The reservoir looked too bland to be capable of killing: it was a silent, waveless flood, a flood in slow motion. It receded during the long dry season, but thanks to the accreting dam, during each successful monsoon its level reached an unprecedented height. It had already swallowed whole villages; on behalf of the inundated inhabitants, the Andolan had waged valiant, doomed struggles in the lowlands that were now underwater. Mist-covered hills above the reservoir had taken on their monsoon shading, a vibrating, nearly fluorescent green nearest the water, so bright that it obscured variations in the land and foliage. In the distant, higher hills, where the moist air dulled it, green gave way to gray and then to the dull white of the overcast sky. Abruptly, the hills were bisected by the horizontal line of the reservoir’s edge, a line so exact it seemed drawn with a razor, unaccustomed to the terrain it so thoroughly invaded, oblivious to undulation, ungraced by sandy shore or wetland, ahistorical. Beneath the line, the hills’ green reflection gradually darkened until it was overtaken by the brown gruel of the reservoir’s water, a souvenir from the obliterated sediment-rich river. Through the reservoir’s surface protruded monstrosities: half-submerged trees and bushes, most of their visible portions already gray and shriveled. A smaller number were still green, still resisting the inundation— activists of a sort.

Several of the human activists had already gathered in front of the temple, waiting for the boat. The stern-faced Shripad Dharmadhikary, who’d graduated from India’s best engineering college and then threw over a promising career for Medha and the Andolan, suggested that Bob and I go into the temple, but showed no interest in entering himself. I peeked inside, and got a glimpse of what looked like eternity: a sleeping sadhu, a shrine behind him, and stone bathed in a murky golden sunlight. Eternity interrupted: the temple, called Hapeshwar, would be submerged if the dam was built to its full height. The authorities had considered this fact, and constructed a new temple on higher ground, but nobody visited it— and besides, the activists were saying that it would eventually be inundated, too. (The drollness of India is infinite.) The oldest of the Narmada Valley’s 32 major temples, the archeologically significant Shulpaneshwar, was the first to be submerged; now people worshipped there by taking water from a spot on the reservoir’s surface directly above it. “So what?” a local politician dismissively told journalist Sameera Khan, when she asked him how he felt about the temple’s inundation— “It still exists.”