by Saumya Roy
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EARLY IN 1897, the British governors identified an 823-acre marsh in the distant seaside village of Deonar, where they planned to send Bombay’s waste from then on, replacing the overflowing, rat-filled grounds at Coorla and then Mahalakshmi. The government acquired the land from its owner, Ardeshir Cursetji Cama, that May.
Cuchra, or trash, trains, filled with the city’s refuse, began arriving at the Deonar grounds on June 7, 1899, its construction having been delayed by concerns that passenger trains passed close by. The smell of garbage, it was thought, would make them gag. The municipality hired workers to empty wagons and fill the vast grounds, which were partly submerged in the sea, and dotted with shrubs and an endless expanse of weeds. “As the refuse contains large quantities of broken glass and old iron, frequent injuries occurred to the feet and legs of men emptying the wagons,” a municipal report recounted. “The wounds were often very serious,” delaying the clearing of wagons and the return journeys to the city. Workers developed fevers, eye infections—and as the new loads of garbage had to be deposited farther away from the end of the track, the work only got harder. Slowly, the workers learned to live with the trash and injuries and two trains of twenty-five garbage filled wagons each began arriving every day.
A bund was built along the edges of the Deonar grounds to keep the sea from seeping into the site, and garbage from flowing into the creek. That year’s municipal commissioner’s report said that officials expected the marshy bog to fill with trash in twenty-three years. It would become “a valuable Municipal estate,” yielding more than a lakh of rupees as rent from farmers, who would cultivate the grounds, enriched with rotting garbage, and form the new edge of the extending city. “It was thought that, by this method, a large area of waste, an unhealthy swamp, could be converted into fruitful agricultural ground,” the report concluded.
And, as Bombay kept growing, its remains and its ghosts had indeed slowly filled the distant bog at Deonar, draining trash from the city. The plague receded too. Officials dug streets in the city’s Mandvi area outside the British fort, to fix drains, extend sewers, widen streets, open passages for the sea breezes, and build homes for the growing migrant population. Beneath the streets they found older trash, deposited perhaps forty years before the city was built over it. Cuchra trains ferried it away and continued to deposit the city’s detritus at Deonar for nearly nine decades, where it remained both in plain sight and out of sight. This arrangement had kept an uneasy calm between the city and its waste until it erupted again, more than a century later.
In 1960, Bombay had become the capital of the newly formed state of Maharashtra. New buildings for the state legislature, stock exchange, a planetarium, and condominiums began to emerge from cleared slums, the city’s hastily extending edges rising from the sea and farms perching on their trash foundations. The grounds had fulfilled British administrators’ plans, more than a decade after they left the country. Rains sometimes washed the garbage along the ground’s ends into the sea, drifting it back toward the city, but the shrunken grounds refilled fast.
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IT WAS AROUND this time, in the mid-sixties, that Vitabai Kamble arrived in Bombay as a new mother. She and her husband had set up their home, made of plastic sheets and sarees, on a pavement in central Bombay, across the street from the state-run television channel’s newly built studio and its cloud grazing antenna. When the breeze opened their billowy ceiling, the spindly antenna nearly became a part of their house, bringing in Bombay’s stardust. It helped Vitabai find her way back from wealthy homes where she washed dishes while her husband did odd jobs. It was in the home in the television tower’s shadow that her children were born and where Vitabai believed she had lived the Bombay dream.
Migrant settlements like Vitabai’s swelled and spilled out of the tenements that Snow had written about decades earlier, onto the city’s railway tracks, along its stretching water pipelines, across its pavements and roads. But the city bulged with an aspiration that edged them out.
One day, Vitabai got papers saying the municipality had given her a plot of land, instantly elevating her to the status of landowner. The papers became her most prized possession. She bundled her two toddlers, husband, home, and the land allotment papers into a municipal truck, and they drove through the city until it petered out into salt pans and mangroves. When she saw the fetid dumping grounds and the chalk marked section of rubble that was hers, Vitabai’s dream of home ownership crumbled before her eyes.
