Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  Hills got more carefully formed, beginning near the municipal office, where cuchra trains had once ended, delivering the city’s shed possessions. The first one, closest to the office, was mostly reserved for offal waste. Others rose along the creek’s curve, filling up with everything else the city discarded, layered with mud, ending in the eighth mountain, whose steep cliff dropped into the water.

  Rane watched electric poles and wires arrive at the township to install streetlights. But the lights had not come on. He heard pickers stole them to buy drugs or that cables snapped from the weight of trash or from coming under its trucks. Later, a few lights came, installed on high masts, casting a distant light on night pickers.

  The municipality fitfully began measuring the chemicals that hung in the mountain air, as the waste rules asked it to, making its halo that irritated lungs, eyes, and caused respiratory diseases around the mountains.

  Doctors around the mountains said that more than half their patients came with respiratory ailments. They had asthma, bronchitis, persistent coughs. Pickers’ weakened chests made them an easy home for tuberculosis and drug-resistant tuberculosis. An airborne infection, it ran deep in the cramped homes in the lanes around the mountains. Pickers also arrived with interstitial lung disease, which would thicken the tissue around their lungs, consuming them within five years of breathlessness and coughing. The patients who came with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the air sacs in their lungs weakened and their airways badly inflamed, would live longer, but doctors knew that in both cases there was no cure, only deterioration. The doctors prescribed oxygen pumps they knew their patients could not afford.

  “The problem is, you can’t tell if a person is sick because of living near waste. You need an expert,” Marco Armiero, an environmental historian from Naples, explained. The Mafia in his own region, called the Camorra, had brought toxic industrial waste from northern Italy and strewn it at landfills, as well as deserted country roads and on Neapolitan farms, known for their produce, ripened by the balmy Tyrrhenian Sea air. From long distances, drivers could see the flames from bonfires made of heaps of wires to extract the copper within, just as Farzana had done with her slim pickings, making the region known as the Land of Fires. Rates for some cancers had risen to twice the national rate around then, giving the region another name: the Triangle of Death.

  * * *

  FOR YEARS, AS the court hearings in Mumbai wore on, municipal lawyers described how the municipality had tried to keep the township out of city limits, to prevent toxins from leaking into the city air and water. But the mountains crept in. There were nearly 13 million metric tons of garbage at the Deonar Dumping Grounds, officials estimated. How could it place a floor under it, as the rules asked it to? The hills stretched over 326 acres. How could it make a ceiling to contain the air that blew into the city? A boundary wall built on layers of trash would be unstable, bound to fall, they said. The lawyers pled for more time.

  Rane sometimes heard of the tests the municipality ran to incinerate garbage and produce electricity, as cities elsewhere in the world did, as the court had asked. But Mumbai’s garbage was too soggy from the rains, too gloopy from rotting food for the incinerator to work. The trash township spilled out of the municipality’s attempts to shrink it.

  Meanwhile, the slim island city’s open spaces had filled up. The relentless sprawl of suburbia had brought even distant places that could have formed possible dumping grounds in proximity with homes whose residents would be nauseated by the stink. They did not want open spaces around the apartments they had saved for years to buy to fill up with the city’s mess. Farmers did not want the waste to pollute their fields. Any open space the municipality found, came with rival claimants.

  In the years after the 1996 petition, deadlines to meet the waste rules and court orders came and went, but the mountains had hardly moved. The waste rules had outlawed them, mountain smoke sickened them, and yet Hyder Ali and his ilk, the desperados of Deonar, still filled them, carrying away all that had value. Clouds of flies obscured them and guards’ eyes glazed over when they looked at them, turning pickers invisible as they continued to hunt for the dregs of Mumbai’s fortunes. As the city, hemmed in by the sea, inched up, its garbage mountains and their halo followed in step.

  Early in 2006, under pressure from the court, the municipality had appointed a private consultant, who delivered a report on resolving the problems at the Deonar township, the smaller mountains at Mulund and closing the trash hills at Gorai. Deonar’s aging waste could make for rich compost, the report said: a waste-to-compost plant could shrink the township. To get there, the municipality would spend more than ₹10,500 crore (1.47 billion USD) on its three dumping grounds, nearly half of which would go into shrinking the Deonar township, building the waste plant and cleansing the murky air and water it spewed. It was the Mumbai municipality’s most ambitious attempt to manage the city’s waste since the Deonar grounds were settled more than a century before.

