Travel Reference
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gently against the bridge, steel cables creaking with the strain. A fresh, sweet air came off
the water. Downstream, a new bridge was under construction, a proper highway bridge,
built on tall concrete pylons.
The men climbed the ramp to see what I was doing. Their English was almost as bad
as my Hindi, but somehow we started a conversation. The bridgekeeper said his name was
Tiwari, and he introduced me to everyone else. I took their picture and showed it to them.
Tiwari got it across that the bridge was seasonal. It was installed only for the dry months,
from November to the middle of June. During the monsoonal flood, he became a boat-
man, ferrying people across on a square, flat-bottomed boat that he kept tied up next to
the bridge. I didn't know how to ask him if he would still have a job when the new bridge
opened.
They asked my name. Andrew, I said.
Andru,
they said. They didn't ask me why I was
here, or who I was, or where I was going. They asked me if I had been on the river.
Not here, I said. I had been on the river in Delhi. I held my nose. They shook their
heads and clucked their tongues in disapproval. But they were smiling. I shook Gorokh-
pur's hand—I think it was Gorokhpur—and his wizened face creased with laughter, and I
laughed, too.
I realized that, among my five or six words of Hindi, I had several that might apply.
“Ye pani acha hai?” I offered.
This water is good?
They nearly broke into applause.
Yes!
they said.
This water is good.
“Delhi pani bahot acha nehi hai,” I said, getting ambitious.
Delhi water is not very good.
No,
they said.
It's not.
One of them pointed upstream.
Panchnada,
he said, and his sen-
tence dissolved in a filigree of Hindi. I pulled out my notebook and we started drawing.
We drew the Yamuna, and the four rivers feeding it, the fingers of a watery hand, with the
bracelet of a pontoon bridge riding up against its palm.
Once the five rivers come together, the water is good, they said. Tiwari gestured up and
down the river, his arm outstretched. He had the English word.
“Purify,” he said. “Purify Yamuna.”
Upstream, the sun was setting. A temple on the rise of the opposite bank had descended
into silhouette. The breeze off the water had cooled. I took a last look at the Yamuna. At
the place where it became a river again.
Then I said goodbye to the bridgekeepers and started back across the floodplain, to
where the jeep was still trapped in the sand.