Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  When they neared the creek, Farzana’s friends dug their garbage forks into soft sand where trash slopes petered into a rivulet. A few pickers came out of houses built on stilts, which lifted them above the trash at low tide and nearly immersed them in waves at high tide. They walked over to see the babies and helped Farzana’s friends shovel sand. The tide was rising and gentle waves inched closer to them. Torn clothes and plastic bags bobbed in the water and dripped from the branches of mangrove trees that edged the creek. Farzana felt a gentle breeze approach through the water. It rustled through the old trees, through the leaves and plastic that filled their branches, and shivered through her.

  She lowered the babies into their shallow grave. Her friends covered them with sand and whispered prayers. They usually came this way later in the afternoons, to wade and swim in the rising tide. Farzana liked to stay until the setting sun almost faded behind the fetid hills, giving them a dusty, pink glow, and the waves turned metallic. That was when she thought the mountains looked their best.

  After the makeshift burial, they walked hurriedly back across the hills to find their father, waiting and hungry. Hyder Ali was standing, tall, gangly, and gaunt, on a quiet slope, his face lit up in a tobacco-stained grin. They sat down to eat. Both sisters wore salwar kameezes with cotton jackets to keep mud and trash away from their clothes, and errant strands spilled out of the scarves they wrapped around their long, loosely bundled hair. While Farzana was prickly and quiet with teenage awkwardness, Farha had stayed smiling and baby faced. Over the lunch he brought from home, she told their father about their morning adventure. Uncharacteristically terse, he asked them not to venture near the graves again. “Ye sab cheez chhodta nahi hai,” he remarked. These things have a way of not leaving you.

  * * *

  HYDER ALI HAD moved to live in the shade of the mountains just months before Farzana was born. He had come to Mumbai in his teens, from his village in Bihar, nearly two thousand kilometers away. For years, he had worked as an embroiderer’s assistant. He enjoyed the long, quiet hours of filling fabric, tightly stretched out on the frame, with lacelike patterns. Half made flowers, rising vines, and wingless birds made shadows on his face and limbs when he curled up to sleep under the frame. Then a wife, Shakimun, and five children followed, forcing Hyder Ali to seek a life outside the embroidery room that formed his world.

  He had heard of the mountains that never ran out of work, vast dumping grounds at the edge of the city, where the remnants of everything Mumbai consumed came to die. Nothing had ever been composted, incinerated, or recycled. Instead, it lingered on at Deonar, adding to fetid and ever-growing mountains of garbage. Hyder Ali had heard from his friends that the mountains were older than the oldest pickers who worked on them and larger than the largest trash hills in the country. They stretched over 326 acres and some rose more than 120 feet, monuments to the increasingly ephemeral desires of the city’s more official residents.

  Hyder Ali’s friends trawled the slopes all day, selling the trash they collected to traders who would sell it on to be remade anew. They foraged for mangled plastic that could be pressed into sheets or pulled into filament. They traded glass bottles to be refilled with new drinks, metal to be melted into new parts for gadgets, and cloth scraps to be stuffed into toys and quilts or sewn into clothes. Hyder Ali had heard you could earn good money on these slopes, and their edges could yield space to make a home for his growing family. He had also heard they sustained pickers, fed them, threw up treasures that had made fortunes, and fueled rivalries and ambitions.

  So, in 1998, he moved his family to a spot where a drain that ran down the mountains met a lane that curved around them. Their lane was called Banjara Galli, or Gypsy Lane, for the itinerant inhabitants who had left before city drifters replaced them. Farzana was born months later. Two more daughters and a son would follow, filling the house they would build on the edge of these shape-shifting foothills.

  At first Hyder Ali looked for embroidery commissions, while Shakimun strapped Farzana onto her back with a dupatta and waded into the township of trash hills. But finding embroidery commissions on his own was hard work and soon he followed her into the rolling landscape of garbage. At first, the mountains’ rising stench made Hyder Ali throw up. His bony hands stank and when he ate; he felt they transported the smell of garbage through his mouth into his stomach, making him nauseous. Mountain trash swam in his eyes. He could not eat or sleep for days, whittling down his already skeletal frame. Hunger made him dizzy.