Unlike Vitabai, other slum dwellers had fought the municipality’s attempts to move them to Deonar. The rambling cloth and plastic settlements in the city were often consumed by blazes in those years, and while their residents tried to reassemble their homes amid the dying embers, the municipality took the opportunity to resettle them at Deonar. Many had filed court cases, alleging that the fires were deliberately set, meant to hand their settlements over to developers so they could build apartments and office towers. Expelled by Bombay’s expanding concrete dreams, trucks filled with extraneous people and their disappointments arrived at the dumping grounds with almost the same regularity as the trains arrived with abandoned things, while the city stretched and rose over their homes.
The municipality could hardly remove the slum dwellers fast enough. Newspaper reports from those years say that Bombay’s streets and pavements still overflowed with trash, people and their makeshift homes, known for flying with the city’s fierce monsoon winds and then dying with it, only to fly again. Garbage piled higher and higher on city streets throughout the day, breeding flies and mosquitoes, stinking and sickening residents. Cuchra trains went once in the morning and then at night, when residents along its tracks knew to close their windows to block the traveling smell. Over time, the municipality created a cuchra fleet, with trailers, donkeys, and tractors to supplement the aging trains. Together, they filled Deonar’s swamp with trash, all day and all night.
For the holdouts, the city positioned the edges of the dumping grounds as planned communities for the poor. Newspaper reporters wrote about the wide roads and concrete houses. There were numbered blocks, tarred roads, a toilet for every ten people, and large workshops to house their small businesses.
But Vitabai, like most others, didn’t get a home like the one in the newspapers. She got a patch of rubble edged with chalk, to ensure she did not spill into her neighbor’s plot, causing a fight. It was filled only with the smell of the distant city’s refuse, which she remembered as being much worse than it was in later years. The truth could also be that she got used to it: that the smell had settled in her, along with the many wounds she sustained from being too tightly packed in with the ghosts of the things Bombay had thrown away to make space for its dreams.
The slum dwellers’ new settlements turned the flower-filled swamps on opposite ends of the dumping grounds into Lotus Colony and Padma Nagar, or “the town of lotuses.” A string of small hamlets grew between them, digging into the dumping grounds, making a crescent curve. As you arrived from the city, you first came to Lotus Colony, which was followed by Baba Nagar, named for the mystics that once roamed its desolate marsh. No one was sure where along the curve Rafiq Nagar, also known as Rafi Nagar, ran into Nirankari Nagar and then Sanjay Nagar, situated in the deepest bend of the mountains’ moon. It was named for the politician from the seventies, known for demolishing Delhi’s slums to make way for a modern city. Banjara Galli, where Farzana and her family lived, was part of Sanjay Nagar and had indeed been demolished several times. No one knew where the name of Shanti Nagar, or “the town of peace,” came from, for behind it was the wall across which trucks endlessly rattled and returned after emptying on hills. It was followed by Padma Nagar, which ended the township. Around there was Bainganwadi, the hamlet of eggplants, Bandra Plot, named for the posh suburb the residents there had been resettled from and others named for the area’s rustic past or the glamour of the incoming city.
As they filled and grew, the dumping groun
ds began to emanate a toxic halo. Nothing made it out; things only arrived and stayed to slowly rot and decay. As Bombay came to be known as the city of dreams, Deonar became the sprawling necropolis of those dreams’ remains, a noxious and wondrous world. Only its putrid air and water mingled, unseen, with the city’s.
The fastest way for Vitabai to return to the city for work would have been to sit atop the stinking, open-topped rakes of cuchra trains. Instead, she and others began to empty the mangy wealth from their wagons, hoard it, and sell it. Vitabai waded through the ground’s shrinking marshy tracts in search of treasures, stumbling on animal carcasses or glass shards sticking out of the mud. “Panyat mele lekra bhetayche,” she would say. We found dead babies in the water. Often, she turned back to find Nagesh, her oldest son, and then her daughter following her. Forgotten by the city, they made lives on all it spat out.
