Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  * * *

  IN SEPTEMBER 2015, soon before arbitration proceedings between Tatva and the municipality were to begin, the municipality sent a pertermination notice to Tatva. It would later send a termination notice on January 22, 2016, asking Tatva to leave the Deonar township on January 31, only six years into its twenty-five-year tenancy. Until the municipality could begin fixing it afresh, the township would continue to take in more of the city’s reeking secrets, employing only the illicit army of pickers.

  One night, when Yasmin brought installments, Moharram Ali asked for them again. He would replace it soon, he said. Yasmin refused. Hearing their parents’ voices raging within their home, glowing in the dark lane, the children decided to stay out. Later, they slipped in and slept on the floor before the voices quieted. In the morning, Yasmin was sleeping next to the children. Moharram Ali was not. When Yasmin sent Sharib and her younger son Sameer to look for him on the mountains, he was not there. She asked Hyder Ali to go to the 90 Feet Road market, but it was deserted; shops had not yet opened.

  Around noon, the Bishi organizer made his way through the small crowd at home. He asked Yasmin for the installments. But when she opened her wooden cupboard and looked under the clothes where she had hidden the money, it wasn’t there. She upturned clothes and the broken dolls Moharram Ali had picked from the mountains for Mehrun and Ashra, their younger daughters. He had left with the money.

  Days later, when Hyder Ali walked to Yasmin’s house to ask for his money that had vanished instead of doubling, he saw her beaten-up television set, washing machine, and Hera’s sewing machine being carried out of their home. Creditors would sell them to retrieve what they could. Yasmin’s room was filled with others, pressing for their money. Farzana began seeing Yasmin lock her house from the outside and leave through a back door, before creditors arrived.

  A tired disappointment replaced the dreams of gold in the lanes around the Deonar mountains that winter. The failed compost plant had become one of the mountains’ ghosts, even before it materialized. Tatva’s staff was leaving to work elsewhere. The latest court deadline to stop dumping garbage at the Deonar township, to fix it or settle a modern trash township, had passed months ago. Garbage caravans came unabated, letting Sharib and Sameer work and keep the house going.

  Hera’s wedding had got called off, Yasmin had pulled twelve-year-old Mehrun out of the free municipal-run school to manage their home and enrolled eight-year-old Ashra, her youngest daughter, who was at a private English school, in it. Ashra returned with disheveled hair that Yasmin tried to tame and empty notebooks she did not notice. As their household suddenly curled at its edges, Ashra’s words began to get stuck inside her. They came out fitfully and sometimes only in her intense, green-eyed stare.

  Ashra was hardly ever in class, her third-grade teacher at her new school, Shireen Mohammed Siraj, told Yasmin, and doodled when she was. Days later, Yasmin walked slowly through the school corridor, looking down at the floor, which was wet and slippery from the children’s water fights, and watching the mountains seeping in through classroom windows. In the principal’s office, a couple of burqa-clad teachers were speaking to a burly consultant who had been assigned to supervise area schools. “Pen se nahi likhte par whitener jeb mein rakhte hain,” a teacher said. They have not started writing with pens yet but they carry white-out. The consultant nodded, knowingly: he had seen students inhaling it in stairwells around mountain schools. Yasmin and Siraj decided Ashra needed remedial classes.

  Every morning, Lallu, Ashra’s cousin and classmate, came over to walk to school with her. He tucked his blue-and-white-striped school shirt into navy blue shorts that bunched up under his school belt and hung below his knees. His socks rolled under them and over his kneecaps. He wore a clip-on tie, pressed his hair down with oil, and slung the schoolbag that seemed to outweigh him over his shoulders. He waited at the door while Ashra searched for a bit of her uniform, or nursed an upset stomach, inside. She often emerged only after he gave up and left, singing made-up ditties of lines she heard Yasmin say to creditors and dancing, with the flies, on the loose stones that covered the drains.

  Lallu picked trash on the mountains or through their lanes’ overflowing trash cans, after school, to supplement his father’s earnings from selling medicinal herbs. He pushed his mother, who was Moharram Ali’s sister, to apply for a bank account or an identity card when teachers asked him to. In their walks to school, he reminded Ashra that the municipality would deposit a rupee in her bank account for every day she attended. She just stared ahead.

