Flying Off Everest (20 page)

After six days in India, Lakpa began to feel immensely lethargic. The muggy heat of the lowlands, which often soaring into the nineties, made the experienced mountaineer, who claimed to smoke cigarettes up to 28,000 feet, feel ill. He was also developing a fierce waterlogged infection on one of his hands and on both of his feet. Krishna could see the white decay of infection growing on one of his own fingers and on the back of his neck. Babu’s stomach still couldn’t hold down food after drinking the dirty well water. He also had an infection on his neck, in the same spot as his brother. They were becoming even
skinnier and more gaunt-looking than they already had been, losing weight they couldn’t afford to lose. Still, each morning and night they paddled on through the brown waters of the lower Kosi, snaking their way south toward the Ganges.

Babu called Phinney one morning while standing on the side of the river just outside of Naugachia, a small, annually flood-plagued town about 5 miles from the Sun Kosi’s outlet into the Ganges. Looking on her computer at the live tracking option on their SPOT locator, she told them where they were and asked how they were doing. Babu told her they were doing fine. After hanging up she updated the expedition’s blog for the first time since Babu and Lakpa had started the kayaking portion of their journey a week earlier:

The Ganges River is actually a goddess called Gangadevi, or Mother Ganga, at least according to Hindu mythology. It is the only river considered by a major world religion to be the physical embodiment of a deity. Created from the foot sweat of Lord Vishnu, the supreme god of Hinduism, Ganga reportedly came down from the Milky Way in response to the prayers of an ancient king named Bhagirath. His late great-grandfather, King Sagar, had apparently upset a magical hermit by the name of Kapil Muni over the matter of a stolen horse, and now a good number of his relatives were dead.

King Sagar, a prodigious procreator, had sent sixty thousand of his sixty thousand and one sons looking for the missing animal, and when they found it standing next to Muni at the southern end of
Sagar Island
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in southeastern India, near present-day Bangladesh and the mouth of the Ganges, they figured that the hermit was probably the one who stole it. So they proceeded to rough him up with enthusiasm. Muni, who hadn’t actually stolen the horse, incinerated King Sagar’s sixty thousand sons into ashes and cursed them all to hell.

Muni then told King Sagar that the only way he could save his sons’ souls was to get Gangadevi, who purified anything and everything she touched, to come down from the heavens and wash over their ashes, releasing them forever from the karmic cycle of death and rebirth—a sort of when-pigs-fly or a-cold-day-in-hell suggestion. Sagar gave his throne to his one remaining son, Amshuman, and went off into the woods to pray. He died before his prayers were answered, so Amshuman then gave the throne to his own son, Dalip, and left for the woods to pick up praying where his deceased father, Sagar, had left off. He died too.

It wasn’t until Dalip’s son, Bhagirath, stood on a rock on one leg high in the Himalaya near present-day Gangotri for a thousand years that Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, finally took notice and asked him what he wanted. Bhagirath told him he wanted to save the souls of his great-great-grandfather’s sons. Brahma told him, sure, he’d be happy to send Ganga down to earth, but suggested that Bhagirath talk to Shiva, another Hindu god, first. Ganga couldn’t come down to earth without someone to catch her fall, apparently, and Shiva would be the one to do it. Ganga would crush and drown the earth, Brahma told him. Bhagirath, unfazed, continued to balance on the rock for another ten thousand years before Shiva showed up and finally agreed to catch Ganga in the locks of his hair. Ganga didn’t want to go, however, so Nandi the bull god drank her—that’s why the Ganges starts at Gaumukh, the “cow’s mouth.” Each lock of hair formed one of the Ganges’s tributaries, like the Alaknanda, Mandakini, Bhagirathi, Satluj, Indus, and Sun Kosi (just to name a few), which all feed into the Ganges from the Himalaya along its course to the sea.

Sagar’s sons were finally saved, and to this day Hindus believe that anyone who bathes in Ganga’s waters will be purified of all sins. And that those who have their ashes or bodies deposited in the river when they die will, likewise, be released from the perpetual karmic cycle of death and rebirth and go directly to Nirvana.

Physically, the Ganges is one of the most polluted rivers on the planet, running 1,516 miles through one of the most populated river basins in the world. Rising as an unassuming gray, silt-laden meltwater creek at about 13,000 feet from the toe of the Gangotri Glacier, just a few miles south of the Chinese border in northeastern India, Ganga’s awe-inspiring beauty is tarnished quickly by the humans who worship her. Just 11 miles downstream from the source, the village of Gangotri dumps almost all of its waste directly into the river. Less than 60 miles farther south, just above the town of Uttarkashi, the Ganges is dammed up and diverted through pipes to feed turbines to generate electricity. Uttarkashi, like the rest of the cities along the Ganges, also dumps almost all of its waste into the river. Just to the south of town, a cement factory pours slurry directly into the Ganges through a pipe. Below that, the Theri Dam plugs the river up entirely, creating a reservoir over 20 miles long and 3 miles wide. The trend continues as the Ganges flows southeast toward the Bay of Bengal, where it is dammed again at Farakka by a river-wide barrage
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and continually drained to precariously low levels for irrigation. Locals believe that Mother Ganga, being a purifying goddess, can’t actually be polluted or destroyed.

