by Saumya Roy
More and more often the guards turned Farzana back from the slopes. When she sneaked in, she saw the township emptied of garbage trucks as she never had before. She spent boiling, windless afternoons waiting for them at mountain clearings. The relentless flow of trash gushing onto hilltops, tumbling down slopes, tangling into mangroves, and flowing into the creek, the endless torrent of castaway possessions that Farzana had always seen, had slowed to a trickle. In just a few months, the amount of garbage dumped on the mountains had dropped by more than a third. Until Deonar’s hills cooled and consultants drew up a plan to fix them, the caravans would move mostly to the municipality’s smaller garbage mountains at Mulund and the new ones, rising at Kanjurmarg.
Farzana usually worked with Farah, who chatted and joshed around to fill the unending afternoons, the sun warming their heads and the steaming mountains, their feet. Days stretched thinner when she waited with Jehana, her reedy oldest sister, who lived in a tin-sheet room sprouting from the boundary wall, with her husband and six children. The two watched slopes stir in the smoke tendrils that still rose from the trash. In the midst of long silences, they waited for the breeze, or a glimpse of trucks winding through the bumpy roads below.
Seeing a truck emerge from the hills propelled them to their feet, sprinting to the clearing it would empty at. Other pickers swooped in from the silent hills, falling on the trash with the day’s pent-up energy. These short bursts of scrambles for garbage were fierce and desperate. But sometimes Farzana found herself on newly empty and uncontested clearings, once the territory of gangs. The growing police glare had shaken the brothers’ grip on the mountains. Trash that had only emptied in their estates began appearing elsewhere in the township.
Shoveling around with her long fork threw up used bloodied hospital gloves, or hands, as Farzana called them. It was the only one of the mountains’ handouts she could not bear to see or touch. Looking at the stiff, white, blood-stained fingers made her stomach churn. She turned her face away, glancing back from the corner of her eye to hook them onto her long garbage fork before scooping them into her bag. She picked empty saline bags, tubes, medicine bottles, and packaging. Finding thick, hospital plastic made up for the days when guards turned her away.
* * *
IT WAS DURING these burning months that Farzana and Farha chased a truck carrying hospital waste to the prawn loop on a slow afternoon. It was then that Farzana reached into a bag that she thought was full of little glass vials, but brought out the glass jar filled with the three lifeless babies, joined at the stomach, joined in their flickering lives and joined in death. After she had buried them in the soft sand at the edge of the township, in the evening, Jehangir had slapped Farzana when he heard what she had done. “Padne ka hi nahi yeh sab mach mach mein. Kuch achha nahi hota is sab se.” You should not get drawn into such messes. Nothing good comes out of them. “Why do they give birth to them,” Sahani had asked, “if they want to send them here?”
Things were going to get better, Farzana wanted to tell Jehangir. The fires that had raged all that year were receding. Her birthday, on June 2, would bring the rains and keep the mountains soaking and cool. She would turn eighteen, an adult, who Jehangir could not slap, Farzana thought, wiping away tears. Adulthood was close, and Farzana kept slinking through the closing wall to work. She needed to save up, buy herself jeans, and have a party to mark her transition. But as the summer wore on, sometimes guards threw Farzana’s carefully filled trash bags under the buzzing bulldozers and sent her home. She watched pickers get beaten if they lingered on.
Wilting under the tightened security, the older pickers tried a new strategy: making themselves visible. In her lane, Farzana saw posters and banners strung up for protest marches in the city. Pickers wanted to work on, they wanted identity cards to make them officially exist. Weeks after the environment ministry team visited but didn’t meet Vitabai, it seemed to have heard her. The government brought out new waste rules that said pickers were to be involved in sorting the city’s trash. But while Vitabai and Salma were to become legal wastepickers and sorters, they did not know it. The rules did not reach the township, and the guards still shut them out. Increasingly pushed out of the mountains and their livelihoods, they still struggled to emerge from their hilly netherworld, now spoiling under the sudden heat.