  Yasmin began to notice that, on some afternoons, Lallu returned home without Ashra. Siraj said she was not at class. When questioned, Lallu said that Ashra had left with a tall, slim man. Worried a creditor was trying to kidnap Ashra, Yasmin handed him some of her borrowed notes and asked him to check who it was. Moharram Ali, Lallu reported back: he had hung outside her school until Ashra spotted him, ran up, and hugged him. They walked nearby, getting a snack, Moharram Ali asking her to keep their meetings secret. After this discovery, and on Hera’s instructions, Ashra made Moharram Ali walk her through Rafiq Nagar’s skinny lanes so she could report back on it to Hera and her mother, without the risk of their father getting caught by his creditors.

  The two entered a lane just wide enough to fit a person, with a slim, open drain, flattening against the wall to let others pass. At the passage end, not far from them, Ashra saw a leafy, old tree, rising from the watery swamp. Moharram Ali turned and unlocked a room, and a small, childlike woman followed him in, from a neighbor’s house. This was Shabana, his new wife, he said. He had left with her, to escape the unending wait for jobs at the plant, money to repay mounting loans and treasures to tell friends about. The following morning, Hera, her friends, and Yasmin followed Ashra through Rafiq Nagar’s lanes and rained blows on Shabana, who Hera had heard was a year younger than she was. They returned home with no one to wait for.

  For weeks, Ashra came home to find Yasmin curled up on their thin, single mattress or speaking to Hera through tears. “Mere karze ki vajah se gaya,” Yasmin said. He left because of my loans. She should not have collected Bishi installments and tempted him, she said. She wished he hadn’t found the gold necklace that had upturned his luck, her marriage, and their lives. The two had piled on debt and new business plans thinking mountain luck would turn their way again. Instead, loans had grown, teetered, tumbled, and consumed them while, Yasmin believed, the necklace had turned mountain luck away. Only the debt had stayed, piling up.

  * * *

  ONE AFTERNOON, LATE in January 2016, when Yasmin returned home from one of her money-seeking trips, Hera pulled out a marriage certificate with her photo stuck next to Wasim, from the lane next to theirs. Mountains rose from his doorstep, and their rubble formed its floor. Wasim had liked Hera since they were at school, but she had seemed out of his reach. He had dropped out in middle school while she went to high school. He picked trash; she wanted to be a teacher. He seemed destined for a life on the mountains and she for one away from them. Then, the mountains had tugged her back. He heard she lived inside a padlocked house, flashing her anger to keep creditors away while her friends had married. During one of Yasmin’s long absences, they had gone to the municipal ward office close by and got the marriage certificate.

  Both mothers feared the scandal the clandestine marriage would evoke and hastily planned a small wedding party. When Moharram Ali heard, he called Yasmin and said he wanted to attend—although he had no money to give. Hera refused. She could not bear to have him watch her finally bind herself to the mountains she had nearly left.

  She wore the simple red dress that made up her whole trousseau. Wasim’s family walked over to Yasmin’s house, as the early winter dusk fell over the mountains and their lanes. A priest came for the ceremony, followed by a small party. The women chatted inside the house and Sharib served snacks to the small group of men spilling into the dimly lit lane outside. As he turned back, Sharib thought he s
aw Moharram Ali’s hazy figure at the edge of the group. Sharib went in and asked Yasmin what he was doing there. Hera heard them and kept up her smile. When Sharib came out to serve soft drinks, his father had vanished.

  As night fell, Hera walked over to Wasim’s house, taking a disappointment that would settle within her. Her plans had joined the many dashed dreams that filled the mountains’ shadow that winter: shaking off the curse, both the city's trash and their fortunes had proven too hard.

  EIGHT

  THREE NIGHTS AFTER HERA’S wedding, in the early hours of January 28, 2016, Hyder Ali awoke in his bed before dawn. His chest burned. He rubbed his eyes, opening them sleepily, seeing a haze. He shut them and tried again. A pale mist floated in the dark.

