Over our heads is one of the river’s road bridges. A young couple have parked their car on the bridge and are now clambering down to the water. It is not easy. The concrete slopes are steep and fifteen metres high. The husband is carrying some kind of package; the wife wears a sari and sandals. Eventually they make it down to where we are standing. The package, it turns out, is a framed photograph of a dead male ancestor — a father, perhaps — decked in flowers. They throw it into the viscous water, watch it sink, and begin to climb back up to the highway above.
The edge of the water is choked with other similar offerings. Flower garlands, broken coconuts, photographs of Sai Baba, mats of shaved baby hair — and all the plastic bags in which these things have been brought — hug the lapping edge in a broad floating carpet.
“I don’t think I would place a photograph of my father in this water,” I say.
“No one is looking at the water,” says Anupam. “They are acting automatically, without looking.”
We begin to walk upstream. We pass the grave of a Muslim saint, around which is a spotless clearing furnished with elegant shelters made of sheaves of long river grasses. We cross stinking canals flowing into the river. No one is around: one would think we were far from any city even though we are now walking parallel to the new overhead highway that runs along the Yamuna bank.
We have set ourselves a long walk, but we have started in the hottest part of the day, and before long we withdraw under the shadow of this highway. The road is like a giant awning overhead, and it is cool here and curiously quiet. Hundreds of cycle rickshaws are parked in rows, and boys are working on repairs. Men go down to the river to wash their hands; they return to eat lunch next to us. Laundry is slung over rickshaws. Birds sing. Pylons carry cables across the river from the power station just a little upstream.
“Why do you think people have always built cities in this place?” Anupam says as we look at the flowing water. “It is because this stretch of the west Yamuna bank has the richest groundwater for hundreds of miles around. Delhi marks the point where the Yamuna comes closest to the Aravalli Hills, which end just to the south-west of us. Seventeen streams used to flow over this plain from the Aravallis into the Yamuna, making the ground abundant in clean water. For the first thousand years of Delhi’s history, every city drew its water from this rich underground supply. Every large house had a well in the courtyard. Each locality had fifty or so wells. Large communal wells were built for people to gather water and also to socialise in the presence of water.
“There were always new invasions and new cities. But those dynasties all came from the plains, and though they had different visions of religion and government, they had the same vision of water. Each conqueror inherited the infrastructure of the last and added to it, so that for 1,000 years Delhi evolved a continuous and sophisticated water system. The philosophy was simple: if you take, you must put back. Whenever they sank new wells they also built new tanks. These tanks captured monsoon rain so that it did not run off into the river, and they allowed this water to gradually seep down and recharge the water table. By the Mughal period, Delhi had 800 of these water bodies. Some were small, some as big as lakes. Many of them had religious and spiritual associations, because it is with the sacred that people protect their water systems. Today, people call these systems ‘traditional’ but this word is condescending, and implies that they are obsolete. They are not. In the entire history of technology nothing has improved on them, and they will still be around in many centuries when electric pumps and dams have long run dry.
“The Mughals were the first to use the river to supplement groundwater supplies. Their metropolis had greater water needs than anything previously built here so they needed to take from the Yamuna. But the river flowed under the walls of their city: there was no way to lift it to the city level. So they went 125 kilometres upstream to where the river was flowing at a higher altitude than their city, and they built a canal from that point which brought water into Shahjahanabad by gravity.”
This was the same canal we saw a few chapters ago, in Shalimar Bagh, where Jimmy’s mastiff ran so exuberantly along its banks.
“The elegance of their system was that the canal entered the walled city from the west and travelled through it to the Red Fort in the east. Ordinary citizens therefore got water from this canal first and the king got it last. Even in democratic societies the president is not usually on the tail end of essential resources. But these people understood the politics of water. Their system guaranteed that water would be clean all along its course because the king was the final user: no one could pollute the water that he would drink. It does not matter that this was not a democracy: they built their system around an understanding of water, and the needs of water are democratic needs. Only if you are democratic in your heart can you sanction this kind of water system. Otherwise you will reject it.”
We begin to walk again. The river bends away from us, and between us and it are the flats of the floodplain where crops are grown at this time of the year. The terrain is difficult and we decide to take the road. We climb on our hands and knees up the steep incline leading up to the highway, holding onto each other for stability. The concrete is burning hot. Finally we get up to the level of the highway, whose black surface is like a radiator. We climb over the barrier and cross eight lanes in front of the speeding traffic.
On the other side is a human-sized road with sidewalks. It leads through another zone of industrial refuse. There are abandoned buildings with broken windows. Any people here are foragers, collecting bits of plastic and cardboard for sale. There is the most enormous pile of shoes caught up in some twisted barbed wire. An old water tower overgrown with vines; the banisters have fallen away from the staircase that once spiralled up around its stem, and the steps jut out like rusty teeth. We pass a waterworks outside which hangs a banner saying, “Water is life”. The trees along the road are dead and desiccated. Here and there are rusty observation towers with broken spotlights. They look as if they have been lifted from a labour camp: I can’t imagine what they were here for.
“It was the British who ultimately broke with Delhi’s 1,000 years of water knowledge. Their rule was different from that of previous kingdoms, which had ruled without interfering in how people lived. The British wanted total rule, which would extend to education, morality, everything. And of course water too. But they had no experience of this landscape and they could not understand its water system. So though they did not set out to destroy it, destroy it they did.
“The British took no notice of the groundwater, which was the reason there had been cities in this place for 1,000 years. They were only interested in the river. They imported modern water practices from Europe, damming the Yamuna to the north of the city, in a place called Wazirabad, and running pipelines into the city from which they delivered water directly into houses. Sewage was then collected in drains which let it out into the river downstream. This is why it is ironic that the British chose not to look at the river. Previous kingdoms had not used the river, but they loved to look at it. The British lived off the river, but they could not bear to look at it.
“The British were used to getting water from taps and that is the system they wished to implement here. They also liked how this monopolistic system boosted their imperial hold on the place: they could make people dependent on them, and they could choose to deliver water to one social group and not another. But it was a total break with local water customs, and many in this city resisted water from taps. It was never considered auspicious. There is an old song which says something like, ‘Do anything to us, do whatever kind of harm you want to us, but don’t put taps in our houses. Keep your tapped water for your bungalows. Don’t bring it to where we live.’ Delhi people did not like the smell of piped water: they were used to taking water directly from wells. Before drawing water they would clean their utensils and rope, and then they would dip their vessels directly into the water source, which they could see and maintain for themselves. With piped water they could not see the source. It was far away, they did not know who was supplying it, how clean it was, or what kind of chemicals they were putting in. Even today you hear rumours of poison in the water system: people have not forgotten the paranoia unleashed when the British brought piped water.