Vitabai took several long bus rides into the city for protests. She heard of one where pickers met Maharashtra’s youthful chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis. If she had made it with them, Vitabai had wanted to tell him how she had joined thousands of mountain denizens who had moved here to make way for the city’s dreams. That if it was not for her invisible army, the mountains would have been even taller. That all she wanted was for the city to employ her to sort through and clean its remains. At the township, more guards swarmed. Vitabai felt the tenuous life she had built on trash slopes, crumbling.
One afternoon, she emptied her bag in the lane, while Salma watched and chatted with her. She separated takeaway food boxes, plastic-coated wires to be scraped away with a knife, and picked out a metal ring, topped with a tortoise. Vitabai knew that wearing mountain finds could bring her ill luck. But she had heard people in the city wore tortoise jewelry, as a prescription for good fortune, and occasionally it found its way into the trash. She fiddled with the ring, unsure of what would work, weighing the luck of the tortoise against the danger of finding it on the slopes. She slipped it on. “Marna to hai hi ek din,” Salma said with a shrug. “Pehen ke marein.” We are going to die someday. Better to die wearing what we like.
Stuck outside the wall, with mountain luck teetering and ebbing, Vitabai made rounds of friends’ homes asking for numbers of wealthy people who needed help cleaning their homes. She hoarded them, just as she had once collected the phone numbers of truck drivers who sold first dibs on their garbage. She took more long bus rides into the city, filling in for friends who needed a day off from cleaning jobs, hoping it would lead to more lasting work.
Meanwhile, Salma’s blood pressure was still raging. She worked when she could, and at other times, she sat crumpled against the wall in her other son’s house, where she had moved so Aslam and Arif didn’t have to support her. Mostly, she stayed stuck, waiting, outside the mountain wall.
Grounded by the fires, guards, and everything seeming hazy, she agonized over how she could make a fresh start, away from her century-old benefactor. She thought of taking the four-hour train ride to Surat, buying sarees from its famed wholesale textile market, and selling it door-to-door, in their lanes. But she had seen Vitabai’s son Nagesh, and others, bring back bags of sarees that they couldn’t sell, because no one in the lanes had enough money to buy them. Nagesh defaulted on loan repayments, as did others. He was not seen around Banjara Galli or the slopes. His phone was switched off. Vitabai told creditors and others, he had moved to the village. But neighbors felt they saw him at night.
“Sabko paisa dena hai to aur kya karega?” Salma snorted about Gypsy Lane’s disappearing residents. When you owe everyone money, what else would you do? Years of picking trash meant the delicate skills, of embroidery or tailoring, that some of her newer neighbors practiced had bypassed Salma’s bruised hands. Their lives braided into the mountains over four decades, she and Vitabai had nowhere to go, knew nothing other than collecting trash. Edgily, Salma waited for her blood pressure and the security to ease so she could return to them.
* * *
SALMA HAD WORKED mostly alone for more than a year since Aslam’s cough began wracking their home through the night. After he ran through bottles of cough syrup, Salma had taken him to a free, charitable hospital deep into the city, where she had heard pickers took their persistent coughs. She had returned to work, freeing Aslam to take the hour-long bus rides into the city’s crumbling and congested old quarter. He waited irritably for doctors to see him while horns blared from the street outside and the flyover that ran above it.
Bargain hunters filled the streets behind the hospital. Together
, the maze of lanes was known as Chor Bazaar, or Thieves Market. When Mumbai’s grand, old homes were dismantled, the good stuff came here, and the rest went to Deonar. Frayed family photographs, oversized chandeliers, hand-painted Bollywood posters, rusty airplane models, and broken irons lay under jumbled piles and layers of dust. Wealthier shoppers came in search of hidden gems amid household junk as Salma did at Deonar. New things were added. They were scraped to look old and old things polished to look new. They were laid out together to earn shop owners the small fortunes that Salma and Aslam could only imagine earning on mountain trash. Pickers sometimes washed and patched up pants they found in the trash to sell there.
