Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  But friends who awoke before dawn and went to relieve themselves at the foothills began seeing Farzana in the dark. Farzana, who had always been with one of her sisters, was walking alone on the dimly lit slopes. They took to calling her Khaadi ka Bhoot, Ghost of the Mountains. She had begun returning to the slopes, before light, before anyone woke up, often with money instead of breakfast. She got to work early to beat the guards, she said. She came home, around dusk, with the day shift pickers. When Shakimun sent her a message to come home for lunch, she heard Farzana would buy food from one of the vendors who roamed the slopes and stay on. Salahudin had told Shakimun that mountain spirits didn’t leave easily.

  One afternoon, after waiting for hours on a mountain top, Farzana and Farha saw a truck winding its way through the dirt track, toward them. Mud splashed as they ran alongside it, on the hills, chasing it to a clearing. Farzana watched breathlessly as trash emptied out. Farha threw herself at it, jostling with the others who had gathered around. She looked up and found Farzana still staring at the mushy trash fallen around them. Others pushed her aside to get their pickings.

  Farha went on collecting squashed bottles. She kept an eye out for Farzana, who continued to stand still, gaping. She called out to her sister, who did not seem to hear. She came closer and prodded her tentatively, with her garbage fork. Aren’t you going to lift up your fork? Farha asked, thinking of how long they had waited for the emptying truck. Pickers jabbed around them. Are you starting a fight with your older sister? Farzana retorted angrily. “Akdi nahi uthaegi to ladna padega,” Farha replied. If you don’t pick up your fork I will have to.

  Farzana swung her garbage fork, aiming it at Farha, who cowered and stumbled away, surprised. Farzana followed her, fork in hand. “Badi behen ko maregi?” Are you going to hit your older sister? Farha heard Farzana repeat as she ran off down the hill. Farha laughed as she ran, thinking they would stop soon, clutch their sides, catch their breath, and collapse on the slopes, laughing as they sometimes did. But when she turned back, she saw Farzana’s eyes filled with rage, her fork dangling in front of her. Farha stayed ahead. Farzana tripped clumsily on the loosely packed slopes but kept after her. Farha’s chest burned. The air was heavy with unshed rain, making it hard even to draw breath. But Farzana’s fork was close behind her, and Farha kept stumbling forward.

  She saw pickers around them stop their work to watch. She heard some of them call out, asking Farzana to stop, but Farha felt her getting closer. She heard Alamgir call out to Farzana. But Farzana’s footsteps remained close behind her.

  Farha heard a scuffle and turned back to see Alamgir grab Farzana tightly from the back until she fell on the slope. Farzana held on to her fork even as her long, curled-up limbs rose and fell with deep breaths. Alamgir wrested it away and lifted her in his arms. He was the tallest of the siblings, sinewy where Jehangir was wiry. Farha heard someone say the humidity was shortening fuses on the slopes these days, as she trailed behind Alamgir, breathless and befuddled. Farzana fell asleep in his arms, heavy with exhaustion. He laid her down on the floor at home and began telling Shakimun about the rage that had gripped Farzana, speaking softly so he wouldn’t wake her up.

  Just as the city’s assault on the mountains had assumed new urgency, Shakimun decided she needed to step up her efforts to exorcise the mountains from her daughter. She asked relatives, neighbors, friends. Many had stories of mountain spirits gripping their own families: Hindus had seen the Khabees, a tall floating Islamic spirit in their homes, while Sahani believed she had been possessed, as a teenager, by a Hindu goddess, dressed as a bride. Some of them asked Shakimun to take Farzana to the shrine of Mira Datar, the patron saint of exorcizing spirits in Mumbai. A fifteenth-century boy saint, buried in Gujarat, Mira Datar’s powers to unclench the grasp of spirits stuck inside people were legendary. The green outpost of his distant mausoleum on a busy street in Mumbai close to the city’s vast port lands featured the same spirit cleansing rituals as in the original shrine.

  Farzana tied green glass bangles to the shrine’s walls with a thread, hoping it would elicit the green bangles worn by Marathi brides, and others who came into the city, and a calmer life.

