Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  * * *

  WITH THE FIRES still continuing, Vitabai Kamble heard Prakash Javadekar, India’s environment minister was coming to their township. She took Nagesh, her oldest son, and walked toward the municipal office to meet him, following Nagesh’s large gray curls to the front of the waiting crowd.

  The midday sun warming her head, her life on the forgotten mountains played in Vitabai’s mind. She wanted to tell Javadekar about it. She thought of her fading scars, of how, at first, mountain smells had made her stomach churn even after eating four vada pavs. She thought of how Nagesh, the skinny ten-year-old who began trailing behind her on the slopes, had turned shapeless and gray on them. Her friend Salma Shaikh had brought her son, Aslam, to the mountains as a toddler and her younger son, Rafique, as a hundred-day-old baby, strapped to her back with a saree, after her husband died. Salma kept them in a shelter she made with dried leaves that fell from trucks. While she worked, Aslam had wobbled out of the shed, picked trash, and grown to middle age on the slopes too.

  Vitabai wanted to tell Javadekar that the pickers had made a life on the mountains. They could not have burned them, as the news swirling around them suggested. She knew traders’ lackeys burned nightly fires on the mountains to unearth metal. “Ani amcha maran”—and we are to die—she said, speaking of the blame that fell on hapless pickers. She wanted to tell him that as one of the mountains’ oldest inhabitants, she had picked up after the city for decades. She dreamed of having an official job doing it, a municipal identity card that would turn their secret army into legitimate workers. The card would make officials leave wastepickers such as herself alone, instead of threatening them, asking for bribes or detaining them for being trespassers.

  The long convoy arrived and Nagesh nudged his mother to stay close to it. The crowd jostled restlessly outside. The strong burning smell and fear of new eruptions hung thick in the air. Vitabai and Nagesh waited in the hot sun until the official cars drove away. No one stepped out of the vehicles. The pickers returned home dispirited. In Delhi, Javadekar told reporters the fires revealed the contractors’ carelessness; a team of environment ministry officials had visited Deonar and would investigate what had happened.

  Weeks later, Farzana was bent over her metal detector when the police lined the mountains again. She heard Rahul Gandhi, an opposition politician, was coming. She and Sahani followed the pickers to the municipal office. Gandhi, dressed in white, looking pink and flushed amid pickers’ tanned bodies and muddy clothes, walked the trash hills. Farzana did not know that the photos would be printed on posters that were later plastered all over the city to showcase the opposition run state government and municipality’s failings.

  At the same time, pickers from their lanes were getting picked up for questioning, and some were arrested. There were no cameras on the mountains. To penetrate the mountains’ fog, police relied on rounding up pickers to interrogate them about the fires and the dark world of the mountains. They asked about suspicious happenings in the days leading up to the fires. The mountains and their inhabitants, which had grown for so long in a bubble of secrecy, were suddenly visible, their bubble stretching thin, threatening to pop.

  TEN

  TOGETHER, OKA’S ORDER AND the endless fires had diverted most garbage caravans, after February 2016, to the grounds at Mulund and the new hills at Kanjurmarg, where trash hills were to be dehydrated until they turned to compost. Farzana and her sisters did what they had always done when trucks dwindled: they walked to what they heard was Atique Khan’s estate. They reminded the lackeys who guarded the estate they were Jehangir’s sisters and slipped in to fill up on what they called ganda maal. Dirty stuff.

  They tied handkerchiefs around their faces to keep away the rising smell of boiled flesh and sifted aside disembodied limbs and gangrenous fingers. They collected freshly steamed syringes, their backs cut off, so they could not be refilled; saline bags; water bottles; and long bloodied swabs of gauze and cotton. For every three filled bags they handed over to the lackeys, they could keep the fourth for themselves. Farzana filled frantically, hardly feeling unknown blood stain her, syringes poke her, and broken glass bottles cut her. Syringes jabbed them a lot, Sahani later explained, but they tied something around their wounds and kept working, not feeling the pain. It was the only thing better than picking from the municipality’s garbage caravans.

