wandered back to the pontoon bridge. The men sitting by the bridge-keeper's hut let
me climb the ramp and stand on the steel plates of the roadway. I watched the river flow