  Consultants and officials invited bids for the projects. Officials worried whether a private company could really manage the Deonar township, where ragpickers fanned out on slopes, their homes inched into hills, and gangs fought for trash. None of the companies that bid for the chance to remake Deonar met the technical terms, and the contract was not given out. Trash arrival and its surreptitious removal went on relentlessly. More came than pickers could take away. Garbage inched up on the mountains and spilled into the creek, stealthily swelling the township.

  * * *

  HAVING WAITED FOR more than a decade for the mountains to move or shrink, Dr. Rane had tired. In the summer of 2008, he filed his contempt petition. In these twelve years, the toxic cloud of Mumbai’s festering possessions had only grown, he said. It hung heavily over the municipal ward around the mountains, where a quarter of all deaths came from respiratory diseases, Rane showed. In a ward further away, by comparison, it was less than 1 percent. He presented medical studies that showed the haze was thick with the carcinogenic chemical formaldehyde. Another study showed that benzene, another carcinogen, also festered in mountain air, many times higher than at any of the landfills the authors looked at elsewhere in the world. While it fell within permissible limits set in some other countries, Dipanjali Majumdar, the study’s author, said those limits were set for short exposure, not a lifetime of inhaling it, as pickers at Deonar did. Their exposure was chronic, she said, the health risks considerable. Those who lived in the mountains’ halo had a life expectancy of thirty-nine, living little more than half the lives that other Indians did.

  The mountains’ thickening halo sickened the city too. “The gases emitted from the landfill and other pollutants in air cooks a range of other hazardous dust and gases using sunlight in the atmospheric kitchen,” Majumdar said. “These pollutants cooked in the atmosphere, called secondary pollutants, can cause severe air pollution and can even lead to climate change.”

  In search of answers, Rane began walking the sprawling, colonial-era court’s angular corridors as hearings on his petition to fix the mountains restarted. “I am the kind of person, if I train my guns on something, I don’t give up,” he said later. The municipality pled for more time. Justice Dhananjaya Chandrachud’s patience wore thin, a testiness seeping into his orders: “The rampant and unregulated dumping of garbage continues and despite orders passed by this court, no serious attempt has been made to alleviate the problem.”

  When asked what it was like being trapped in the mountains’ deadly aura, Hyder Ali pushed his bony chest out. “Hamko kya hua hai?” he would retort. Is there anything wrong with me? He was healthier than anyone he knew, he liked to say, even after two decades of working on the rising tides of trash. He had seen friends silently replaced by their young children at the mountains while they retreated to waste away in the lanes, consumed by tuberculosis. Others had left to take in the village air, to help them recover, and never returned. While walking up the slopes, to work, he often passed by pickers vomiting
. Their ailing chests could not take the gentle, uphill climb anymore. Others had faded into the haze, their disappearance unnoticed in the unrelenting chase for the city’s moth-eaten treasures. But Hyder Ali, and his friends, didn’t think their treasure-yielding township and the livelihood it provided for them, had anything to do with it.

  FIVE

  IT WAS JUNE 2008 and the school year had just begun, along with Mumbai’s months-long rainy season. But Farzana had come to work on the mountains all day. Most mornings, when she arrived at the trash peaks, she started by collecting the overripe tomatoes and eggplants that arrived with the discarded food, or sprouted from it with the rains. She waited for her friends’ hazy figures to emerge on the rugged slopes, and threw her pickings at them, making dark, wet splotches on their clothes. They swiveled in pain and confusion. When they spotted Farzana, her friends scrambled to look for their own tomatoes. They scoured through the trash that had arrived overnight for bits of watermelon or eggs and hurled them at her. Giggly tomato fights ensued as they chased each other around the unsteady, sun-filled slopes, rotting fruit in hand. Laughter and light refracted in the halo of the forgotten mountains.

