the blue of distance
six hundred miles to the lonar crater
I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not…of where you can never go. —Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Two hundred miles out of Bombay, Vishnu’s small white Maruti Suzuki pushed on through a brown single-lane road in central Maharashtra. Three friends and I sat shoulder-to-shoulder as the cotton fields swept by. A skinny man carting a six-foot tall pyramid of oranges collapsed into a single speck on the horizon. Three politicians in dark sunglasses grinned on a billboard next to an ad for Dadich’s Satvik Bhoj. The dust started to pink against the setting sun.
Thirteen hours in, we still had several hundred miles before we reached the ancient Lonar crater. While my friends stared out of their different windows, our Uber driver Vishnu tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and confronted the road ahead.
“There aren’t any petrol pumps around here,” he muttered.
He swerved to avoid a bullock cart, and we passed by a five-story mall whose windows were plastered with posters I couldn’t read. In front of the mall, several men unloaded sacks from a truck embroidered with painted birds and Hindi poems.
I crossed and uncrossed my arms in the middle of the back seat, trying not to touch anyone.
“I guess it’s nice to have friends who’ll go places just because you said so,” Vishnu said.
Two white-turbaned men holding each other on a blue Bajaj scooter accelerated up next to us. The driver stared at me for a second before he pulled away.
“Philosophy major, huh?” Vishnu asked, with a weary voice. “Is that how you convinced them to come?”
I had first heard about Lonar five years before our drive, during my first class at Princeton. My professor was a geoscientist with a reputation for difficult coursework and mind-blowing field sites. To my surprise, he told me that his most memorable field site wasn’t on uncharted land in Antarctica, Namibia, Cyprus, or Kazakhstan—but rather, at a crater in a small Indian town called Lonar.
No one in my family had ever heard of the Lonar crater, but I found some information scattered across science journals, Indian newspapers, and Google reviews. The Lonar crater, I learned, was birthed from a meteor crash in the Deccan Traps some fifty-thousand years ago, when mammoths and giant kangaroos still roamed the earth. Locals named the crater after the demon Lonasura, who was allegedly slammed by Lord Vishnu into the earth as punishment for his sins. Lonasura’s tears filled the crater with water and salt (lavan in Sanskrit, related to the demon’s alternate name Lavanasura).
Today, the village of Lonar has around the same population as my hometown of Secaucus, New Jersey, distributed around a mile-wide crater lake. The lake has been mentioned in Hindu texts like the Skanda Purāna and medieval surveys like the Mughal Ain-e-Akbari. Today, it ranges in color from yellow-green to pink, given the whims of the native bacteria, and sometimes stinks of sulfur. The lake is garlanded by temple ruins from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and a jungle of monkeys, flamingos, and bayaweavers. Surrounding farms till the rich soil for chickpeas and bananas.
For locals from neighboring villages, Lonar is a minor attraction. For foreigners, it’s a non-place. Most people unknowingly bypass it on their way to the Buddhist Ajanta and Ellora caves, lauded UNESCO world heritage sites.
The word that dominates most of Lonar’s TripAdvisor reviews is mysterious. Sankalpa007 calls it “a cosmic magnificence and mesmerizing folklore…a geographic brilliance which baffles experts to this day with its brine.” George from Nottingham calls it “a very long journey for a scant reward.” Many visitors warn that it smells like rotten eggs.
I tucked it into my mind and never stopped wondering about it.
After I graduated from college, I moved to Bombay. I settled into a familiar routine: I ran in Jogger’s Park in the mornings and spent the day at my laptop in cycles of humid sweat and cold showers. I took salsa classes and glared at men on the train. I elbowed my way through flower sales at dawn with throngs of devotees and bought kale at organic farmers’ markets on the weekends.
Every evening, I parsed my roommates’ French and cigarette smoke on a small balcony that overlooked Burger King. The rest of Maharashtra unrolled for miles eastwards of Bombay, housing a hundred million additional people in a region more expansive than Italy. I often wondered what it was like inland, far past the green parrots on the telephone wires, where traffic horns gave way to hilltop forts, ancient caves, and a strange crater lake.
My chance to visit Lonar finally arrived in April, when three American friends visited me in Bombay, hungry for a weekend excursion. Luca and Apoorva were living in Telangana and Bhopal at the time. Gio, Luca’s brother, was visiting from their hometown in South Jersey. Someone pitched the idea of a trip to the Ajanta and Ellora caves.
“What if we stop in Lonar?” I said. I opened up a picture of the crater on Google and swiveled my laptop.