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IN 1992, AS the cool winter winds lashed the mountains, riots had broken out in the city over the demolition of the Babri Masjid, a mosque in North India, where Hindus believed Lord Rama was born. Vitabai, a Hindu surrounded by neighbors she had not noticed until then were Muslims, had stayed inside her house for days. She heard of rioters dressing as police, neighbors gone missing, the dead being flung into trash slopes and the living hiding with them. When she finally came out, some of her neighbors were returning home, battered, while others had begun unending searches for missing relatives.
Hindus had begun to leave, aware of the ruptured air in their lanes. Some had moved across the creek, to the newly formed municipality of New Bombay or other distant but gentrifying fringes of the city. After the riots, Bombay’s lanes—where everything had lived on something else, where languages ran into each other to make “Bambaiya” and cooking styles melded together—became segregated. Muslims were moving to flinty, far-flung enclaves and those who could not afford to settle even there arrived to fill the lanes around the mountains.
“Naapaki mein rehna to Shaitan ko neota dena hai,” a cleric Hyder Ali delivered books he found in trash had told him. Living in impurity and dirt is an invitation to the Shaitan. When people settled, bringing light and cleanliness to the ruins, mountains, filthy recesses at the outer edge of society that Shaitans, or evil spirits, inhabited, the Shaitans left, the cleric had said. But with nowhere else to go, migrants and the city’s slum dwellers constantly arrived to live in the shadow of the mountains and in the lanes that had stayed unsettled even as they filled. Consumed with the hunt for overlooked or discarded treasures, Vitabai had stayed too, her days only getting more frenzied with the growing trucks.
She began by calling garbage truck drivers to ask what they filled up on in their rounds of the city. If trash from hotels, hospitals, marriage halls filled their bellies, and they weren’t booked by the big garbage traders already, Vitabai asked them to empty only for her. She got her sons to corral these trucks as they entered the township and direct them to quiet mountain clearings, then ran to them so quickly she turned to a blur. She pulled out notes from the fanny pack she made with torn sarees and tied around her stomach to pay guards to look the other way while she picked through the trucks’ contents and to pay bulldozer drivers so they would not shovel it away before she was done. Then she filled it into the pickup van her younger son Santosh, born at the mountains’ rim, drove and took it to her daughter Babita’s kata shop, where trash was sorted and sold by weight to traders who would sell it ahead to be remade.
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IT WAS SOON after Hyder Ali arrived, in the early 2000s, that Deonar probably became the world’s largest trash township of the kind where nothing had ever left or been treated. The mountains had risen as high as twenty-floor apartment blocks. Mumbai had already stretched over the smaller dumping grounds in Gorai and Malad. The Malad grounds were handed back to a developer who quickly topped them with glass and chrome buildings that housed call centers and entertainment company offices, where executives got headaches and computers rusted too quickly. This was known as “sick building syndrome”: scientists had discovered that the gases from hastily closed dumping grounds didn’t settle for years. Instead, they permeated the buildings that rose over them and sickened the people and devices within them.
Mumbai was at a growing impasse. The trash that used to be deposited at the now closed Malad grounds came to the Deonar mountains instead, increasingly ringed by the growing band of the city’s castaway people, who only waded deeper and brought out more of the trash they built their lives on. The dumping grounds spewed foul air and smoke that the municipality countered by spraying herbal disinfectant and deodorant. It had to clear garbage from city streets and pavements or it would lead to the same infectious diseases that British reports had recorded, at an unimaginable scale. But the mountains were beginning to intrude into the city that had ignored them for so long. If they got any taller, officials worried, sections could tumble down in dangerous landslides of garbage. Flights coming into Mumbai might crash into the trash peaks. The mountains inched above 120 feet, the city’s lengthening garbage caravans emptying constantly on the rising hilltops, making it harder to shrink them.
THREE
FARZANA’S EARLIEST MEMORIES ARE of watching her house collapsing into the muddy trash and rising from it again every few days. Hyder Ali had taught her older brothers and sisters to spot municipal officers on eviction drives while he was away at work. Farzana helped empty the house, then the older children untied the bamboo sticks that they had brought back from the hills to make its bones. Finally, the siblings stood aside and watched, giggling, as the plastic and tin sheets they had collected to make their home fell noisily in a heap.