  Three days later, Shakimun told Sahani, Farzana cried through the night, tormented by the mountain spirit. Through the weeks, more healers came to visit, more talismans were tied onto her arm and yet Farzana kept returning to work before dawn, with no memory of it all. She only remembered once going to the shrine in Chalisgaon, which was hours away.

  * * *

  IN THEIR ATTEMPTS to fix the township, Tata Consulting’s engineers looked at waste-to-compost plants and power plants around the world. They were concerned, as other consultants before them had been, that Mumbai’s waste did not contain enough plastic, paper, cloth, or wood scraps to burn well as fuel in an incinerator. Nearly half of what arrived at the township was mushy food waste, saturated by the monsoons, and would not burn easily. The plant could work only seasonally, in fits and starts, the consultants worried.

  But that May, a new report the municipality had commissioned arrived from the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, showing that the calorific value of Mumbai’s waste, which allowed it to burn well and produce power, was high, higher than in most other cities the authors studied. The city’s habits had changed: Mumbaikars had begun throwing away more coconut husk, rice straw, and good-quality plastic, and paper, all of which would burn well. The plant that seemed at first like it would not work, possibly could.

  In the city, the builder’s association had appealed against Oka’s order to stop new construction. They should not be penalized for the municipality’s inability to manage its waste, for its failed plans, they pled. But Oka was immovable. Until the mountains were dealt with, there could be no fresh construction in the city. Soon, they appealed in India’s Supreme Court.

  * * *

  AT FARZANA’S HOME, the spirits seemed to recede with each incantation, only to return. More suggestions poured in. Farzana was not to treat the slopes as an open-air bathroom, as pickers usually did. The spirits rising from desire could catch you when you least expect, grip you, trip you, then not leave you, friends had told Shakimun.

  Yasmeen’s mother told her to take Farzana to the shrine of Makhdoom Shah Baba along the Mahim Bay. Known as the Qutub-E-Kokan, or shining star of the Konkan coast, along which Mumbai lay, the saint had drawn aches and pains from across the city and beyond. The lanes around the shrine were filled with the possessed, dispossessed, disabled, and others the city had stretched to a breaking point.

  A scholar and saint, Makhdoom Shah Baba was said to have lived seven centuries ago and held court at the spot that later became Mahim’s police station. His annual feast began with a procession led by the station’s senior inspector, growing Makhdoom Shah Baba’s glow. Musicians were said to have come on barges to play at the feast. The fair that went with it, spilled into the beach that stretched behind the Dargah, illuminating the Mahim Bay and holding up traffic movement in the curving, finger-shaped city every year. Shakimun felt sure it was the Mahim Dargah that would bring out the Shaitan lodged in Farzana.

  So far, the Shaitan had left only to return. None of the medicines, the talismans, or the rituals seemed to make any lasting difference. “Kabhi kabhi usko pata chal jata hai, Hazri ke liye ja rahein hain, to thodi der ke liye, vo bagal mein baith jata hai,” Roshan Shaikh said, explaining how the Shaitan had eluded Baba Jalaluddin. Sometimes when it knows you are going to have it extricated, it comes out and sits next to you, for a while to escape. But it comes back.

  FOURTEEN

  AS EID APPROACHED IN Banjara Galli, fragrant smells wafted into Moharram Ali’s house and filled Yasmin’s head. She had nothing to offer in return for the food she smelled. She owed its makers money. She told them fasting gave her a headache and she needed to sleep through the evenings to get over it. But she didn’t fast.

  Moharram Ali had tried to work near Rafiq Nagar through the fires. M
any months later, he dismissed the smoke and changed air around the mountains that was unsettling life in the lanes, in his airy, elegant manner. Mountain air doesn’t “suit” everybody, he would say. But he had worked there most of his life, a bit of smoke didn’t bother him, he said. He would not admit that things had changed, that mountain air no longer suited his family. As security tightened, Moharram Ali had dropped into the family’s house at night to pick up money he said he had left behind in his hasty flight. When Yasmin tried calling him, to ask for Eid expenses, his phone was switched off or went unanswered. Friends stalked their home to retrieve loans they had given him. But they never saw him. The legend of Shaitan Singh, of Moharram Ali’s invincible luck, had flamed out untraceably, gutting his family.