“And add another two hundred miles to the trip?” Luca asked. “How would we even get there?” I laughed.
As the day went on, however, I felt a familiar widening in my chest, the same kind that always happens when I’m about to speak in a full room or tap a stranger on the shoulder. I knew we’d go.
On Friday night, after enjoying a candlelit dinner and fiddling with the acoustic guitar, we sat drenched in sweat in the living room. After we blew out the candles and stacked our plates in the sink, we retreated to my bedroom, one of the only places in the house with air conditioning. We lay side-by-side on the cool stone floor and shivered as our sweat started to dry.
“We need to get out of here,” someone said.
Reaching over a tangle of arms and legs, I pulled out my dying iPhone and opened Uber, typing in three destinations: Ellora, Lonar, Ajanta. 1,079 kilometers; 19hr 57min. I hit confirm. Within minutes, my phone buzzed.
“They found a driver,” I said. “And he’s four minutes away.”
We bolted up and stuffed tubes of toothpaste, phone cords, and extra underwear into our backpacks. I clicked the apartment door shut and followed my friends down four flights of stairs, past the slumbering gate security guard. A white Maruti was idling on our street.
I knocked on the window.
“To Ellora?” Vishnu asked. I nodded.
Too exhausted to be incredulous, we crammed in, snapped a photo, and fell asleep.
I opened my eyes every now and then to see the urban sprawl shrinking in reverse as we sped out of the city. We left millions of peons, pimps, and film stars behind for turbaned farmers and buildings like HOTEL TULASI & FAMILY and MS RAM DAILY NEEDS STORE—all on Google maps thanks to the data empire of Asia’s richest man in his personal fifty-storey skyscraper, hours back west.
In the congestion of Bombay, cars never moved very fast. In between traffic, people often biked, walked, or carted balloon animals in all directions at once. No matter where I looked, outside a passenger window, there were usually already eyes staring back.
In Vishnu’s car, for the first time, I hurtled through a still environment, watching the world without being watched in return.
I decided to interrupt Vishnu's occasional coughs with a question.
“How long have you been in Bombay?”
“On and off,” he said.
“What do you do here?”
“Construction.”
“How is the work?”
“Fine.”
Defeated, I fell silent. I tapped through the iPad tied to the seat in front of me and found several rows of music albums. I hit play on Kishore Kumar: Golden Hits and the singer’s Chaplin-esque grin animated to life. When we all burst into the chorus of Roop Tera Mastana, Vishnu’s eyes widened.
“Can you turn it up?” Luca asked. Vishnu sprouted a grin.
“You know this?” he asked.
“They’ve lived in India for almost a year,” I said, switching to Hindi.
“Where are you all from?” he asked.
“Two of us were born in India, but we all grew up in America,” I said.
“Oh, I know a lot about foreigners,” he replied.
“How?” I asked.
“I worked at a construction site in Saudi Arabia for ten years. There were a bunch of us from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan. The overseers were all foreign.”
“Where were they from?” Apoorva asked.
“White countries,” he said. “Irish, British. Foul-mouthed bastards. Waat lag gayi thi.” Apoorva and I attempted to keep up, translating his Bombay slang into English for Luca and Gio.
“Did you like it?” I asked.
“Hell no,” he said. “I was surrounded by savages. White men and Muslims. And the Muslims were the worst. Meat-eaters: you can never trust one.”
“But Americans are great,” he quickly added, switching back to English. “Good and intellectual.” He nodded at Luca, who was nose-deep in a fat copy of A Confederacy of Dunces.
We passed large fields of dust and yellow flowers, with metal irrigation systems lining the ground. I imagined Vishnu working in Saudi Arabia, surrounded by sand and sun, coming home after a day of verbal abuse to a room of cots that smelled like pickled mangos and sweat.
“Are you a Hindu?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “Actually, I’m a part of the Spiritual Science Research Foundation.”
I read on my phone that it was an evangelical organization started by an Indian hypnotherapist in the 70’s. The foundation was headquartered a few miles away from my parents’ home in New Jersey. The living saints (on “spiritual tour”) on the organization’s Facebook page included two Slavic men named Cyriaque Vallee and Dejan Glescic.
“How did you find them?” I asked, after a pause.
“I didn’t find them. They found me, working the streets of Bombay.” he said.
“After all,” he continued, “Destiny is fixed. A farmer works hard from dawn to dusk, but he does not control how much he reaps. Who we meet and what we do is not in our hands.”
