Castaway Mountain
Page 19
One afternoon, Yasmin decided to go to Mehrun’s school to explore if she could return for classes or get a leaving certificate so she could enroll her elsewhere, far away from the mountains. Mother and daughter covered their heads with dupattas they held tightly at their chest, wore their slippers, and turned to close the house door behind them. Yasmin began to giggle, seeming childlike. “Aadmi ghus sakta hai,” she pointed out: the bottom plank of the door had come off, leaving a hole. A man could get through it. Mehrun placed the plank loosely in place so a potential intruder would think it was a full door, then turned to leave, looking nearly like the young woman she was becoming. The two walked out along their lane.
The newly built orange and green school building was across from a public park and had a large foyer with pictures of national leaders, most of whom Mehrun could not recognize. They walked up the stairs, painted with signs asking the children not to litter, in Marathi and Urdu. There was a poster showing pictures of children breaking stones in a quarry, with slogans encouraging them to go to school rather than work. But Mehrun’s guess was as good as Yasmin’s. She could not read it, although she had studied in Urdu until middle school. At every landing, the views of the trash mountains streamed in through the geometrical grills in the wall. At every landing, the reluctant Mehrun asked to go home. Yasmin kept her going.
As they reached the fourth floor, Mehrun looked breathless and relieved. It was Friday and school had closed for the day. They walked back downstairs, Mehrun telling Yasmin this was the first time she had come back to her school since she left more than a year ago. She had told her friends and teachers then that she was moving to a private English school. She would only speak English the next time they met, they had teased her. Since then, they had moved on to the next class and learned more Urdu and more English. “Main unse kya kahoongi? ” Mehrun said. What will I say if I run into them?
Outside, they joined the lane jammed with handcarts and shoppers they had seen from high up. A Friday sermon began to crackle over a loudspeaker as the two walked through the clouds of flies. If you do your namaz, your prayers, before you sleep, then you will never sleep alone. He will be with you, a voice called over the loudspeaker, rising above the din of shoppers, as they walked back home.
* * *
WEEKS LATER, THE Shiv Sena had nosed ahead of the BJP in the municipal elections, but didn’t secure enough seats to elect its own mayor: again, the two parties would have to work to realize the city’s rising aspirations together. As expected, the Samajwadi Party had won in the shadow of the mountains made by the leftovers of Mumbai’s aspirations, and hardly made a dent in the rest of the city. The city and its mountains would stay in different worlds.
TWENTY-ONE
IN THE NEATLY DESIGNED schedule that municipal consultants had made in their project report for the prospective waste plant, March 2017 was filled with blue blobs, showing the months when the company, which by then would have been selected, would finalize the design. By the time the court deadline came, in June, the blobs in the report’s table turned green and then orange, showing the beginning of construction on their schedule for the project that would finally burn away the city’s trash. The colors moved forward like a rising wave on the long schedule in the report, but no plant was underway at Deonar. No bids had come. More than two months before the deadline to close the township, the municipality was back in court, asking to extend its life for four more years.
Raj Sharma, the activist, had filed his own petition saying that hardly anything Oka had asked for, the boundary wall, the cameras, the lights, and the cessation of dumping building debris, had happened. For months, he had photographed people getting through the broken wall, and seen debris fill roads within the township and top the mountains. As the security tightened farther around the mountains’ border with the lanes, other court committee members had heard that pickers made rafts with the rubber and plastic they foraged, and sailed into the township through the creek. They had asked for barbed wire to be installed along the creek’s edge. It had not been fixed yet either. Sharma opposed the extension of the deadline. The court set a date to hear both petitions, a week before the June 30 deadline to stop dumping garbage at Deonar.