  As the fights ebbed, drying pulp mingled with sweat and clung to them in the humid heat that hung heavily between rain showers. Farzana bathed under the leaky taps of water tankers posted at their hilly township. The rest of her family, whom she joined at work, had asked to be spared from her messy welcomes and perfect aim. Farzana and her daring spirit grew up together in the mountains’ thickening fog and extending shadow. “Main pehle se hi aisi thi,” she would say breezily, when asked where she got her fearless spirit, her sense of adventure from. I’ve always been like this.

  As she turned ten, dark monsoon clouds grazed and then cocooned trash peaks. She watched trucks approach through the outer slopes. Filled with older trash and topped with rich mud, the mountainsides glowed emerald with grass.

  Drenched in wind and rain, Farzana walked among clouds, which also floated in the pools that filled mountain troughs. At first, the water looked clear, like the thick and empty plastic of the milk pouches that fetched the highest prices. Farzana collected the squashed plastic bottles that drifted in the pools, like bubbles, amid lotuses.

  As the rain continued to lash their township, the overgrown green slopes became muddy, hilltops turned molten brown. Farzana turned brown too from wading thigh deep into the mud. Dodging herds of cattle that their minders had brought to bathe in the water and graze on the grass, she slipped into the pools to bring out bottles, gloves, or glass floating within. She came up for air, coated in muddy water and saw friends emerge, dripping slush too. She dipped back in for more.

  Bags filled, Farzana walked downhill, collecting spinach, cucumbers, and other vegetables for dinner. She looked for pumpkins growing under rain-soaked trash and watched papayas cling to tall, spindly trees that sprouted from it. Farzana had heard that not everyone ate vegetables grown in trash. Some rubbed overgrown leaves, from plants she did not recognize, onto wounds to heal them or chewed them to get intoxicated and work longer on slopes.

  When the rains receded, Farzana and her sisters began their wait for Diwali. They were Muslims, like most others in the mountain communities. But on the slopes, Diwali brought breezy winters and creamy, candy-colored sweets, sprinkled with saffron strands, crushed cardamom, sliced pistachios, or silver slivers that tumbled out of garbage trucks, for days. City confectioners made hundreds of kilos of sweets, with disclaimers to consume them within a day or the fresh cream they were made with would sour. What didn’t sell at stores made it to Deonar for hilltop Diwali parties. “Hamara har shauk poora hua khaadi mein,” Hera, who came only to collect treats, would later recall. The mountains fulfilled our every desire.

  Balmy, fleeting winters gave way to unending summers. The township turned gold under the blazing sun, and Farzana watched trash shine or fade on the sun-baked slopes that rippled around her, edged by the glimmering creek. Plants withered quickly, leaving an expanse of dried mud and trash. Long, hot days were redeemed only by extended swims or discovering puffy, white boxes stuffed with ice cream cups, long past expiry, in the trash.

  Farzana knew the end of summer was near when thick bunches of blotchy, red lychees began falling out of emptying trucks. She bit through their scaly skin and pulled it away with her teeth. The juice within dribbled down her chin. She spun the fruit in her mouth, spat out the long black seed, and swallowed the translucent white pulp that cooled her as it went down, swirling the sweaty last dregs of summer with sweetness.

  * * *

  FARZANA WAS SUDDENLY growing to be tall, like both her parents, and athletic, like her mother. She poured her coltish energy into chasing the city’s unending trash caravans. She watched garbage trucks lurch slowly up the rubble- and trash-filled slopes. As they got to hill clearings, she raced other pickers to get to them, clambering onto their side rails before they halted and began emptying. She leaned onto the truck’s edge so she didn’t fall off, dipped both her hands in, and skimmed the cream of junk before anyone else could. She held on to the railing, turning and twisting aside when burning trash fell out of trucks, ignited when thin plastic bags were jammed too tightly with still simmering cigarette butts. She brought out hard-boiled eggs or bags of crisps. She sat in a circle with her sisters and snacked on them. What they could not eat, Farzana enveloped in her outstretched arms and carried downhill for her younger sisters and brother.