  Bags filled, the sisters walked back home, the smell of people’s steamed remains clinging to them. The smell stayed stubbornly on them, even after they washed. “Koi hadsa dekha to man mein reh jaata hai,” Sahani would say. All we see lingers in us. They would never return, the sisters decided, as they had for years. But in a few weeks, they would be back, as they always had. Garbage trucks were dwindling.

  * * *

  I’LL ACT LIKE I beat you and you act like you cried: the old Marathi idiom explained the official shadow play that had let the city’s detritus acquire its dark afterlife at Deonar, one official had said. Its contract reportedly said Tatva was to make the boundary wall and fix the breaks in it that had created an estate within the township, where nightly convoys brought the remains of buildings to make debris hills, said to be Rafique Khan’s. A municipal letter to Tatva said it would fix the break in the wall itself, while police settled a booth across it. For years, the booth had stayed unmanned, the wall broken, convoys streaming in while the Khan brothers and their rivals were said to have amassed dead buildings, dead people, leftover hotel food. As the city’s water lines, power lines, and sewers stopped before their stretching lanes, pickers had little choice but to cling to the gangs’ largesse. It nearly strangled them. But now, as the fires lit up the forgotten trash township and the shadowy, private estates within it, the municipality and police had to reel it in. The mountains began moving from under the feet of its illicit and invisible residents.

  Manoj Lohiya, a police officer who had been tasked with bringing this secret world out into the open by the police commissioner, gave an interim and then final report saying the failure of the plant meant methane stayed trapped within the mountains and seeped through them, hanging in mountain air. That night in January 2016, fires had begun at the far edge (in what was said to be Khans’ territory), sea winds had howled, swelling the flames, taking them deeper within trash hills and into the sky until they were out of control, Lohiya said. The delay in the fire engines’ arrival had taken the fires farther into the city.

  As they started building a case against the Khans, police began walking the slopes, discovering the world Farzana had always lived in. They saw cameras and lights surround hills staked out by gangs, as Sharma the petitioner in court had. Getting caught in their gaze brought out lackeys to defend their turf, unlike the municipal cameras that once installed, did not work.

  The sprawling, private estate of medical waste within the township was settled not long after the municipality had cut out a far corner of the township to make its medical waste incinerator in 2007. While municipal trucks made the rounds of city hospitals, bringing their waste to the incinerator, Atique Khan bought a small pickup truck. It was said to make trips to the city’s largest private hospitals, unofficially redirecting it to this estate, where pickers sorted it and lackeys resold it. Farzana had learned the names of some of the city’s best hospitals from the drivers of trucks that veered away from her on hill clearings to this estate. It was not trash meant to be strewn on hills for pickers. And yet, for Farzana, it was too good to leave: thick plastic from saline bags, medicine bags, and glass containers that sold well. She had followed these trucks to the edge of this territory, pleading for entry. But that summer, as police began walking the slopes, fewer trucks came to this estate. What made it to the incinerator blew toxic clouds into the air that the pickers barely noticed.

  Police discovered that the clashes for dead possessions had led to gangs lighting fires in rivals’ territories at night, burning away other traders’ fortunes. A rival gang boss had written letters to the state’s chief minister, police
commissioner, and others referring to the Khans as Matti Mafia, or Mud Mafia. The Khans accused him of grabbing a part of the township. Farzana’s Banjara Galli formed the overlap between two of the area’s fiercest gangs. Life on the mountains was controlled by the Khan brothers and life at home by their namesakes, Atique and Rafique Shaikh, also brothers.

  The Khans provided satellite television in Baba Nagar, and minions who claimed to work for the Shaikhs collected power bills in Banjara Galli. Atique Shaikh’s face was featured on police posters around their lanes, with a headline saying, “Wanted.” Farzana’s family, like most others, only used legal power to accumulate bills that made them exist in official records, which they hoped would help them show they were legal residents, eventually. They bought illegal power to keep costs low and the army that patrolled their lanes placated: any payment delays could lead to disconnection, threats, and abuse. Through Farzana’s childhood, their lanes had been lit through pickers’ ingenuity. But later these foot soldiers had come to patrol the lanes collecting payments, even though police busted their illegal network several times.