  Hyder Ali developed a technique to protect his hands and appetite, clenching his toes tightly around cloth scraps while balancing himself precariously, on the wobbly slope, with his other foot. He would bend his knee and lift his leg, clinging to the cloth, depositing it into the bag that Shakimun held open for him. He often lost his balance in this acrobatic act and fell flat on his face into muddy trash amid a swarm of pickers. If he didn’t get to something fast enough, someone else would. Eventually, he had to discard his leg curling technique and use his hands to work quicker. As his hands and feet filled up with cuts and bruises from stumbling on glass and metal, he also learned to dodge the stray dogs and birds that chased them for trash. Determined, Hyder Ali, Shakimun, and the children hung close to the khaki and orange trucks that relentlessly emptied the city’s moth-eaten possessions onto the rising mountain clearings.

  Hyder Ali liked to tell Farzana and her siblings that there was nothing he had not seen while trawling through this sprawling necropolis. Everything that gave meaning to Mumbaikar’s lives, from broken cell phones, to high-heeled shoes and gangrenous and dismembered human limbs, ended up here. He, like most pickers, believed that the spirits of people and possessions that had been sent here for unceremonious burials hung around the windswept slopes. Delivering the Urdu books that he found in the trash to clerics, he had heard from them that God, who made people, also made spirits and that the evil ones among them were called Shaitans. Unseen and unheard but nevertheless tangibly present, they were said to be a manifestation of people’s baser nature, of their rising, unending desires. They gripped people, only to lead them astray.

  Shaitans lived in filthy recesses and rose from smokeless fires, the clerics had warned Hyder Ali. Indeed, fires simmered, furtively and constantly, within the mountains’ layers of decaying trash. He had seen smoke that rose from fires burning deep within the mountains and flames that danced without smoke. At other times, flames erupted and moved like lightning across the hills, letting off swirling smoke, the two dancing together. Hyder Ali had nearly been encircled and trapped in these traveling fires. The Shaitans were bound to appear on the mountains, a dizzying accumulation of partly sated desires wreathed in fires and smoke, pickers believed. Shaitans arose from them and lay in wait for new homes and younger people to inhabit, they believed.

  Hyder Ali had heard of friends who had been tripped on mountain slopes when they crossed the path of lurking Shaitans. Others warned him to stay away from certain hill slopes or claimed they had encountered the tall, floating spirits, known as Khabees in Islamic mythology, in their shrunken, plastic-and-cloth-scrap homes on the edges of trash foothills, where they demanded rent. Hyder Ali’s friend Moharram Ali had told him he heard a woman call out to him every time he neared the pile of white cloth scraps he had collected on a slope, asking him to return her shroud from his neatly folded stack.

  Hyder Ali knew, of all his nine children, Farzana loved being on the mountains the most. She was the first of them to be born at their feet, and had learned to walk on the gentle incline of trash foothills. As soon as she could make the short walk from their home, Farzana had come wobbling over to them and it had been a losing battle to keep her away from them, ever since. At first, Shakimun sent him to get Farzana back, worrying she would get buried under the garbage showers that erupted from emptying trucks. She had heard of children getting mauled by dogs, falling off garbage cliffs, or tumbling down mountain slopes. Hyder Ali often found Farzana swinging from abando
ned car fenders or digging for toys buried in trash. He delivered Farzana home, crying, and returned to work on the slopes. Soon enough, Farzana escaped again and followed him.

  * * *

  FOR MONTHS, FARHA and Farzana would remember the day they buried the babies as the day they got thrashed. When they arrived home, their oldest brother Jehangir was waiting for them, his face filled with rage. “Mardaani ho gayi hai? Bache gaad rahi hai?” he asked, his voice rising. You think you’ve turned into men? Burying other people’s babies? Without waiting for their answer, Jehangir, who was eight years older than Farzana, slapped her and then Farha. He asked why they hadn’t called him. He was at a clearing nearby that afternoon, he said. He would have taken care of it, or asked the municipal officials to. Don’t get into these messes, he shouted. Nothing good ever comes out of them.