By lunchtime, we’d reached our first stop: the Ellora caves. We parked the car and my friend went to buy tickets. Vishnu stayed in the car.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’ll see you back here,” he said.
“Don’t you want to come?”
“Aren’t tickets expensive?” he asked.
My friend walked back, waving five pink stamped slips, and Vishnu’s eyes softened briefly. The guard squinted at him for an extra moment before waving him inside behind us.
At lunch, we were the only visitors at the tourist restaurant. We sat at a round white plastic table when I noticed that Vishnu had vanished. I found him a few tables away, alone. When I asked him to join us, he refused so vehemently that I put my hands together and apologized. I thought of servants and waitstaff with their own bathrooms, drivers eating bagged lunches while passengers in silk slinked into the Taj, my family telling me that things are sometimes just the way they are.
Finally, I heard Vishnu pull up a chair behind me.
“Fine,” he said. “I’m not hungry, but I’ll come sit.”
“Have you had veg kolhapuri before?” he asked, a bit later, and then, “Isn’t chai great in the afternoon?” before we ordered a tray. For dessert, Vishnu ordered us a huge steel bucket of Dussehri mangoes that he taught us to massage in water and squeeze into our mouths like tubes of go-gurt. When I got up to bus the dishes, he waved me away in horror.
Power and belonging are a complex trade. As a traveler in India, I generally lose points for being a woman and gain some for having money and a US passport. In our car, I sensed that Vishnu felt like he came out last: both outnumbered and out-earned, many lifetimes over.
We got back in the car, bellies heavy, and clicked into our seatbelts.
“Time to go to Lonar,” I said. There was a slight pause.
“Mishti,” Luca said. “Are you serious?”
“Yes,” I said. “We have to.”
“You realize that would add seven hours of extra driving,” someone said.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” I said, feeling my face grow hot. “It’s just a few extra hours.”
“Where would we even stay?”
“I know a hotel,” I said.
A long, awkward minute passed. I noticed my friends close their eyes in frustration—and I realized I didn’t care.
I grabbed Vishnu’s cracked Samsung and typed in Lonar on Google Maps. It glitched for a second until the blue arrow lit. Four hours, blinked the text. I hit go. The female navigation voice rose into the car.
Get on Hindu Hrudaysamrat Balasaheb Thackeray Maharashtra Samruddhi Mahamarg in Pekalwadi from NH52.
Vishnu glanced at us.
“Start the car,” I said, and the engine rumbled to life.
For the next four hours, the atmosphere in the car stretched taut.
The stereo cycled from Bollywood hits to the Backstreet Boys. Apoorva scrolled through episodes of Black Mirror on Netflix. After the characters skipped into the sunset at the end of Juniper Road, she clicked her phone shut and closed her eyes. I felt a sudden wave of nausea.
Tension radiated in the car and in my throbbing head. I counted goats and irrigation pipes, trying not to check the map.
Every now and then, Vishnu offered a dharmic aphorism.
”Everyone wants to do good. Even sweepers work hard. Our work is to work, without expectation or promise,” he’d say, or “Only one who has won the wind can rule the world.”
As the sun began to set, I saw fewer and fewer vehicles on the road, and no streetlights or gas pumps. Our lifeline was a downloaded Google Maps route, flickering on the dashboard under a plastic orange air freshener of Hanuman. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if it was leading us the wrong way.
Finally, just before sunset, we glimpsed a fence encircling a green lake. Delight surged through my body like cold water.
“Stop the car!” I screamed.
I ran outside and, before I could think twice, I dialed the professor who started it all—at 6AM New Jersey time.
Impossibly, he answered.
“What’s up?” he said, not hiding his surprise.
“Guess where I am?” I asked, pressing my camera against the fence.
“No way,” he said.
I hung up and whooped, kicking up dust as I ran circles around the road.
The fabric of space-time had opened in my Mumbai bedroom and spit me out outside a crater from the Geological Society of America Bulletin.
In my euphoria, the rest of the night felt like a sequence from an absurdist film. The tourist hotel across the crater was Wes-Anderson-pink and fully booked. A massive wedding party swept by the lobby and pulled us into its undertow. For several minutes, there were camcorders, drums, horns, and children’s shrieks in my face, and all I could think to do was dance along.
We pulled free of the mob, wet with sweat, and stopped at the first roadside restaurant in sight. As we approached, three waiters jolted up. We were the only customers in sight.
“Outside?” a man playing phone solitaire asked, and gestured us to the backyard, where a lonely swingset gleamed in the moonlight.