  The area’s markets stayed open all night on Chaand Raat, the first night of the crescent moon that would bring Eid. The settlements glowed against the dark mountains, and pickers spilled into the markets to bask in the moonlight, shop with what little money they did have and eat. Others set up stalls to sell bangles, henna cones, spice bundles to layer into pulaos, and edible silver to set, quivering, on sweets, hoping to earn money away from trash. Hyder Ali claimed that Shaitans, creatures of the dark, stayed away in the glow of that night.

  Moharram Ali returned Yasmin’s call that night: she had not wanted her boys to be draped in the mountain filth while their friends wore new, white kurtas for Eid prayers. In the months since their debts had mounted and Moharram Ali left, Mehrun and Ashra’s clothes had inched up and tightened. He would take the girls out to buy new clothes, he said, and send her a set. Yasmin did not know how to tell Sharib, who was filled with rage against his father, that there was nothing left for him or his brother. She went, instead, to ask friends for a loan.

  Mehrun and Ashra met Moharram Ali in the 90 Feet Road market, luminescent with fairy lights and bejeweled shoppers. Mehrun wore a sullen pout, thinking about all that Hera and Sharib said about their father. Ashra held his hand and kept up a chatter he could barely hear as they wove through the crowd. They passed butcher shops without customers, with long, bony carcasses that hung partly carved for days and attracted mostly flies, and avoided piles of fruit on the pavement that had rotted on carts until sellers threw them away. Enchanted, Ashra pointed at dresses with sequins that glittered under the halogen lamps, their stiff taffeta layers making it seem like someone was inside them, as they hung on bamboo poles. Moharram Ali’s face fell when he heard their prices.

  He tried directing her toward cheaper clothes that lay in dark piles. Ashra shook her head, no. Mehrun saw Moharram Ali’s face crumple even as Ashra’s lit up like the lights filtering softly through the fairy-like dresses. In the end, she said she could do without new clothes, and Ashra quickly picked a long, creamy lace dress filled with gold sequins that came with a long skirt and trousers. Mehrun and Ashra, holding her outsized bag, walked back to Sanjay Nagar, while Moharram Ali took his empty wallet back to Rafiq Nagar.

  Yasmin came home a little later, with ₹2,000 she would not have to return: Fitra was charity given on the last night of Ramzan. The following morning, Sharib and Sameer bathed, put on their new, white salwar kurtas, and went out for prayers. Scrubbed of their coating of mountain grit, Yasmin thought her tall, strapping sons looked better than any of the friends whose homes they visited, to collect Eidi, or money as blessings, and sample the treats their homes were redolent with. Ashra wore her gold dress with the skirt, got Mehrun to make braids in her hair, and left for a friend’s house. Yasmin thought her children looked so nice that no one would notice she had not even lit her stove on Eid.

  For years, the mountains and their lanes had emptied out in the wake of the festival, as pickers took trips into the city, stretching the festival to Baasi, or stale Eid. They visited far-flung mausoleums, colonial monuments, and rocky beaches. But that year, the mountains darkened as soon as Eid was over, the lanes stayed full, and creditors returned to Yasmin’s door, hungrier than before.

  Yasmin was often out and when she was away it was twelve-year-old Mehrun who faced them, with no money and little to say. Yasmin thought they would retreat in the face of a child. Then, one afternoon, she ran into the Bishi owner, whose money Moharram Ali had disappeared with, as she entered their lane. Yasmin told him, as she usually did, that she would return the money when Moharram Ali returned. He interrupted: if she didn’t have his money, she should send Mehrun to his house, at night, as payment for the debt.

  Unlike the other Siddiqui children, who were tall and strong, Mehrun was fragile, almost breakable. She seemed translucent, with her milky complexion, permanent blush, and hazel eyes. Her presence in conversations at home, was gauzy too, conducted mostly through glances. Both Moharram Ali and Yasmin thought she looked just like them. “Mera bachpan hai ye,” Yasmin had said. She is my childhood. In the moves the family had made since Moharram Ali’s disappearance, the dolls he had collected from the mountains for Mehrun and Ashra had disappeared, the sewing machine Mehrun had used to stitch clothes for them taken away by creditors. “Kabhi socha hi nahi ki vo gudiya hai aur main insaan,” Mehrun said. I never thought they were just dolls and I was a person.