Hearings began in the packed Room 13, a year and a half after Justice Oka had handed down the construction ban and set the deadline to close the Deonar township. Petitions filed in public interest, such as Sharma’s, were presented in turn before Oka’s ornate, elevated chair, forming a moving tableau of Mumbai’s aches and wounds, of dreams that clashed as they rose. The concerns were varied: the city’s cramped jails, the sound of the millions-strong orchestra that played day and night at festivals, residents cooking meats that their neighbors’ gods prohibited them from even smelling, the smoke that wafted from unseen garbage mountains into its rising towers. Oka make space for endless dreams and needs in a city with little space.
Petitioners, lawyers, and an assortment of government functionaries squeezed past one another to recount these often years-long troubles to Oka. The only comfort in the courtroom’s crush came from the air conditioning that had been installed when Justice Chandrachud had adjudicated on the Deonar mountains’ fate, nearly a decade before. A deep thud sounded as Deonar’s case papers, accumulated over years and in which the mountains’ invisible army appeared only as fire-starters, landed on Oka’s desk.
Why would Mumbai’s garbage be emptied on the hills for four more years, he asked when the waste rules gave only two more to fix garbage dumping grounds around the country. Anil Sakhare, the municipality’s long-standing lawyer on the case, said it had made substantial progress on meeting Oka’s goals and the waste rules. It was Sharma who had an obstructionist attitude.
The diminutive Sharma stood behind his lawyers in his oversized shirt and high-waist pants and nudged his lawyer to point out that he had asked to visit the mountains officially. When the municipality had not set it up, he had got through the cracks in the wall, photographed the mountains, and written a report for the court detailing all the ways in which Oka’s orders had not touched them. Oka asked the municipality to allow Sharma and his lawyers to inspect its mountain registers. He set the next hearing for June 29, one day before the deadline for dumping to end at Deonar.
As Sharma stepped out into the colonnaded corridor that ran alongside the courtroom, a municipal engineer pulled him aside, into a sun-filled courtyard, and chatted affably. The waste-to-energy plant they had planned for Deonar would take off this time, he told Sharma. He made no mention of the absence of bidders so far or that the deadline had been extended and norms relaxed, in the hope that it would help attract bids. Mumbai’s waste could produce enough power, he said. It would just have to be dried several times, to reduce its wetness, before incinerating it. He bought Sharma tea from one of the tea vendors who walked around the busy court, steaming kettle in hand and little glasses stuffed in their pants pockets.
“We were born here and lived here our whole lives,” he said animatedly, in Hindi. “We know what works in this city. I don’t look at what is happening anywhere else.” Swallowing the last dregs of his tea, he expanded on how the project would transform the city and the Deonar township. “People tell us Pune model, Pune model. We should look at the Pune model,” he said, referring to the awards the neighboring city had won for managing its waste. “They have no idea how big and complex Mumbai is.” They needed Sharma’s help getting their project off the ground, he said—these court cases only soaked up their energy and delayed the plant. Sharma nodded.
Sharma’s lawyers calculated that more construction debris than garbage had been dumped on the mountains over the last few months. He wondered why garbage traders were in jail for dumping debris illegally on the mountains, when the municipality was dumping excess amounts of the stuff itself. Municipal officials said they were doing this within permissible limits and that it was needed to quell fires, make roads to reach the township’s far end and fix it.
* * *
Oka looked down through his glasses, selected pages from the case papers, then looked up and read out the orders he’d given on improving the state’s jails, months before. Had they done it? Lawyers said that much like at Deonar, a committee had been formed to improve prison infrastructure and reduce overcrowding in jails on Oka’s instructions. It would submit a report in a few months. Oka interrupted, his voice rising. He didn’t think progress would be made, even months later. For a few moments, the lawyers and petitioners in the courtroom looked up from their own case papers to take in his anger. Cases could stretch on in court but in the city, the delays could lead to abrupt, dark turns—the mountain fires, Shetye’s death. Behind the cases, the courses of the lives they obscured sometimes turned, ended, or darkened forever, through accidents, fires, violence, and the lengthening shadow of the mountains.