  The Shaikhs, who had started out picking trash and grabbing pickers’ garbage-made homes, had later retreated to build flourishing careers in business and politics. They were also charged with many crimes. Rafique’s third wife, Noorjehan, was the area’s corporator, an elected representative in the municipal corporation, allowing her to raise the area’s concerns with officials. It was her responsibility to ask why trash in the lanes around the mountains was not cleared, speaking on behalf of the lanes near where the city dumped its own garbage, endlessly. At one of her campaign events, Rafique had brought a bottle of muddy tap water and emptied it to show area representatives and municipal officers that they were failing to provide drinkable water. It was through these shows of largesse from mountain bosses, trickles of sustenance from the municipality, and leftovers from gang wars that life came to Farzana’s lanes. And it was in their tangles that it stayed stuck.

  On the edges of the Shaikhs’ territory, along 90 Feet Road, which Farzana’s lanes nearly opened onto, the Khans’ lackeys were said to collect fees for parking the pickup trucks, auto rickshaws, and taxis that pickers had saved up to buy, so they could build lives away from trash. Owners of these vehicles told officers they had been threatened, intimidated, beaten, or their vehicles impounded if they did not pay.

  The police and municipality set out to reclaim this forgotten world, which had grown so tangled while they looked away. Mumbai’s municipal commissioner had announced that the township of trash would become a prohibited zone: anyone, other than municipal staff, seen on the trash slopes could be a fire hazard and would be detained or fined. It threatened the fragile gray economy that had grown around the mountains and their bounty. New guards had replaced the ones Farzana knew, and there were more patrols on the mountains than she had ever seen before. Construction workers dotted the edges of foothills. Once again, they began fixing the mostly broken boundary wall and brought barbed wire rolls to top it.

  Farzana heard of pickers being turned away from the mountains. She heard of friends getting into work before dawn to evade the guards and cameras that were to begin watching the hills. With the city’s glare glinting through the mountains’ halo, their world was beginning to spoil at the edges, crinkling their lives and shaking their futures. Farha waited for unguarded moments to get in and work. Hyder Ali perched himself on the ledge that jutted out from their wall, as he often spent his afternoons. He walked over to the mountains’ edge sometimes, not picking trash but hoarding the stories that pickers carried with them when they returned, inhaling their worry, growing gaunt before his children’s eyes.

  * * *

  ONE EVENING, WHEN Farzana returned home, she saw the wispy Salma Shaikh sitting outside the house, filling Hyder Ali in on the events of the day. Salma had draped her flowery orange saree around her shoulders, drooping as if weighed down by the mountains. As she got closer, Farzana saw Salma run her fingers around a plastic necklace, which she later heard was retrieved from a trash bag. It gave her an elegant, worn air. She heard Salma softly hurl the insults she had accumulated over four decades on the mountains at the new guards. Hyder Ali listened, looking bemused.

  Arif, her fourteen-year-old grandson, had taken to working predawn to avoid the guards, she told them. He kept picking trash, one morning, as the sky turned from ink to rose to gold. Guards had come in to work and spotted him, half-filled bag of plastic bottles in hand. They chased him, waving their sticks frantically, Salma told them. Arif ran down as fast as he could, stumbling over the wobbly slopes, drained by the persistent cough and fever he had caught from his father, Aslam, who had tuberculosis. He struggled to stay ahead of the guards and their flailing sticks.

  Then Arif felt a sharp and piercing pain in his foot. His knees buckled and he fell into the sun-dried trash. He turned his foot to see a rusting nail had pierced through his thin slippers and made a deep cut in his foot. Blood gushed onto warm, torn plastic bags and glinting tablet strips. Guards closed in on Arif as he slumped on the slope, in pain.