The cook, sticking naans to the outdoor tandoori oven, had a strange accent.
“I’m from Nepal,” he said. “I moved here from Kathmandu.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I just followed my uncle.”
“But why did he move?”
“Who knows?” he said. “But I love it here. I’m never leaving.”
Near the restaurant, we found a small inn called Krushna. The receptionist waved Vishnu in without a second glance.
“Drivers sleep free,” he said, and gestured at the empty row of cots on the bottom floor. Vishnu nodded and retreated.
He toyed with the rest of us at the entrance for an hour, savoring each page of our passports like a novella. We waited with tight stomachs while he slung them into a plastic bag and walked them to three different copy machines down the road—our policy, he said. There were no signs of any other guests.
A few Indian-sounding names signed into the guest book every week. The last foreigner was a sole Israeli from a few months ago. In the hallway hung a misspelled banner: The Only Hyper-Velocity Impact Meteorite Crater in Besaltic Rock in the World.
The next day, at dawn—at last—we visited the crater. Vishnu parked the car above the rim and pulled the hand brake shut.
The first thing that hit me was the familiar ashy scent of dry dust and bramble.
The mythic green lake—which I’d imagined for a half-decade—pulsed with a few ripples, five-hundred feet below. My years-old daydream had suddenly burst into the dimensions of touch, smell, and sight.
Disoriented, I found a small footpath that descended from the crater rim. I held my breath and skidded down, half-running, half-falling in my battered brown Tevas, wondering if I was crushing any meteorite flakes. At the base of the trail was a thick forested treeline and a sudden stretch of shade. A few meandering paths led left, right, and straight.
I walked straight and emerged onto the shoreline, quiet but for the troupe of monkeys screeching in the distance. Ossified tree stumps sprouted from the lake in weird looking patches. A banner of teal iridescent salt formed as a crystal banner between water and shore. The ground was made of gray mud that cracked and oozed water, like barely-solid quicksand. I squished my foot down and spurted water until I could press no more.
Around the lake lay fragments of temple pillars, under bramble or half-sunken in quagmire, carved with lions and birds. Sparks traveled up my spine as I brushed them with my thumb. I wondered who’d carved them, where their ashes lay, whether they had living descendants. Several larger basalt-carved temples lined the lake in various states of repair.
I followed the monkeys to the largest temple on the shoreline, which had an iron gate and a fresh painted red-and-yellow striped ceiling. Inside, wilted flowers and rupee notes lay in front of a Shiva lingam. The innermost sanctum hosted a large orange deity with a tiny, surprised O as a mouth.
Unlike the ruins of Ostia or Pompeii, the temples of Lonar came with little to no context. There were no teachers, books, or stacks of academic articles to tell me who built them, how they fell in and out of power, who and what was relevant here over the years. There were no ropes or security guards to tell me where not to go. The temples were living structures that still hosted prayers for births, weddings, deaths, for good health and money.
I’m not sure how long we spent at the lake. By the time we left, the sun was starting to blaze high in the sky. On my way out, I met a woman in a brilliant yellow sari carrying a baby.
“Where did you come from?” we asked each other, in equal wonder.
We returned to Mumbai late at night on Sunday, around thirty-six hours and six-hundred miles after our departure. In the time since, the trip has continued to stick in my mind, and I’ve had an agonizing draft of this essay sitting on my computer for four years as I’ve tried to figure out why.
As a kid, I loved the stories of explorers like Marco Polo, Gilgamesh, Buddha, or Aeneas. Their lives were more complex and bloody than I’ll unpack, but the relevant part was that they each reached beyond the borders of their known worlds, intentionally complicating and re-making their interior maps.
India is a place I’ve always wanted to know in a way that feels more visceral, fleshy, and real. I look and—if I’m lucky—sound the part. But the more I know, the more I don’t. Going to Lonar was about a feeling: the awareness of the space between me and something other, a growing curiosity about that other, and the tingling desire to bridge the gap.
Like most things, India is easiest to understand by caricature. Textbook models of the solar system fit onto a page; if to scale, they’d spill across rooms and buildings. India is the world’s most populous nation, with cities that have more residents than many Western nations. Nearly any statement about how Indians look, speak, eat, or think is easy to refute.
Thanks to colonists, missionaries, and TikTok influencers, people’s imagination of India today often consists of hand-wavy adjectives: exotic, colorful, chaotic, incomprehensible. The descriptors aren’t wrong, but they are lazy. Calling something incomprehensible feels like a convenient conversation ender. If it’s impossible to understand something, what’s the point of trying?