Salma had returned home after long days on the slopes, to find Aslam slumped against the wall, the bright blue t-shirt he often wore hanging more loosely over his shrunken frame each day. A shadow had come over him. He walked little and shaved infrequently. His cough echoed in the skinny Arif. With Arif, Salma tried dragging back trash-filled bags that nearly outsized them. A bag, filled with plastic bottles, that matched Salma in size would fetch ₹50. She needed several of them to buy Aslam’s medicines and keep their family of eight, with Aslam’s wife, three more boys and a little girl, going. She kept Arif working, hoping it wasn’t too late to treat his cough and worrying that it was. She didn’t know that Aslam had stopped taking his medicines or making the trips to the faraway, free hospital.
A flower trader had asked Salma to help with the impending gush in demand during Ramzan, asking her to string the fresh flowers he bought from Mumbai’s wholesale flower market, so he could sell them in the city. One afternoon, Salma rested her back against trunks piled up with the family’s belongings and sat between heaps of sweet-smelling tuberoses, roses, and jasmines in their long, dimly lit room. She bent forward to catch the sun and thread her needle. Amid jabbed fingers and perfumed hands, she learned to braid the flowers in intricate patterns. She made flower blankets that were laid out in the city’s filigreed mausoleums to make wishes come true. She made garlands that brides and grooms hung shyly around each other when they got married and wreaths that were laid at the feet of the dead. Most of all, she made flower braids that adorned women’s hair, masking the smells of cooking, or the fish they sold, enveloping them in the heady, aphrodisiacal fragrance of jasmines instead.
Aslam sat next to her, tiny crystals making shining reflections on his gaunt face: he was sticking them onto a peach-colored skirt in long paisley patterns. It would later be stitched into a bridal outfit and hang in Mumbai’s markets. Salma and he would each earn ₹30 for their work, just about enough to afford a thinly stretched meal for everyone. They had begun getting Aslam treated for his tuberculosis at the government-run Gokuldas Tejpal hospital in the city. That afternoon, he played outside the house with a Frisbee he had fashioned from an empty medicine carton.
Her little granddaughter flitted over Salma’s flowers, asking for two rupees. “Toffee lena hai,” she said, blocking the sun as she bent over to catch Salma’s attention. I need to buy toffees. Salma waved her away, trying to get the slight jasmine stems through her trembling needle.
The girl bent lower so Salma would look up at her. “Ek jhaad lagaya hai,” Salma said, pulling the thread out of her half-made flower braid. I’ve planted a tree. “It will grow money along with flowers,” she continued. “I’ll give you the money as soon as it flowers.” Befuddled, the girl went out to play. The sun fell farther into the house, Salma slumped against the piled-up trunks and went back to braiding flowers.
Fridays were unfailingly busy for her. It was the day devotees visited the city’s milky, marble mausoleums. Entreaties to the saints buried there rose through the crescendo of music and heaving crowds. Worshippers draped flower blankets over the tombs of the saints to propitiate them. They bent low over the tombs, swathed with brocade and flowers and wreathed in incense, and whispered their petitions, hoping the saints would hear and make them come true.
Salma could not afford bus rides into the city herself. She still believed her blankets could keep diseases away from her family and security guards, drones and cameras away from the mountains. Ramzan was not far and she hoped that through her blankets, her prayers would reach the miracle-inducing saints of Mumbai.
* * *
NO ONE WAS sure how Farzana made it to the mountains as often as she did. After the long waits for trucks she brought bags filled with plastic, wire, television sets that fetched the highest prices, squashed bottles that earned a little, and the wispy carrier bags that earned the least. But it was getting harder. Some days, she and Farha returned home with nothing, ate and clambered onto the long wooden planks tacked to the edges of their house and slept early, tired from the endless waiting.
One night, Farha woke up to the sound of Farzana muttering insults, her voice rising to threaten someone. In the dark, she called out to Farzana and asked who she spoke to, but Farzana went on. Farha called louder, waking Farzana, who muttered, confused, that she was not speaking to anyone. Both sisters drifted back to sleep. Farha reasoned that Farzana was seeing guards even in her dreams.
