Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  Yasmin returned to Deonar with money and sometimes even gifts. She bought a tin of ghee for Hera, who was pregnant. Next time, she got a box of peanut brittle that she knew the children liked and had not eaten for a while. Creditors dropped in as Yasmin entered Banjara Galli. She handed over her money, curled up on her mattress, and napped to the hum of the children around her. Sharib and Sameer saved up to get her a boiled egg or beetroots: she had told them they were fed beetroot salad at the trial facility to ward off the anemia that the drugs could induce.

  * * *

  SHARIB BROODED FOR days after Yasmin returned from the medical trials. He was apprenticed with a mason, when he could not get to the mountains: soon, he would find a construction job and earn enough to repay their loans, so she would not need to go to any more trials, he told her. Until then, though, she repaid her undiminishing debts, serviced with a rate of interest about which she had no idea. When her creditors found Yasmin, she just handed over whatever she had.

  Every time Moharram Ali called in, Yasmin thought he might be back for good. But it was always the same: he took some money, hung out some hope, and left again. The mountains, which had once yielded gold into his hands, now bore down on him. Winds howled on the slopes and rains lashed them. When he walked through their passes and clearings he slipped and slid. Guards patrolled even at night, and the flashlights they waved in curly sideways patterns to catch pickers in the dark, moved in his mind in the daytime as well.

  When he was on the mountains, Moharram Ali felt they smelled gingery. The smell, mingled with the stench of rotting trash, made him nauseous and clung to him. In fact, the municipality had given a ₹1.5 crore contract to spray herbal deodorant and disinfectant on the mountains, to quell their stink. Opposition politicians had asked if it was not somewhat indulgent to spend so much on perfuming trash mountains.

  Although she was on the trash slopes more often, Farzana had not noticed the smell. Mumbai’s garbage convoys were slowly returning, and she was consumed in chasing them. But they often emptied mud and concrete, rather than trash she could sell. Every year, the municipality fixed roads and bridges before rains lashed the city: Mumbai’s pounding rains could wash away homes that were too old or too new, and their crushed debris piled up in heaps around the city and arrived at the mountains for weeks. Farzana saw mud, gravel, bits of concrete, bricks and cement emptying at the mountains all day, burying the old trash and pressing it down. Moharram Ali heard that all the gold had melted with the fires and would not be found again.

  FIFTEEN

  DAYS AFTER EID, FARZANA had awoken, late one night. “Mujhe chhod do. Main kuch nahi karoongi,” she had cried aloud, to a roomful of people submitted to sleep. Leave me. I won’t cause any trouble. Her painful sobs rose slowly, filling the house until everyone was up.

  Neighbors came, expecting to see a fight, only to find Hyder Ali and the others standing around Farzana. They watched bewildered as she sat on the mattress, crying. “Chhod Do. Main vapas nahi aoongi.” I won’t return. Leave me alone. It was probably the guards she saw in her sleep, Jehangir thought. He should never have let her go back on the slopes after the doctor told her not to. It was the Shaitan, Shakimun knew, pressing Budhi into service for immediate relief. She chanted and splashed holy water on Farzana. The family waited sleepily for the prayers to work. But Buddhi had exhausted them and retreated outside, before sleep overpowered Farzana.

  This would have to be the year that the stubborn spirits left, Shakimun decided, soon after Eid. She restarted the incantations, manifestations, and collection of talismans. Healers waved lemons in slow circles around Farzana, then eggs, and then threw them on the floor so they cracked, releasing the spirits drawn into them. A healer burned a lock of her hair in a weak, rain-dampened fire outside Hyder Ali’s house while reciting Koranic verses to draw out the spirit entangled in her.

  Shakimun returned to the Dargah at Mahim with Farzana. Outsized cooking pots boiled and steamed around them: Makhdoom Shah Baba was known for feeding the city’s hungry. On wheeled wooden boards, limbless people circled around the mother and daughter. Old, bent people stretched their arms out, asking for money, to buy food, in Baba’s name. Plates of food arrived, paid for by a wealthy patron, and the gaggle around them drifted away. They saw the Mujawar they had met before, sitting at his shop front. He did not seem surprised to see them and resumed his prayers for Farzana.