Avoiding the urge to caricature and instead, attempting to see people and places in their unique detail, is a demanding form of attention. It is also, perhaps, the ultimate form of love.
India may have been incomprehensible to Marco Polo in the 12th century because of the sheer futility of trying to map its interior. I imagine that he navigated by the stars, rumors, and gods, with little to no reference points for the people and places he’d encounter next.
Today, seventy percent of Indians own a smartphone equipped to zone in on their GPS coordinates and route them anywhere they can imagine—for fractions of a penny of cellular data. Leaving your trace on Google Maps or an Instagram location tag is free, and often comes in the universal language of teenagers lip-syncing songs or throwing up peace signs in selfies.
I can walk the streets of any Indian village from the comfort of my bed in New Jersey and all but taste the jalebis dripping hot with oil from the street vendor across from my grandfather’s house. It’s as easy to read about the Taj Mahal on Google Maps as Joney’s Place: Yum Yum Food, the tiny Korean-Japanese-Indian restaurant a few hundred feet away from it.
The implication is that places that feel impossibly distant in concept, today, aren’t always hard to reach in the world of bits and atoms. All it took to collapse the space and time to Lonar, like touching a finger to a bubble, was to choose to go. With three friends, a few clicks on an iPhone, a few thousand rupees, and a construction worker driving Uber on his days off, I was there.
Getting there felt at once momentous and unremarkable. One of the largest explosions of all time is now just an unknown crater on Google Maps. The only thing that congratulated me for making it was the crusty misspelled tourist banner in our hotel. The kings and artists behind Lonar’s sculptures exist, today, in relative obsolescence. But in the town, people live like anywhere else; the most recent Google photos of the temple grounds I visited are from the 2nd Year Asturaj Bhoj Memorial Football Tournament.
And even moreso than in the age of Marco Polo, trips never really end. Reminders from my thirty-six hour jaunt to Lonar continue to blur into my everyday life. After we arrived back home to Bombay, I exchanged WhatsApps with Vishnu. For Janmashtami, the week after, he forwarded me a brilliant blue GIF of Krishna dipping his fingers into a pot of ghee.
Every time that I have nearly forgetten about Vishnu, he has re-entered my life in the form of another WhatsApp call. The first was during the height of the pandemic, two years after the trip. Before Vishnu’s call, I’d been running in a light, misty rain that had nudged the sidewalk violets into iridescence. Smelling and sensing the earth’s moist sponginess, I’d thought, suddenly, of Lonar.
“What a crazy coincidence!” I told Vishnu, who was unfazed.
“Everything happens for a reason,” he said. “Can I put you in touch with the Spiritual Research Foundation?” (They sent me WhatsApp messages from Mount Laurel, New Jersey for months.)
Six months later, the morning after Biden defeated Trump for the presidency, Vishnu called again and asked me to explain. After a hiatus of two years, he rang in November 2022 from a construction site in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“How is it?” I asked.
“Not good,” he said. “Waat lag rahi he.” His son was applying to a Master’s program and he wondered if I could help. He sent me photos of both of them on motorcycles while we talked for context.
Like a strange omen, a few hours before I finally published this essay—after over year of no contact—I got a WhatsApp from Vishnu’s number: a several-page PDF celebrating the opening of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, and then an image about godliness.
The urge that made me book the 700-mile Uber to Lonar has never faded. Sometimes I’m at an unfamiliar street in my hometown, other times, in a stranger’s leathery cab in a foreign country. The feeling often starts the same way: a heartbeat getting faster, a what if…turned into a why not. Each journey that results is an exercise in attention and care.
Walking the incomprehensible is always a strange and familiar thrill: a ball moves slightly in Einstein’s fabric of the world.
Thank you to Adam for telling me about Lonar, my friends for taking the trip with me, and Vishnu for guiding us there. Thanks to Martin for painstakingly reading drafts and helping me pull apart what I wanted to say. (I always tell myself now—“be more specific!”) Thanks also to Corrie, Ally, Gio, and Drew for reading the beginnings of this piece a few years ago, in the heart of the pandemic.
Awesome! Loved the adventure and great writing. So Lonar was anticlimactic?
Misthi! Thank you for the story. I was touched by the relationship you have with your professor.
There was a line that stuck with me... "Who we meet and what we do is not in our hands".
I think because the longer I live, the more I realize that this has always been the case.