Around the end of April, Farzana and Sahani were walking up toward the seventh mountain after lunch, to collect plastic bottles. After a while, Farzana looked up for air. Tea vendors walked around them with kettles. The late summer sunset was at least an hour away. She looked downhill, where a crowd had gathered around the Khan brothers’ warehouse. Policemen were bolting it shut. Others photographed the scene, or fixed barbed wire around the private suburb of hills within the municipality’s township of trash.
For a few days, the army from these estates waved down trucks and directed them to different parts of the township. Farzana and Sahani decided they were changing tack to dodge the police. It was nearly a week before they heard that policemen had arrested the Khan brothers that afternoon, charging them under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA), which allowed for long periods of imprisonment without bail. Later they would also arrest Javed Qureshi.
Jehangir was called for interrogation; others melted into the skinny lanes or returned to their villages to escape attention. Officers had shut all the private hill clearings in the township, including his own. He was in and out of the house, his restless energy turning nearly frenzied, as he met traders, offering his trash to anyone who might take it.
* * *
MUMBAI’S SUMMER STRETCHED ahead, moving slowly. Farzana worked with Farha on a mountain peak, on an afternoon suspended in the sun. They waited for the breeze and the garbage trucks to begin drifting their way. Their feet were clammy in the socks and lace-up shoes they wore to keep from the heat shocks the mountains still gave off.
Farzana was looking for glass to give Jehangir. It only made him rage at her. There was never enough to fill a truck and make the trips into the city to sell it, he told her. But, not knowing what else to do, Farzana and Farha tried collecting more. The two walked slowly, alongside each other, up a steep hill, until Farha tripped on a discarded shoe, jutting out of the mud, and fell backward on her bag.
Glass, boiling hot under the sun, cut through the material and made a long, serpentine cut on her back. Blood stained the shards within. She had screamed until Farzana called Alamgir to take their injured sister home. Neighbors had followed her howling progress to Hyder Ali’s house. She would need stitches to repair her back, but Hyder Ali didn’t even have enough money for the rickshaw trip to the hospital. He spilled the tobacco powder that he and Shakimun chewed, into Farha’s cut. It burned in her back, intensifying her screams. “Ye to door se chilla rahi thi,” he said. She’s been yelling from miles away.
As the cut on her back filled slowly, to make a dark, curling, tobacco-filled scar, Farzana and the others had taken to calling Farha “snake woman.” They believed mountain luck had carved itself into her. It drew glass and other mountain treasures into Farha’s hands, even amid the mountains’ diminishing fortunes, tightening security and the city getting nearer. It would stay i
n her through the mountains’ endless cycle of turning fortunes.
TWELVE
THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER OF 2016, Farzana and Farha watched the engineering consultants bore holes and lower tubes into the mountains to measure the fires seething within. They heard that some of the vents would stay within the mountains, to release these secret fires and their smoke. They also heard the consultants were mapping the township in order to pick a section for the waste-to-power plant. The map was carefully made with images from drones that had flown low over Farzana as she worked on the mountains that summer.
On a long, warm afternoon, Shakimun squatted next to Sahani, the second oldest of her daughters, at the mountains’ rim. They watched as Farzana arrived with a cloth pile, leaving them to sort through some fashionably, and other irretrievably, ripped jeans while she turned to walk back up the slopes for more. Shakimun, sitting with her arms hanging off her bent knees, waited until Farzana had walked far enough out of earshot, then spoke softly to Sahani, in the lilting dialect she brought from her village, decades ago. “Raat mein ajeeb harkatein karat hai.” She says strange things at night. Shakimun was worried: the mountains, with their chaos and poison, were bubbling out of her daughter in nocturnal mutterings and strange behavior. Farzana was born to the mountains. Their contours had shaped her, body and mind. But now she seemed trapped in them, and they were wedged inside her.
A neighbor had taken Farzana into the city for a trip along with her own children. She returned in the evening, swearing to Shakimun that she would never take her again. Farzana had felt faint and needed chips, but not the sweet ones they got. The salty ones were too salty. Without them, she was so drained of energy, she could not walk to get the bus back, leaving them all stranded for a while. She was always weak in those days, Sahani would remember. She always had a headache, a stomachache. Always.