  He slung a shirt over his favorite blue check lungi and woke up the children. He walked carefully into the small passage outside, letting out his goats and chickens, hoping it would quell their racket. Hyder Ali and Alamgir stepped out into their slim lane, filling with smoke, swelling and floating ahead, taking their long-forgotten township into the city.

  Hyder Ali cursed the new migrants who filled Banjara Galli these days. One of their workshops must have exploded, he mumbled. They stumbled through their lane, bumping into hazy figures of neighbors, to reach the mountains’ edge, filled with light. Flares lit up the night sky. Fires raged on the mountains as far as they could see, smoke spiraling above. There was not an inch of the mountains that was not burning, Alamgir remembered thinking.

  Jehangir, who was already there, told them he had seen the fires simmering since the afternoon. Watching them grow into the night, he, Alamgir, and the others were not sure who to call. Tatva was in the middle of its long departure from the mountains. Its contract was to end in three days. The pickers couldn’t find the guards.

  From the crowds gathered at the edges of the mountains, Alamgir heard the fires had started at the far edge of the township, on the eighth mountain, which was mostly in the Khans’ control. The creek curved around it, but winds were howling in from the sea that night, and the fires traveled with them. By 3 A.M., when Alamgir and Hyder Ali arrived, the fires blazed through much of the township.

  Alerted, municipal officials spoke to Tatva officials, who told them their staff was working to douse the fires with the bulldozers and earthmovers they had on hand. But as the night stretched on, they could only watch as the fires grew and traveled deeper into the hills. Hoping to take decisive action, the municipal officials on night duty wrote a memo to their counterparts at Tatva, asking for fire engines. But with smoke filling the cloudless sky, cell phones became unreachable, officials were not sure where Tatva’s staffers were on the grounds and the memo was never delivered, they would later tell their superiors.

  Ahead of the watching pickers, an impenetrable wall of smoke built and rose. As the sky turned flame and then blush, officers began calling their bosses in the municipal corporation’s solid waste management department and asked for water tankers and fire engines. The fire engines entered the township’s fog around 7:10 A.M., winding slowly through flaming trash hills. Garbage trucks, blinded by smoke and stuck in trash strewn on the dirt tracks, blocked their way. Firemen saw pickers work amid the wafting mist and heard dogs whining within it.

  The firemen stepped out, uncoiled their hoses, and pointed them at the flames, but even before they turned on water sprays, the fires extinguished themselves. Others calmed under the hose rain, only to travel through secret passageways within hills, erupt magically on distant hilltops and travel farther through hills. The water they sprayed ran off slopes without cooling the blazing innards of the more than 120 feet high mountains. The firemen sprayed on, amid the rising flames and smoke, not knowing what else to do. High winds and smoke rising with it, firemen could barely see ahead, so that some of them became so ill they had to be taken to the hospital.

  Through the windows of her fourth-floor classroom, Ashra watched the mountains blur to smoke that morning. Coughing fits had woken Yasmin before light, and she had tried to wake up Ashra. Half awake, Ashra said she was coming down with something. Her throat and eyes felt scratchy. She could not go to school. But Yasmin was irritable too, and Ashra caved in and went, tripping over garbage and goats in the foggy walk to school.

  She walked up the stairs to her classroom, where the sea breeze was blowing the smoke in, clouding the shrunken communities below and filling the room with a sharp burning smell. Coughing and teary-eyed, the children were edgy from the screeching of fire engines below. Teachers wrapped up early, thinking they would make up the next day, when the fires quieted. Ashra was home again soon.

  But smoke clouds were only traveling farther. Firemen had not found water storage tanks or water hydrants at the township. Instead, smoke and the nearly magical dance of flames that Prabhat Rahangdale, Mumbai’s fire chief, said landfill fires were known for the world over, were only swelling. Residents in the high-rise buildings that had edged closer to the mountains and nearly ringed them had felt the smoke burn in their chests, coughed through the night, and woken to see a gauzy veil floating around them. In their vertiginously high homes and offices, they felt dizzy for reasons that had nothing to do with height.