  Unlike his daughter, Hyder Ali worried about the remains of city people—their melted desires, the spirits that arose from them and were marooned on the mountains. To him, they were an ever-present danger, hanging around the slopes, unobserved, only to ensnare his daughters. He told Farzana how he had seen unclaimed dead bodies tipped out of dump trucks at the edge of the grounds, where trash hills ran into the creek. He had watched burned ashes from Mumbai’s cremation grounds emptied on hilltops.

  Passing on the rules he had accumulated during the years he spent on the mountains, Hyder Ali reminded Farzana to stay away from the path of the Shaitans. Once, Farzana and Farha had waited for the trucks all day as the rain soaked their township, the city, and them. As day turned to dusk, they finally heard that the trucks had been delayed in the city and would arrive soon. Night fell and the day shift pickers began to leave, but Farzana heard the trucks were now on their way and she decided to wait on. Around 10:30 P.M., she watched as the trucks’ lights appeared through the darkened paths of the township. She and Farha got their pick of the cloth scraps that fell out of the trucks, unhindered and raced quickly down the muddy slope, thinking they would deposit the scraps on Hyder Ali’s pile. That’s when they saw a woman, in white, floating above the scrap pile, just like the chudail Jehangir had told them about. Farzana and Farha held on to their bags and went straight home, returning to deposit them and chase more trucks the following morning. “Usko bolenge nahi karna hai, to Farzana ko karna hi hai,” Sahani, her older sister, recalled, with a grin lighting up her almond shaped, kohl rimmed eyes. If you asked her not to do something, Farzana had to do it.

  Some mornings, her friends stopped by her home while everyone was still asleep. Farzana left with them, and whichever sister she could wake up. They ran up to clearings where trucks had delivered trash from Mumbai’s luxury hotels or the airport, sat on hilltops and ate hotel breakfasts. Pointing to Arif, their fourteen-year-old friend, shriveled by tuberculosis, Hera would later say that the bread they had eaten was as long as he was. They sliced breakfast rolls with cutlery that came in crisp airline packaging and slathered them with butter, jam, or ketchup from single-serve packets thrown away at breakfast buffets. After breakfast, Hera left to go to school while Farzana and her sisters went to chase the arriving garbage trucks.

  As Mumbaikars moved to wearing ready-made clothes, buying from shops rather than wearing tailor-made, cloth scraps had faded from the slopes, and Farzana had begun to collect plastic, copper wire, and German silver, rather than the bright offcuts
that Hyder Ali had taught her to chase. Farzana emptied her bag in her lane, accumulating long loops of electric wires and retrieving tight coils from within the gadgets that crammed Mumbai homes, but had to be discarded because they rotted in its salty, coastal air and felt outdated as soon as they were bought. She burned the wire to recover copper and stuffed broken television sets, rusted ceiling fans, and video players into her burlap bag. She bashed stones on them, quickly covering her ears to muffle the sound of cracking. Sifting through the broken shards, she pulled out the metal frames of television sets to sell.

  Collecting up to ten kilos of plastic and trembling copper wire or German silver, which took a few days, could earn her up to ₹300. Farzana sold her haul and handed her money to Hyder Ali, who earned a few rupees for a kilo of cloth scraps, his earnings shrinking with the waning supply of cloth scraps, his languid air and long breaks to chat with friends he ran into at work. They told him how the scraps now went straight from textile factories to traders in their lanes.

  * * *

  THE TALLER THE mountains grew, the harder it got to move them. At court hearings around April 2009, Justice Chandrachud had asked Mumbai’s compact and erudite municipal commissioner, Jairaj Phatak, to go to the Deonar township to see the forgotten world with his own eyes.

  Trailed by his entourage of civic officials, Phatak, who was an engineer and had recently also completed his doctorate in economics, saw the halo of gas that ringed the mountains that Rane had photographed, and in which Hyder Ali and Farzana had worked. “I was told this smoke was not due to fire set by ragpickers but due to methane gas in the garbage, which starts burning, letting off smoke, without anybody being near the spot,” Phatak wrote in his report for Chandrachud.

  With contempt proceedings looming, Phatak returned to his office and rifled through the inspirational quotes he assiduously accumulated. He settled on one from Theodore Roosevelt, which he wrote out in his pocket diary: “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”