  Farzana couldn’t answer. Tears choked her. Besides, fighting with Jehangir was never a good idea. Everyone at home knew of their wiry and intense brother’s explosive anger.

  In that long hot summer that stretched between her and adulthood, Farzana worked through the smoke that drifted over the slopes, the constantly burning fires, their sharp smell, the heat that turned humid as rain clouds approached, and even the new security guards that arrived to patrol the hilly township’s hazy rim.

  It would all end soon, she told Hyder Ali, coolly. The baking sun would give way to Mumbai’s long season of torrential rains that would soak their burning township and quench the fires. That year, the summer would also end in the holy month of Ramzan (known elsewhere as Ramadan), filled with daylong fasts and feasts that would occupy much of the night. And three days before the first fast, on June 2, 2016, Farzana would turn eighteen.

  Hyder Ali later came to believe that it was in this long and boiling summer of waiting, when Farzana found the glass jar filled with lifeless babies, that the mountain spirits entered his daughter—though they did not know it at the time.

  TWO

  HYDER ALI HAD MADE a living from mountain finds but the shadow of the Deonar mountains was longer than he knew and breaking out of it had proved to be harder than he had thought. He had often asked Vitabai Kamble, who lived a few houses down the lane, for help in escaping it. He had first seen her as a rolling cloud of gray on the hills, draped in jewel-colored sarees, chasing arriving trash. Pickers said that she was among the oldest on the slopes, that she had seen the mountains before they were mountains. She spoke of the legends that floated in their halo, which said that the mountains were older than the oldest pickers. Like most legends, some were true and others were not.

  “On the morning of July 6, 1896 there was a strong smell, as if sulfureted hydrogen was generated over the north of the island and especially from the salt channels across Matunga and the vacant ground to the north. The smell seemed strongest furthest to the north,” Dr. T. S. Weir, Bombay’s health officer, wrote in the assiduously compiled administration report the municipal commissioner sent to London every year. “At this time, a migration of rats had been observed across Sewree [a neighborhood along the island city’s eastern sea board], and I believe the smell was due to the decomposition of dead rats, for a number of bodies of rats were afterward found in the suburbs. The Commissioner of Police and I happened to go over the north of the island on this morning in connection with arrangements being made for the inspection of traffic by the roadways into Bombay and we tried to ascertain the cause. The smell was most offensive, tainting the air, far and wide.

  “A blue haze was often observed in the evenings of September and October and rainbows which I had not observed in Bombay for a long period,” Weir continued. “At this season boils were very prevalent. On September 9, a gale blew and the sky looked like a monsoon storm. In the evening, rain fell. A little time afterwards dead rats were found on the west foreshore.”

  Days later, Dr. Acacio Viegas, a physician who practiced in the Indian quarter of the city, was called to attend to patients stricken with fever. During his visits, Viegas found nothing to explain their raging temperature and listlessness other than a small red welt. The following day, before he could diagnose their illness, their fevers spiked and they died. Using fluid extracted from their welts, he identified the disease as bubonic plague. He began reading of more plague deaths in the newspapers.

  By the 1800s, opium and the cotton trade had transformed Bombay from the rocky fishing islands the British had received from the Portuguese in the seventeenth century into one of the Empire’s most majestic and important trading ports. The British built a fort, reclaimed land from the sea to join the islands, and, on the sliver that emerged, they built stately European-style buildings with Indian flourishes. While the British lived in the breezy, tropical London growing within the fort’s walls, the lanes outside got packed with Indian migrants, drawn from around the country by the promise of work. Garbage and infectious diseases followed. Soon, Weir began getting reports of hundreds of plague deaths a day. France imposed restrictions on Indian passengers and trade.