  As the mountains drifted farther into the city, they arrived in places worlds away from Banjara Galli. From high up in their glass offices, Mumbaikars took pictures that captured the faint outlines of monolithic office towers suspended in woolly smoke. They posted the pictures on social media, adding captions wondering if they had woken up to a dystopian nightmare.

  Television news headlines about the strange fog settling in the city were accompanied by NASA satellite pictures that showed a trail of dense, white smoke rising from the mountains, gusts from the creek carrying it deep into the slim, finger-shaped city, hiding it. After eleven decades hidden in plain sight, the Deonar mountains had returned to Mumbai, carrying glowing embers of every resident’s life and memories.

  The municipality had invested in new khaki and orange garbage pickup trucks, a few years before, to take away the trash that piled up outside the apartments Mumbaikars spent their lives working to buy, the cavernous offices they spent their workweeks looking out of, and the malls, multiplexes, and gyms they retreated to on weekends. Every day, the city was renewed, shedding its debris into the overfull, black plastic bags that lined street corners, and filled garbage trucks that ferried it quickly away to the Deonar mountains, where it accumulated silently. As dusk fell, city residents watched flames glow at Mumbai’s far edge; the stench and smoke itched in their chests, running down their eyes as tears.

  The next day, police filed a case against three young boys for lighting the fires. A woman had seen them running away from the blazes in the dark. The case was against Tatva too, for negligence. It would be rescinded, later, as mistakenly filed: the figures the woman had seen had been obscured by dark smoke, and she could not identify them.

  The fires continued for days, unrelenting, turning into an embarrassment for the state government. On the streets and in the media, residents and opposition politicians protested its failure to douse them. The water that it was spraying on the undiminished fires took away from the city’s drinking supply, they said, but the fires were only growing.

  As the mountains’ toxic cloud inflated over Mumbai, the city’s air pollution measured 341 on India’s newly launched Air Quality Index (AQI): the acceptable limit was 200. Around the mountains, it was higher. On the mountains, particles of burned garbage hung in the air, keeping the respiratory suspended particulate matter, the most harmful form of air pollution, at 192 micrograms, nearly twice the permissible level. Nitrogen oxide was 97 micrograms; it should have stayed below 80 micrograms. The smoke mingled with the sun’s heat to create the growing smog, making breathing around the mountains hard and sapping already weak lungs. Mumbaikars should stay inside to avoid inhaling its air, they were advised, although that would hardly protect those in the lanes around the mountains. Doctors all over the city reported seeing pat
ients with smoke-induced breathlessness, scratchy chests, coughing, giddiness, nausea, fever, and watery eyes.

  * * *

  THE CLOUD HUNG over the global investor conference, to begin two weeks later, from February 13, 2016, and was designed to be Mumbai’s glittering showcase. City and state administrators had spent months cleaning and prettying the usually gritty city. Driving through Mumbai’s gridlocked traffic, the slim road dividers had been filled with newly planted petunias, purple, pink, and white. They filled baskets that were strung from streetlights, and hung over the passing cars, swaying wildly in the same sea breeze that fanned the flames on the mountains. Oversized, electric versions of traditional Indian oil lamps appeared on traffic islands—they would light up to greet investors into the city.

  Other slivers of open space filled up with larger-than-life lion cutouts. One was filled with colorful Lego blocks, another with rusty nuts and bolts, a third with twirly machine parts. Looking for lions became a pastime for commuters waiting for Mumbai’s perpetually stationary traffic to move. A red one on a billboard perched high over one of the city’s busiest intersections. They were all mid-stride: a lion on the move was the symbol of the Indian government’s newly launched “Make in India” campaign. The national government, elected a little over a year earlier, hoped it would attract foreign investment in its struggling manufacturing sector.

  Prime ministers and presidents of several countries and a galaxy of global corporate bosses were due to arrive in weeks. In the city’s new business district, metallic screens in the style of Mughal-era jaali, or stone latticework, were welded together to make conference pavilions that would fill up with stalls showcasing how cutting-edge products could be made in the state. Traditionally, these lacy patterns were hand-carved into stone to let light and air pass through long, winding passages in medieval fortresses, letting sunlight stream in and casting filigreed shadows.