In 1995, Bombay had become Mumbai. Its boxy, socialist-era apartments, best known for squeezing a lot into very little space, were giving way to gated communities that brought first-world amenities, complete with garbage chutes. In this world, stretching far into suburbia, buildings were named after trees—such as Cedar, Oakwood, and Birch—that were never seen in the city’s muggy weather. Malls, gyms, and multiplexes arrived, turning Mumbai aglow with India’s growing wealth. They were all filled with new things whose remnants came to the mountains, to be reborn only through the ministrations of ragpickers.
Growing desire brought plastic bottles that had contained purified water, takeaway boxes half filled with unseen foods, soiled diapers, and wires from new devices. From giving many lives to things, Indians embraced sachets for shampoo, hair dye, and ketchup. Their expendability provided a new thrill even in families that had taken pride in passing things down through the generations. Glass and metal containers were replaced with plastic pouches and boxes made of tightly packed layers of foil, paper, and plastic that left homes when their contents emptied but lingered forever, at the dumping grounds. Emptiness, sadness, longing, and aspiration: it could all be doused with purchases and possessions.
At the township at Deonar, in the growing gush that erupted from trucks, trash could be trash or it could be gold. While Hyder Ali, with his laid-back style, found only broken bits of cement flooring, his friend Moharram Ali, whom he had taken a loan with, found long marble slabs that had recently come to fill Mumbai homes. The city’s growing wealth poured out onto the mountains and Hyder Ali and Moharram Ali floated in its rising tide.
In September 2000, three months after Farzana turned two, India’s environment ministry had framed rules, for the first time, to manage waste. Moved by the growing mountains of garbage around the country, the Supreme Court had asked the ministry to take control of its trash, which was hardly mounting as dizzily anywhere as it did at Deonar. Among the many rules, encroachers such as Farzana’s family were to be kept out of the township of trash so officials could secure and manage it. The municipality, tasked with meeting the rules, stepped up eviction drives in their lanes, which had been happening, on and off, for years.
But as soon as officers turned their back, the pickers’ shacks rose again. Chasing the city’s constantly arriving discards had become a
n illicit but unwavering addiction, a forgotten treasure always seeming close. Squashed plastic bottles bundled together in a load that almost matched the pickers in size could be sold to traders to get them through the day. A palm-sized emerald, which Hyder Ali heard someone had found, could lift their lives entirely. He watched houdhi, or pond pickers, make bunds on slopes, encircling trash, fill these enclosures with water, and sift through wet sand for gold dust mingled in city dust. “Kisi ka kachra kisi ka bhangaar hota hai,” Hyder Ali said, explaining his work and his township. One person’s trash is another person’s scrap. And it all arrived ceaselessly, growing the mountains. Pickers hoarded it, sold it, slept on it, ate it, and inhaled it.
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AS A TODDLER, Farzana wobbled and crawled around the jewel-colored cloth scrap hills that filled their home. Shakimun, Hyder Ali, and the older children collected these scraps on the slopes, filling them into outsized bundles they slung over their heads and that dangled in their eyes as they carried them downhill. Made of odd-shaped scraps from city tailors’ workshops, the cloth hills in their house would soon get sold to stuff pillows, quilts, and toys. Then hills in new colors would rise afresh on their floor. Farzana took her first steps on this terrain at home, practicing for the trash hills that rose behind them.
When he could not spot the older children on the slopes, Hyder Ali topped Farzana’s head, since she was little more than a toddler, with useful finds. She brought down mud to fill the drain that flowed down from the mountains, along Banjara Galli. She carried chunks of cement slabs flecked with fading green, orange, or silvery glass or the dark stone blocks that were laid as flooring in Mumbai apartments from the seventies and eighties. Municipal guards sometimes chased her. As she ran down the unsteady slopes to stay ahead, Farzana often fell or dropped her floor slab. The mountain fragments that made it home were sold or thrown down to fill the watery bog beneath their home.