At Varanasi, one of the holiest sites along the mighty river’s banks, water samples taken from the river often contain more fecal coliform bacteria (feces) than water molecules—making the Ganges, only about halfway through its journey to the sea, a veritable river of shit. Heavy metals and toxic chemicals are dumped into it from tanneries
and factories built all along its banks without even a semblance of regulation. A toxic green-brown sludge forms along the water’s edge, where people bathe, wash their dishes, and fetch their drinking water each day.

The Ganges is also one of the few places in the world where if you see a human body floating in the river, you don’t have to call the police. Families of the recently deceased travel from all over India to deposit the remains of their loved ones in its waters, with the belief that Ganga will deliver the dead to Nirvana, the Hindu version of heaven. According to some local traditions, unmarried individuals aren’t supposed to be cremated, so they are simply placed in the river, their bodies left to float downstream to decay. Many poor families can’t afford to purchase enough sandalwood to properly cremate the deceased that were married, so it’s not uncommon to see a partially burnt body washed up on shore or swirling idly in a trash-filled eddy. Feral dogs prowl the river edge, feeding on the corpses.

In eastern Bihar, where the Ganges joins with the Sun Kosi, the river is sluggish, moving no more than 2 miles per hour through a broad, flat plain stretching off as far as the eye can see. The water and surrounding air are warm and sticky—a far cry from the raging glacial torrents of either the Ganga’s or Sun Kosi’s Himalayan headwaters. There are few towns or even villages. As the river approaches the coast, it begins to divide and subdivide into a labyrinth of smaller rivers, eventually seeping obscurely into the ocean through a vast mangrove forest inhabited by man-eating tigers and poisonous snakes.

It is a long, hard road to Nirvana.

Although it had been raining for the past several days, a full moon covered Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna’s camp in a silver half-light. The tepid water at the edge of the riverbank glinted brightly with it. It was the team’s fourth night on the Ganges, and they could see clear across the river to the tall grass on the other side, even though it was a little
before 11:00 p.m. and, otherwise, completely dark. The night before, they had woken up in the midst of a light rain next to a corpse. “A dog was eating it,” Lakpa says. The lower half of the body was missing.

On this full-moon night, their tarp shelter lay collapsed on the ground at their feet, covered in sand. One of the corner stakes had been pulled out. Lakpa counted nine shadowy faces standing around them. None of them looked pleased. He couldn’t understand what Babu and Krishna were saying to them, or what they said in return, but he knew it wasn’t good.

Suddenly, one of the shadowy strangers grabbed Lakpa’s wallet out of his pocket. Lakpa shoved him hard in the chest, knocking the man over. Krishna began to shout in Hindi. Babu held up his own wallet, offering it to the men, who were obviously now even more angry than they had been before. They took it, along with Lakpa’s wallet and mobile phone, and moved off grumbling into the grass. In a matter of a few minutes, the Nepalis had lost all of their money and their only means of communication with the outside world besides their GPS tracker, which was stashed in one of the boats.

They hurriedly packed up camp, shoving their collapsed tarp shelter unceremoniously into the back of the tandem kayak. The moon continued to shine, as if nothing had happened. Getting into their boats, they could hear the strange men returning. They could hear voices getting closer through the tall grass. They had nothing more to give them besides their boats and their lives, and they didn’t care to wait around to find out which they would take next.

They then paddled out to the center of the river and pointed their bows downstream, watching as the thieves collected on the shoreline where their camp had been, shouting after them. After a few minutes they heard a motor start. Looking behind them, they could see a small wooden fishing boat pursuing them slowly across the surface of the smooth, silver-colored water. After a few minutes of frantic paddling, they realized that the boat wasn’t gaining on them. It evidently had a small motor.

The next few hours proved to be a surreal, slow-speed on-water chase: a handmade rowboat with a tiny outboard motor, filled with bandits, chasing three Nepali kayakers in the moonlight along the Ganges through the Indian Terai. Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna remained silent as they paddled as fast as they could, which seemed to keep them about 100 yards ahead of the boat. It was a losing battle, they knew. Unless their pursuers ran out of gas soon, the kayakers couldn’t keep up the pace long enough to stay ahead of them all night.

Then the moon began to go dark. The silver-shrouded plains faded into black. The water around them lost its inky sheen. They paid little attention to the slight change in light, but it was there, growing darker by the minute. By 11:53 p.m. the sky was completely black. That’s when they noticed there was a gaping hole in the sky where the moon had been just a few minutes before. It was a full lunar eclipse—a complete blackout. The last one had been forty years earlier, on August 6, 1971. The next isn’t expected until June 15, 2058.
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Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna paddled toward a grassy island in the middle of the river. Once on shore, they quickly tucked themselves and the boats into the weeds, hoping the newfound darkness would help them avoid detection. Then they waited, listening to the sound of the motorboat move down the river past them. When the eclipse ended and moonlight flooded the plains once more, they could still see the boat puttering downstream in the distance. They could do nothing as they watched it turn around and putter upstream straight back at them.

“They went up and down the river, looking for us all night and most of the morning,” Lakpa says. With daylight, the men in the boat
left, motoring downstream where Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna knew they had to follow.

After a few minutes of nerve-wracking paddling, wondering if the boatmen were hiding in the weeds and waiting for them, Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna came around a left-facing bend in the river. The river itself is miles wide, interspersed with flat sandbars leading down stagnant dead-end channels. In the distance they could see a low, faint line running across the water through the morning haze: the Farakka Barrage. They could also see that the boat that had been chasing them was now on river left, which they didn’t know at the time leads into Bangladesh. They paddled to river right, where some men with guns promptly stopped them.