  * * *

  YASMIN MOSTLY KEPT her door locked so people would think she did not live there anymore. She needed money not only to repay loans but also to send Mehrun and Ashra to an orphanage or hostel, away from her creditors and troubles, Yasmin figured. The Bishi owner’s words played in her mind. A friend told her about an agency that hired women to carry babies for wealthy but infertile couples in their wombs. She told Yasmin that women from their lanes had been applying to be surrogates, a job that could pay them lakhs of rupees. The mountains closing on them, it was the only way to make good money in their lanes, Yasmin heard. She queued up at their office in Dreams Mall, a shopping center in a suburb nearby. She signed consent forms and went through medical tests but, at thirty-seven, was not selected.

  With the rent for their room overdue, Yasmin traveled to a hospital across the creek, where she heard a doctor was looking for a surrogate. The hospital was unlike any she had seen before: there were no sick people or medical smells in its softly lit, beige lobby. She got chatting with the burqa-clad woman sitting next to her. They were unlikely to be chosen unless the younger women failed the tests, she said: she had already moved from surrogacy to medical trials. She got paid several thousand rupees for a few days of popping pills and medical tests, she said. Yasmin begged her to take her along.

  A few days later, when she got the call to join a trial in the city of Baroda, more than 400 km north of Mumbai, Yasmin left Mehrun and Ashra with Moharram Ali and asked Sharib and Sameer to sleep at a kata shop. Then Yasmin took the five-hour train ride north, and returned, days later, with a few thousand rupees that she used to rent a new room and make some repayments. A week later, she got another call. It was a woman she had met at the test center, asking if she wanted to go for another “study.” Yasmin told her she would meet her at the train station. With the putrid grip of the mountains fading away, she slid into the dark underworld of medical trials.

  At test facilities, managers ushered her into quiet, air-conditioned rooms. Women who tested anemic or had low blood pressure were sent home, usually in tears. Others were ushered into a room where someone explained long legal contracts saying they willingly participated in the test and would not hold the company responsible if trial drugs made them sick. Yasmin could not read a word of the Hindi script they were written in and relied on the verbal explanation to sign the contract. Mostly, she tried not to listen too hard.

  Yasmin tested contraceptives, epilepsy drugs, and pills for heart conditions, among others. She listed Mehrun as the beneficiary if something were to happen to her and money was due to her family. The drugs were usually being tested by an Indian organization on behalf of a large western pharmaceutical company that had developed it for use in international markets where it was illegal to test unapproved drugs on people. But without human testing, comp
anies would not know whether the medicine worked, and what side effects it had. So, it was Yasmin, and the other women like her on whom the future of global drug discovery rested.

  For a few days, Yasmin and the other women stayed at the test facility while scientists and doctors kept them under observation for any induced illnesses or side effects. Some women threw up, got headaches, dizzy spells, or fevers. Others sat up on their beds, in dormitory-style rooms, recounting stories of the disappointments and struggles that had filled their lives and brought them there. They wiped away tears in the dark.

  As Yasmin waited for sleep in the eerily quiet, air-conditioned test facility, the meeting with the Bishi owner tormented her. She had asked a friend’s husband to speak to him before she left. Nearly everyone in their lanes owed him money, he had said. When he asked for it, they said they could hardly work on the mountains anymore, that they would pay when Yasmin did. She told him Moharram Ali had disappeared. The Bishi owner said he was nearly broke himself. He regretted it, but he had to force Yasmin.

  Cold and awake, in bed, Yasmin thought of her visits to orphanages. She would have to show she was divorced or widowed to enroll Mehrun and Ashra. But Moharram Ali still dropped in sometimes, and she wanted that more than divorce. In the morning, she awoke to days filled with elaborate meals, laid out to give them strength. Yasmin and her new friends dissected recipes and planned to replicate them for their children when they got home with the money.

  In a few days, tests were repeated to ensure the drug hadn’t caused any side effects, and Yasmin and the others were paid and sent home, with the instruction that they were supposed to be back in a month or so for a final check on how they had reacted to it.