How Thoreau's Walden Pond Mixed with the Ganges and Yoga Came to America with Swami Vivekananda

Summary
I live about 7500 ft up in the Himalayas, in a small valley on the southern
face of the Rohtang Pass in Himachal Pradesh, one of the northern-most
states of India. There I have a one-room cottage on the slope of a huge
Deodar (Divine Tree) cedar-forested mountain, in a small meadow,
surrounded by apple and apricot trees, up above a snow-melt, glacier-fed river
called the Manalsu, which pours down into the Beas River, that flows
through the Kullu Valley. The Beas formed the boundary beyond which the
armies of Alexander the Great refused to pass and marked the eastern-most
extent of his eight-year world conquest. It runs down into the Sutlej, which
heads southwest, flowing all the way across northern India, crossing the
Punjab into Pakistan, where turning south it merges into the Indus, emptying
at last into the Arabian Sea. (see map)
If I follow a small path down across the meadow about 200 yards below
my cottage, I can plunge my bare feet into the cold, clear Manalsu. When I do
so, I contact a river of water that touches the Arabian Sea in another country;
that is what it was like to write this story . . . no matter where I put my
attention, in every character, event or idea, I touched a great river, in which I
recognized sources further up in remote snow-covered mountains, that flowed
into far-away seas. It is a vast river of life, of whose currents I live mostly
unaware. What I wrote about and what I saw was not what I expected to find.
But that is how this tale came to be told and much of it was a surprise.
I set out to write a story about the mingling of the waters of Walden Pond
and the Ganges, and the return of those waters to New England, thinking to
show how Yoga was brought to America by Swami Vivekananda in 1893. I
found many rivers poured into this story, before, during and after
Vivekananda’s arrival. Many people and ideas had prepared the ground for
him and, of course, there were the events and times that surrounded the tale
told here.
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