  The guards let him go, with a warning never to set foot on the mountains again. Salma had taken Arif to get an anti-tetanus injection and get his foot wrapped in a gauze bandage to keep him limping. “Beta kabr mein ek pair hila ke aaya,” she told Hyder Ali, talking about Aslam. My son already dangled one foot in the grave. She had only Arif for help, now she was alone.

  When her softly delivered invective abated, Hyder Ali suggested she get the nonprofit that gave them identity cards to complain about the guards who had chased Arif. What could they do if pickers kept sending their children to the slopes, Salma replied. The volunteers would ask if they had given birth to children only to send them here, she said. She knew she had to help Arif build a life away from the mountains but they were all she knew, the only thing she had passed on to her son and grandson.

  The best mountain views shone in the elegant, bristling Salma’s eyes. When the mountains’ weight had pressed her down, put the grit in her soft voice, they had forgotten to take away the whispery softness, the lingering mischievousness that clung to her like the paper scraps that she sometimes picked.

  She had tried to get Arif employed as a waiter or dishwasher, she told them. But his sickly face, chipped tooth, and bony frame made him look younger than his fourteen years. He got work only on days there was a big wedding and the caterer was so desperate for staff he could persuade himself that Arif, in his rumpled white shirt and frayed bow tie, looked eighteen. On most days, Salma admitted, Arif tried creeping back to work, before light, on the mountains, often getting beaten, getting warned, getting detained.

  Another evening, Farzana found Hyder Ali, at their doorstep, talking to a newly married picker with a thin mustache. Early one morning he had gone to the mountains to relieve himself and looked up to find a black eye buzzing high over him, he told Hyder Ali. He had heard the television news crews that hung around mountain edges these days used small, flying cameras to bypass security and film the seething mountains. Pictures of him relieving himself would reach his newly acquired in-laws, back in his village, he told Hyder Ali. He had told them he worked in an office. They would see where and how he lived in Mumbai, on television news. He would crumble in their eyes, he fretted.

  When he left, Hyder Ali went inside the house and put on the television set that he had bought at a kata shop, had repaired and perched high up on the wall. Farzana emptied her bag outside and heard Hyder Ali flick through channels, looking for news reports on the mountains, as she sorted through the day’s pickings. Most talked of police reports that said pickers had lit the fires at night, at the behest of their bosses, the garbage traders. More kata shop owners and pickers were getting arrested. As Farzana emptied the bag she had brought back, sorting through syringes, saline bags, swab, and meal trays, she thought, she had to go back to the medical waste estate again.

  ELEVEN

  THROUGH APRIL 2016 THE township
stayed warm, heat building from the seething fires and rapidly warming summer. Fire engines, forklifts, and the assistants who hung off them dotted the slopes. Municipal officials and assorted consultants worked on the mountains, police filled the lanes around them. Everyone was here to fix the mountains’ seething mess, which had suddenly and unexpectedly frozen the endlessly inching-upward city. The pickers’ subterranean world had been discovered and they were being evicted.

  Salma had been in and out of the hospital through the fires. Ghabrahat, or mortal fear, was the only way she could describe the range of symptoms that paralyzed her, none of which were directly related to air quality. Her blood pressure had shot up. She had visited doctors and swallowed medicines secretly, so she didn’t alarm the already sick Aslam and Arif. The week she felt better, fires had erupted again. Salma’s blood pressure increased so much, a blood vessel had burst in her eye. Everything had blurred. The world looked different. She needed surgery to fix it, a procedure she would later remember as cataract surgery.

  As the summer warmed, the mountains began to shrink. Mumbai’s sultry, humid heat sucked out any moisture left within, deflating them. Madan Yavalkar, a municipal engineer who had managed the mountains for years, and knew them better than most, had described the mountains’ seasonal inhalation and exhalation in the municipality’s fire inquiry report, in Marathi. “At the height of the monsoon’s fury, when rain waters seep into the mountains, they expand and when the burning summer sun draws out the moisture, they contract.” Pickers’ luck too was deflating with the mountains.