The Deonar lawyers moved in for their hearing, Sharma’s lawyers saying Oka’s orders had not reached the township and the municipality’s lawyers saying they had. They only needed to extend the township’s life a little longer. Oka instructed Sharma’s lawyer to suggest names of waste management experts who could visit the mountains and report back to the court on whether his orders had been implemented. He extended the deadline for halting the dumping till the next hearing, a few weeks later.
A few days after the hearing, Sharma began calling experts he had met as he traversed through Mumbai’s waste world for years. He asked them to visit the trash township at the court’s direction and report back to Oka.
* * *
AS THE COURT and the city attempted to tighten their grip on Mumbai’s waste, it kept spilling from underneath them. No one seemed to know how much waste there was: one report estimated that the city generated around 9,000 metric tons of garbage every day, concluding that as Mumbaikars continued to move out to suburban utopias, their waste would follow them, growing only by 1 percent a year for the next twenty years. Deonar could almost absorb this; it seemed to suggest and it fitted the municipality’s contention in court that the township could keep going for longer.
But another study, commissioned slightly earlier, which had formed a part of the thick tender documents for the waste-to-energy plant, estimated that the city generated 11,198 metric tons of garbage and 2,500 metric tons of construction waste every day.
Together, the reports commissioned by the municipality suggested there was not so much trash that the Deonar township would get further overfilled and have to close but there was enough for the plant to make a profit. Mumbai’s garbage mysteriously swelled and deflated to fit its precarious plans to manage waste.
A scandal had also erupted over a garbage truck contractor who had sued the municipality for not paying his bills. The municipality’s own investigation revealed that some of the garbage the contractor ferried, and billed for, never existed. Mud was mixed in with waste to add to the weight of garbage. He was paid for the increased weight and passed a portion of the payment to municipal officials. It seemed officials had colluded with him to make inflated claims for garbage, to get overpaid, over several years. The Lohiya report, the police department’s investigation into the fires in January, had also found the weigh bridges at the township were fixed to show at least 10 percent overweighing of garbage so contractors could be overpaid. The artificially inflated garbage brought with it money for equipment that was not needed, fees for transporting and handling garbage that did not exist, and pay for contractors who were not needed.
Digital cameras and automated weighing machines were installed at the weigh bridges where garbage trucks brought in their load to ensure it was garbage that emptied from trucks, not mud. Payment registers started to be monitored carefully. But the problems seemed endless. “Can you ever repair a house while you are living in it?” an aging and retired municipal engineer who had managed the Deonar township mountains and the city’s waste for years asked. “As long as waste keeps coming to Deonar, how will we fix it? And our waste won’t stop coming.”
TWENTY-TWO
IN APRIL 2017, NADEEM’S uncles had come to see Farzana. The day before, Hyder Ali had called his future son-in-law in a panic, asking how he should explain Farzana’s scars, her limp, to them, and Nadeem had told him not to say anything. Tell them only that you sent a proposal through Alamgir, he had said. Hyder Ali had felt his nerves calm as Nadeem navigated the way forward. When Nadeem’s uncles arrived, Hyder Ali talked about their families, their villages, and the journey both families had made to settle in the shadow of the mountains.
Farzana had come into the room before them and sat with her gaze lowered. She wore a peach and gold kurta, its long sleeves hiding her wounds. Her sisters had covered her head with a dupatta and stuck a hairpin to make sure it did not slip. Hyder Ali told the men she stayed home, had learned Arabic, and knew some verses from the Koran.
Nadeem’s uncles approved of the match, asking only to advance the wedding to May, so they could attend. The wedding date was set for May 21, six days before the first fast of Ramzan that year. Most of Shaheen’s family from Nasik, and her husband’s family from farther away in Akola, would cram into hired SUVs and drive up for the wedding, she told Hyder Ali. He tried to dissuade her from inviting so many people. She called back later, only to tell him the number in their party had gone up.