  Officials believed the disease had arrived in the city with pilgrims returning from a religious fair in North India. Later colonial reports would conclude that it emanated in Yunnan, China, arrived on trading ships from Hong Kong and was carried through the lanes outside the fort by rats moving through the overflowing filth. Over time, the garbage dumping grounds at Mahalakshmi, where Mumbaikars had sent garbage for years, had nearly swollen into the homes around it, emitting smells, rats, and diseases that sickened residents and threatened trade. But the campaign that Dr. Weir planned to control the epidemic would grow, thorn-like, between the colonial administration and Bombay’s residents. “There is only one measure from which any effect can be expected and that is quarantine,” he wrote.

  With plague cases rising, British troops began keeping travelers arriving into the city in camps. They entered the slim Indian lanes around the fort, where they dismantled tile roofs to let light into dark homes, emptied granaries piled with months of supplies, and cleaned drains and sewers by flooding them with seawater that gushed back into homes. The returning waters brought dead rats, trash, and all that the drains were supposed to purge. Soldiers searched homes for the sick and lined up residents outside, so they could examine them for buboes. They burned patients’ possessions, lime washed and quarantined their homes, and kept their families in the hospital for weeks. Even the graves of plague victims were to be layered with quicklime or charcoal to contain plague fleas within.

  Fear and rumors gripped the city. Many Indians hid the ailing inside cupboards and protected them, with knives, from being taken away to the hospital, afraid that they were being taken there only to die, alone. A plague patient had jumped out of a moving ambulance taking him to the hospital and was later found dead, having walked a long way. “They had some idea that the ambulance would give them a shock that would kill them,” Weir wrote in the municipal report. “Men have said to me, ‘You think we are like mad dogs, and you want to kill us as if we were.’ ”

  Late one night, Bombay’s municipal commissioner, P. C. H. Snow, walked across this widening rift, into the Indian lanes. He discovered a town, growing unnoticed, so tightly packed that the plague was bound to travel fast. Snow found nineteen men, twenty-one women, and seventeen children sleeping in the same room. “In fact, the room is a passage with a door in front between closed walls.… What can anything done outside this room, do for the people in their misery inside?” he wrote. As the city’s budget surplus was wiped out by the fight against the plague, it was only spreading further, beginning to touch the edges of the constricted, island city. Snow wrote of seeing patients walking city streets in delirium and lying beside the road. Some could be revived but others were long dead. More than 1,900 people died of the plague every week for the rest of the year, according to newspaper reports. The recently built Victoria Terminus was packed with residents leaving Bombay.

  On October 14, with plague control measures tightening, a group of Indians wrote to Snow asking to eas
e the regulations. Enforcing them would only accelerate the surge of leaving residents, they wrote. Fleeing patients had already taken the plague to the historic neighboring city of Pune and beyond. In both cities, those who remained protested, often violently, as the Empire and its soldiers inspected their homes, bodies, and rituals.

  Late on the night of October 30, 1896, Snow and Weir met the police commissioner, H. G. Vincent, at his imposing stone office, across from the city’s busy, electric-lit market. Shops had closed early and angry crowds swelled in the dark lanes nearby. Inside, Vincent pled for a retreat from the plague measures or, he feared, there would be riots. He and Weir worried the Halalkhores, or waste cleaners, would join the crowds leaving Bombay. This could precipitate “a vast panic and exodus” from the city, Snow wrote. “Bombay in a few days would have become uninhabitable, left to reek in a mass of sewage, sweepings and pollution, with no one at hand to conduct the daily routine of sanitation, much less adopt a single preventive measure against the plague.” The three officers withdrew their patient isolation measures that night.

  Instead, they let the city’s mosaic of communities pour into their own plague camps, hospitals, and burial grounds and turned to pushing out the city’s mounting refuse. With it, they hoped to edge out both the discontent and the diseases they had battled for years, including malaria, measles, mumps, chicken pox, smallpox, cholera, and tuberculosis.