  Then, a few days later, when Sahani came home, she found Farzana sitting alone, resting her chin on her muddied and drawn-up knees. “Vo dikhta hai,” Farzana said. I can see him. Sahani followed Farzana’s eyes, which stared straight ahead at the kitchen counter. “Vo baitha hai,” she continued. He’s sitting there. But Sahani couldn’t see anything, she later recalled, and worried her sister was going crazy.

  The following Thursday, the Mujawar at Mahim sat Farzana in the courtyard, filling with others seeking separation from spirits. Shadow flowers streamed in through the grill with the fading sunlight. Woody smoke from the burning bark of the Loban tree rose and mingled with the misty sky. It thickened to clear the fog within, as the drumming began. People sitting in the courtyard stirred. They swayed slowly at first and then faster as the drums picked up. They ached and swirled in pain to the beat. By the time it abated, the sun had set and the courtyard was bathed in the cool, purple light of the Mumbai monsoon. But Farzana had stayed cool too.

  She was at the mountain slopes before dawn broke, the next day, telling her friends she had only been away for a trip. The city’s attempts to shrink the mountains were picking up too. Did she know, pickers asked her, that Tata company was coming to take over the mountains, to turn the mountain waste to power? They were nearly here. Jehangir had heard that Tata officials had already taken plastic and paper from the slopes and used it to generate some power at their campus across the creek. If it all worked out, mountain plastic would begin going to their facility, he had heard. Prices for plastic would go up. He asked Farzana to start picking the thin plastic carry bags that did not fetch much money at the kata shops but that would get fed to their plant. Optimism began to rise in Jehangir again.

  At Mahim, though, Farzana’s spirit stubbornly remained in place. Shaitans could stay elusive in the glare of a crowd, but cling hard, the aging Mujawar told them, like desire itself. The following week, he would trick the Shaitan into believing there was no one around, that it could reveal itself, and then drive it away, in a parda hazri, a manifestation within curtains. No one but the Mujawar and Farzana would be there.

  The next Thursday, Sahani and Shakimun had stayed at a distance while the Mujawar took Farzana into a room at the back of the shrine. After a while, the Mujawar came out, triumphant: it was a Shaitan from filth, he said. It’s gone now. Sahani interrupted him, to say yes, Farzana was a trashpicker—the Mujawar had got it right this time. “Ab vo theek ho jayegi. Bas vahaan vapas jaane mat dena, Unka saya rahta hai,” he said. She will be fine now. Just don’t let her go where he caught her. They linger on there.

  Jehangir agreed that Farzana needed to stay at home, although he didn’t believe in the spirits but in the doctor’s earlier diagnosis that the mountains had poisoned his sister. She was not to work at the slopes, and he asked her to sleep on the mezzanine floor, with his family. He would watch over her. Shakimun had asked friends to look for a match for Farzana. Until then, she would keep Farzana home and teach her to cook.

  And yet, often, when they called her down for tea in the mornings, Farzana was not there. They were not sure when she had climbed down the steps, opened the door, and left. Even the goats, tethered at the door, had not bleated, Shakimun noticed. Friends told her they saw the Khaadi ka Bhoot on the slopes, before daybreak. Farzana bought vada pav, samosas, tea at the mountains or ate at the restaurants near the municipal office and stayed out all day.

  Shakimun sent Jehangir, Alamgir, Sahani, or whoever else she could find to bring her back. But Farzana was never at the mountain they heard she was at. She had left with empti
ed garbage caravans, getting to clearings before trash arrived at them. Her growing collection of charms dangled off her. Anyone at home, who went to a shrine, brought one back to add to it. Slowly, Farzana began sleeping through the night. With a progress as slow as the aging mountains moving out of the city, the Shaitan began to leave.

  On July 27, the consultants presented their plan to shrink the township of discarded desires to Mumbai’s municipal commissioner, Ajoy Mehta. Through April and May, they had walked mountain slopes with municipal officials. They had collected samples and drawn up reports that laid the mountains bare, and the toxic halo that seeped in and settled into those who lived around. They had gone over the rules that bound the mountains, considered the municipality’s brief, and made a plan for a plant that would shrink them and produce power for the city.

  The mountains’ noxious halo had thickened, data the consultants collected from the municipality’s air quality monitoring laboratory showed. Hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous, flammable gas known for its rotten egg smell, had more than tripled between 2010 and 2015, as had methane, feeding the ever-burning fires. Carbon monoxide, which could cause headaches and dizziness, was five times higher. Rag-picking could cause confusion, laceration, indigestion, and hazy vision, among other illnesses, the report said.

  The consultants proposed clearing a section out of the 132-hectare township, where, eventually, more than half the 5,100 metric tons that garbage caravans delivered every day would get fed to the plant. At first, it would be segregated, passing through a metal screen and then a magnetic screen to keep out larger bits of garbage. The rest would be spread on the incinerator floor, where hot air would blow from below, “causing the waste to bubble and boil, much as a liquid, allowing intimate interaction between the waste and the fuel and facilitating drying and combustion,” the report said. The heat would produce electricity, which would get supplied to the city—although often less than the municipality’s brief of 25 MW of power, it would be enough to power thousands of homes.

  The burning incinerator would spew smoke over the mountains and the communities around, and the consultants planned for three rows of trees around the plant to absorb it. The trees, whose verdant pictures they stuck in the report, could reduce ammonia released from the plant by more than half and absorb most of the dust thrown up by the incinerator, the consultants said. The plant and its border of flowering trees would “improve the aesthetic of Deonar,” while saving more than 8 million tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases over two decades. Without it, Mumbai would need the Deonar township to double in size to accommodate the city’s trash, by 2021, they estimated.

  The future they laid out was utopian, so close it hovered in the room: as it shrank the mountains, and the trees soaked its halo, the plant would create better jobs in the lanes. The twenty-two separate diseases they could give the pickers would fade away.

  Soon after the presentation, officials and political leaders from the Shiv Sena, the party that controlled Mumbai’s municipality, had begun meeting executives from India’s largest power companies informally. The waste-to-energy plant they had planned at Deonar was to be among the world’s largest, they said. The contract to make it would be given through an international bid. There was a lot of interest, they said. Large foreign waste-to-power companies were keen on the project. They coaxed power company executives to bid for it. Being in Mumbai gave them a moral responsibility to make the plant that would clean the city and its air.

  They would invite bidding in a few weeks. And then, the mountains, their halo, and their spirits would finally leave the city.

  SIXTEEN

  AUGUST 15, 2016, INDIAN Independence Day, was also the first birthday of Alamgir’s son Faizan. Farzana had begun saving for it soon after her own birthday. As dusk fell, Farzana and Farha stood on 90 Feet Road, as they did every year, and watched bikers whizz by waving flags. They collected the chocolates and sweets the bikers distributed, and soaked in the patriotic songs playing on loudspeakers installed in the street. They walked back through their lane to more such songs floating softly out of homes.

  Farzana changed into a long, white lace kurta with dark green piping on its edges. She put on a deep red lipstick, powdered her face, and pinned back some of her long, loose hair. In a photo studio nearby, she held Faizan in her arms and posed against a leaf-green curtain, her fingers digging into his pudgy cheeks. The pressure to smile led only to two intent stares in the photographs. As the flash popped, Faizan burst into tears.

  When Farzana woke up the next morning, the rain of the previous evening had abated, leaving an overcast sky. She put on bright blue leggings, a parrot-green kurta, a black jacket, and a large white handkerchief around her hair. Carrying her gumboots, she left unnoticed while her parents lingered over half-filled tumblers of tea. Farzana stopped at Jehana’s house to pick up her sister, and the two walked over to the mountains to work. It was a little before 10 A.M. and the sun traveled slowly across the sky behind gray clouds. It was a mottled day.

  After the fires, the municipality had created a new trash hill toward the creek, across from the gobar, or prawn loop, which was officially called loop one. Pickers called it the new loop one: trucks were increasingly sent to empty on it, and pickers followed them to the rising slopes. It had quickly developed a reputation for being slippery and precarious, but they had stayed on, hoping its craggy slopes would smoothen as trash settled on them.

  That morning, with the clouds threatening to erupt, Farzana and Jehana thought the new loop one was their best chance at finding trash before the weather made it impossible. As they walked up the slope, they saw yellow and orange bulldozers and forklifts buzzing fitfully against the gray skies. Trucks had already been here. Pickers were at work, several in black jackets like her own, Farzana noticed.

  They watched trucks come in through the gate, pass the municipal office, and grind slowly up the slushy slope toward them. As the trucks got to the clearing, pickers fell on them, working quickly. Farzana put on her earphones and reached for the pick of trash before the bulldozers moved in and began pushing it down the slope. As bulldozers reversed to flatten the clearing, she retreated, moving to the rhythm of the music and the machines. It was always songs of infidelity, from Hindi films she hardly ever saw. Absorbed in this intricate dance, Farzana barely looked up to see the skies rumble. More than an hour went by in the mucky, frantic scrambles to fill her bag with plastic bottles. Farzana barely felt it.

  A truck drove up, and Farzana dived into the scramble to sift through its contents—wire, mushy paper, lurid colored cloth, and vegetable peels—to pick out her squashed plastic bottles. Tangled clumps fell into her bag. She would sort through it at home, Farzana thought, as she reached out for more. Jehana worked close by. Emptied, the truck was driving downhill when it got stuck in the muddy track. It revved up, noisily, trying to move ahead. Farzana looked up quickly, watched it struggling, and returned to fill her bag. It stayed stuck.

  In a little while, she looked up and saw a bulldozer on the slope down below. It was moving backward and uphill toward the clearing. Farzana saw it get closer. Pickers rummaged around her. She waved lazily at the driver and went back to filling her bag.

  Then she heard the bulldozer again and looked up. It had stopped and then restarted and was moving back up the hill toward her. She saw some pickers scatter to get away from its path. She took a step forward too and nearly tripped and fell into the slimy trash around her. Surprised, she looked down and saw a wire entangled around her ankle. She banged her foot on the clearing to free it but the wire only pulled tighter, cutting into her. She twisted her foot around in the air. The wire stayed stuck. The bulldozer moved closer. She sat on the clearing and struggled to untwist the wire from her foot. It would not come off, and the bulldozer was now moving closer and closer.

  She stood, carefully, and waved at the driver to warn him that she was stuck behind him. The wire pulled her back awkwardly and she nearly fell again. Farzana picked
up stones and threw them at the driver to get his attention. They didn’t reach him. She yelled at him to stop moving back but he kept backing up slowly toward her.

  The bulldozer was nearly at the clearing, and Farzana was still rooted to the spot. She screamed and craned, trying to catch the eye of the driver inside the cabin. She was close enough to see that he had earphones on. He was probably listening to music—her voice could not reach him. She waved at him frantically. Still, the bulldozer moved closer. She noticed he was wearing sunglasses. He could not see her, she thought.

  That is when Farzana tripped and fell faceup on the slushy mountain clearing. Hyder Ali believed it was the Shaitan who had gripped her and pulled her down. The bulldozer drove over her left thigh as she lay on the ground. Screaming and flailing, Farzana tried to pull herself up from her stomach from underneath the bulldozer. It shoveled up a load of trash and moved forward again. Farzana fell back in agony.

  Nearby, pickers were gesticulating and screaming wildly at the driver too. They were not sure which of the black jackets was under the bulldozer and called out different names. As the bulldozer drove back downhill, pickers tried moving closer to see who had been crushed under it. The bulldozer dropped its load of trash downhill and began moving back up again. The driver did not notice the frantic waving around him.

  He drove back slowly, rolling over Farzana a second time. This time, the bulldozer went all the way up the left side of her body, nearly to her chest. Jehana and some of the other pickers were shouting, trying to get the driver’s attention. Finally, catching sight of the commotion, he stopped the bulldozer. A skinny young man with a straggly mustache jumped out of his cabin and walked back to find a bloodied mess under one of his tires. Farzana’s bloated face emerged just in front of it. Most of the rest of her was underneath the vehicle. Her eyes had nearly popped out of their sockets and stared at him, startled. Blood trickled out of her ears and nose. The driver turned and ran away. Some pickers chased him downhill. Fear kept him ahead of them. In a few minutes, they gave up and turned back to check on Farzana.