Hyder Ali had hired the wedding hall at the entrance of their lane, and the next few weeks went by in a frenzied scramble to collect money for the growing wedding party. Jehangir, Alamgir, Badre Alam, and he borrowed from friends and worked nights on the mountains. He asked Yasmin, who said she had no money to lend. But she had friends with political connections. She took him to meet their state representative, who asked an assistant to hand over some money and a dress for Farzana’s trousseau. Hyder Ali wasn’t sure how these bits added together, in those last few days, but they did.
On the day of the wedding, Sahani and Jehana helped Farzana into a red dress embroidered with gold flowers that Shaheen sent. They draped a red dupatta over her head and topped it with a blanket of milky tuberoses and scarlet roses. The flowers framed her face and felt cool and velvety against her palm when she touched them. The heavy costume, topped with gold jewelry and the flowers, kept Farzana’s movement so limited that no quivers or limps showed. She kept her head bowed and unsmiling as Jehana had asked her to, making Farzana a demure, fragrant, and glowing bride. In the wedding hall, Nadeem sat in a separate room, wearing his own flower blanket over a white and powder blue salwar kameez. A crescent paper moon was strung across his forehead, a flower veil hanging below it.
Banjara Galli had emptied into the hall that night. Yasmin came with the children, Ashra wearing the dress and skirt that Moharram Ali had bought for her at the market last Ramzan. They ran into neighbors and old friends from the mountains. And yet, Nadeem’s relatives more than matched them. Together, they packed the rooms, the greatest sign of a successful wedding. The flame-colored meat curries began emptying out too quickly.
All evening, the men had pushed and edged toward Nadeem and the women toward Farzana. They paused to pose for pictures, in which Farzana’s face was turned down, eyes on the floor and her new, gold handbag held up against her waist, facing the camera. After signing the marriage contract, Nadeem took off his veil, and he and Farzana met guests together. Nadeem’s gold flecked pompadour was teased even higher to make him look taller. And yet, his bride inched over him. Later, both would insist it was her heels, Farzana pointing to her shoulder to show where she reached up to on Nadee
m, the height for good brides.
Guests crowded around Farzana’s trousseau. On a cot that was Jehana’s gift, Shakimun had laid out clothes, oversized cooking dishes, and sandals, along with gold studs Hyder Ali got to replace the ones he had taken out of Farzana’s ears while she lay unconscious in the hospital. Friends wanted to tell Shakimun to add their gifts but it was hard to speak to her. “Meri maa poori shaam roi,” Farzana recalled. My mother cried all evening. Five of Shakimun’s children had married already, but letting go of Farzana was too hard.
Farzana moved to Nadeem’s house that night. Two days later, they dressed in wedding clothes again and left for their daylong honeymoon in the city, accompanied by Nadeem’s cousin, his wife, and their children. They went to Haji Ali, the white marble mausoleum that rose from the sea, where Farzana had bought the rice grain and had it engraved with their names. They walked along the slim, rocky pathway, with waves lashing its sides, Farzana making sure to walk behind Nadeem, as she had seen brides do. Groups of beggars lined the pathway, chanting softly, asking for money. Little stubs of limbs hung below their elbows or knees. Farzana drew back, turning away, as they edged closer. They could have been her, Farzana thought. She could have been them.
Nadeem and Farzana entered the mausoleum through separate entrances, gave flowers and a brocade sheet to be laid over the tomb to the Mujawars, the keepers of the tomb, who waved and then tapped peacock feathers on their heads to bless them. Then they walked out through the sun-filled courtyard, onto the windblown rocks, jutting from the waves, where Farzana sat and felt sea spray on her face. Nadeem asked his cousin to photograph him, leaning into the waves. Later, they would go to a photo studio where Farzana sat on a cardboard crescent moon with Nadeem’s baby nephew on her lap. Nadeem stood behind them, amid the stars in the backdrop, holding the moon’s strings for her.