IT IS THE VILLAGERS OF RAJASTHAN. They watch
us pass in the hot light of the Thar Desert. We are
unwashed, covered in coarse dust, darkened by
sun: charred scarecrows trudging across India
with a cargo donkey. Local people mistake us
for vagabond performers, traveling quacks, cir-
cus nomads. They believe we are sorcerers. The
answer to their question is: Yes, of course. We
carry magic. But then, so does everyone.
It lies in water.
Human beings are mobile wells of mildly salty
water. As every schoolchild knows, our bodies
contain roughly the same percentage of water
that covers the Earth’s surface. Such harmo-
nies are no mystery. We are water animals born
onto a water planet. Water is everywhere and
nowhere. It is a restless element—unstill, on the
move, always shifting its physical state from gas
to liquid to solid and back again.
One oxygen atom. Two atoms of hydrogen.
Water molecules are bent like an arrow tip. Like
an elbow. This helps give water a certain polar-
ity, an infinitesimal charge on each end. This is
how it collectively shapes our reality. It is the
enchanted solvent and glue of our tangible world.
It is the compound that both dissolves and binds
our brain cells, mountain ranges, the steam waft-
ing from our morning tea, and tectonic plates.
And yet there is so little to drink! The salty
The hands of Resham
Singh, a 59-year-old
carpenter in Punjab, are
gnarled from arthritis.
Doctors say it may have
been caused by expo-
sure to water tainted by
fertilizers and pesticides.
Heavy use of chemicals
in the 1960s to late 1970s
brought India out of
famine and into its green
revolution, but Singh’s
village, Mari Mustafa,
has high cancer rates.‘Do you do magic tricks?’
oceans hold roughly 97 percent of all the water
on the globe. The poles and glaciers, though
melting under the effects of climate change,
lock up about 2 percent. Only an absurdly small
droplet of the world’s total supply, less than one
percent, is available for human survival: liquid
fresh water. And yet, we squander this treasure
like fools lost in a desert.
I am walking across the world. Over the past
seven years I have retraced the footsteps of
Homo sapiens, who roamed out of Africa in the
Stone Age and explored the primordial world.
En route, I gather stories. And nowhere on my
foot journey—not in any other nation or con-
tinent—have I encountered an environmental
reckoning on the scale of India’s looming water
crisis. It is almost too daunting to contemplate.
The world’s second most populous country,
home to more than 1.3 billion people and a land-
scape defined by iconic rivers—the Indus, the
Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and all their mighty
tributaries—now teeters at the edge of a water
emergency with unknowable consequences.
Roughly a hundred million people in 21 Indian
megacities, including Delhi, Bengaluru (Ban-
galore), and Hyderabad, may gulp their last
groundwater dry by the end of this year. Farmers
in northern India’s Punjab, an important Asian
breadbasket, complain that their relentlessly80 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC