by Saumya Roy
At night, more of the family heard Farzana say things that when woken from sleep, she would insist she had not said. Mohammad Salahudin, who had lived a few houses farther down their lane, had recently moved away and often returned to Banjara Galli to wash away unintended traces of the mountains from within pickers with his prayers and rituals. He asked them to bring Farzana over. But just as Salahudin began chanting, Farzana got up and turned to leave. Sahani tried to hold on to her but Farzana was already out of the house. They looked out but could no longer see her. Hyder Ali pronounced that this was a shaitani harkat, the doing of the Shaitans that rose from the discarded desires and had burned on the mountains for months.
Hyder Ali tried taking Farzana back to Salahudin for the prayers, but she never sat through them. Later, he got Salahudin to pray over an amulet and got Shakimun to tie it around Farzana’s arm. He hoped these portable prayers and the few fasts she would keep during the holy month of Ramzan would dislodge the Shaitan settled in her, perhaps a remnant of all that lay abandoned on the slopes. He asked Yasmeen, Alamgir’s wife, to supplement these protections with her Koran reading lessons. In any case, he thought, as Farzana entered the marriage market, being able to recite a few verses would also improve her prospects of finding a husband.
Yasmeen made Farzana, Farha, and Jannat, the youngest of the sisters, sit in the mezzanine, cover their heads demurely, and face the buttery yellow Mecca mosque she had painted on the pink wall while she read a verse: Do you not see how God drives the clouds, then joins them together, then piles them into layers and then you see the rain pour from their midst? He sends down from the skies mountainous masses of clouds charged with hail, and he makes it fall on whom He will and turns it away from whom He pleases. The flash of his lightning may well nigh take away the sight. God alternates the night and the day—truly, in this there is a lesson for men of insight.
Yasmeen’s baby son, Faizan, crawled out of Shakimun’s arms and tried to get into hers. By the time she settled him, Farzana had slipped away. She just would not hold the Koran in her hands, Yasmeen recalled, frustrated. Teach those who want to be taught, Farzana countered: the class was meant for Farha, not her. Farha enjoyed the class, believing the verses washed over the burning mountains, rinsing away their smoke and the smell that had itched in her. Out in their lane, Farzana followed a trail of colored cloth scraps blowing down the slim passage with the dry summer breeze, taking slow, long steps, stamping them down, walking toward the mountains.
Sometimes she took a winding route so she could poke her head into Mohammad Khalil’s cool, dark house. He was one of Sanjay Nagar’s oldest residents and collected only cracked coconuts from the mountains. Hindu rituals hardly ever began, and new things were rarely used without breaking a coconut to bring good luck. As Mumbaikars bought more new things, more broken coconuts arrived at the mountains. Khalil often returned to Banjara Galli, in his torn vest, walking his bicycle, piled high with coconuts he had collected from wedding halls, car showrooms, new apartment complexes, and temples. Often, he pulled out his plastic-encased bank book, to show it was swollen with more savings than cracked coconut shells might be expected to yield. He would have a big wedding for his daughters, in his village, with his savings, Khalil would tell them. Relatives and friends there would not know his money had the smell of spent luck.
Khalil had made a makeshift, bamboo stick conveyor belt, curving around the edges of his room, filled with drying shells. He would also sell their velvety husks, to be made into matting. They filled his house with an intense, heady smell. Farzana would stand outside for a while, taking in the scent of drying coconuts, then wind her way to work.
* * *
ONE AFTERNOON, AS Farzana sat on a mountain peak with Farha, the beating sun kept her anger boiling. That morning, Hyder Ali had told her he had no money for her to bribe the guards to unsee them as she and her sister climbed over the wall. Farzana had left without breakfast, then waited for the guards on patrol to pass by to get through the wall and walk up the slopes, not eating lunch either.
Farzana and Farha saw two trucks emerge, following the winding, potholed mountain roads. As they turned to chase them, the trucks diverged to move toward different loops, turning the sisters in opposite directions. They argued over which one to follow, each worried they would miss the contents of the dwindling trucks that were gone in a flash these days. Farzana’s anger, seething through the day, flashed, the sisters’ voices rising as they saw other pickers emerge from hills and move toward the trucks.
But even as Farzana saw Farha wave her fork closer to her, goading her toward the trucks, she slumped on the slope. Farha tried calling out to her, shaking her, but her sister would not stir. The sun warmed her inert face. Not knowing what else to do, Farha looked around for Jehangir or Alamgir. She shook Farzana again but she wouldn’t move. Farha saw the emptied trucks make their way back into the city. Farzana stayed motionless among the castaway possessions.
When Farha returned with Ismail, Sahani’s husband, and his brother Saddam, they found Farzana lying unconscious on the trash peak, glowing against the sun. A small group had gathered around. Ismail lifted Farzana in his arms and brought her slowly down the slopes. Shakimun mumbled frantic, high-pitched prayers as Ismail brought Farzana into their home and laid her on the floor. He called Salahudin, who prayed over a bowl filled with water that he then splashed on Farzana’s face. She woke up to a small crowd around her and slapped Ismail. Why had he brought her home? She needed to get back and fill her garbage bag, which was still on the slope. Shakimun asked her to stay home and help her with her embroidery, filling a red tulle sleeve that wafted in the air, with tiny crystals.
When Jehangir came home that evening, he ignored Shakimum’s story of how a Shaitan had tripped his sister on a mountain slope. He took Farzana to a doctor nearby, who examined the pale inner rim of her eyes and told them that she was very weak. Working in the sun must have made her feel dizzy and faint. Jehangir got her the multivitamins the doctor prescribed and asked Farzana to make sure she didn’t skip meals. He asked her to stay home, to not work on the mountains anymore, as he so often had. Farzana returned to the slopes the next day.
Shakimun sought treatment for her own diagnosis. She had heard of a healer across 90 Feet Road, so holy that he didn’t even let the shadow of a woman fall on him, as she told Hyder Ali. With such discipline, he could make anything happen, she thought. She got Yasmin to write down Farzana’s name, explaining that she had been gripped by a Khaadi ka Shaitan, a spirit from the mountains. She dispatched Hyder Ali and his cousin Badre Alam to the room, filled with incense and supplicants, with the slip. They returned with more taveezes, talismans, for Farzana to wear.
On some days, Sahani ran into Farzana on the slopes, and they picked together as they always had. On others, she found Farzana home, in the afternoons, as she never had been before. Often, she was muttering to herself, Sahani recalled, or was crying. “Andar andar tha. Baad mein bahar nikalne laga,” she said. At first, the Shaitan flickered within my sister. But then he started pouring out of her.
It was bound to happen if she worked during the afternoon, Ismail told Sahani when she tried telling him of Farzana’s affliction. The thing about Shaitans was, he explained, that they came out in the day from around 7 A.M. to 2 P.M. and then from midnight to around 2:30 A.M. “Iske liye main uske baad hi kaam pe jata tha. Unka saya pade hi na,” Ismail said. I worked only after that, so their shadow could not fall on me.
But as word began to spread in the lanes of the mountains’ spirit that was stuck in Farzana, neighbors dropped in at Hyder Ali’s home, often with thoughts and opinions about her ailment. One of them pointed out to the anxious Shakimun that Farzana had spent all winter on the burning mountains, within the toxic halo of smoke. A lot of mishaps happen at the mountains, the neighbor told Shakimun. They were all burned. Farzana must have inhaled something. But to Sahani, the answer was clear: they needed a bigger healer. They decided to take Farzana to t
he mausoleum of the Sufi saint, Hazrat Shah Jalaludin Shah, known for exorcizing seen and unseen ailments from people, on Thursdays.
A short bus ride dropped them at the far end of the neighboring suburb of Chembur. On their way to the Dargah, or shrine, which they had heard was nearly as old as the city itself, they walked past oil refineries that spewed air noxious as the Deonar mountains’ halo. The spirit of Baba Jalaludin, who was buried within the shrine, was said to have ensured that the sprawling British-made refineries that came to ring his mausoleum could never cover it.
When the mountains’ rim had grown crowded, and new arrivals continued to build slim, double-storied, bedsheet-made homes that hung over the city’s roads and inched onto its train tracks, the municipality had sent them to the Mahul area within Chembur to settle a new tenement town. It grew within the halo of the refineries, close to the halo of the mountains. Baba Jalaludin had come to be known as Shahenshah-E-Chembur, or the Emperor of Chembur, presiding over a kingdom of poisonous chemicals and disease.
That evening, Shakimun, Sahani, and Farzana stood in the courtyard of his shrine. It was lined with old trees, simmering cooking pots and outsized drums. Shakimun and Sahani walked ahead, drawn by the shimmering, green trellises that stretched across the mausoleums’ silvery, glass-topped inner walls. They turned back to see that Farzana had stumbled and fallen at the doorstep. Akbar Bhai, the healer they had come to see, came out to help. When Sahani told him that Farzana worked at the trash township, had begun to babble through sleep and had fainted, he said, “Gande saye ne pakda hai.” An unclean spirit has gripped her.
As the sun slowly began to cool and retreat from the courtyard, Sahani and Shakimun watched it fill with people and their aches and troubles. At six o’clock, Dargah staff began beating drums. Some people came out with their feet chained because they were possessed by spirits, others alone, and sat in the courtyard, to be in the presence of Baba Jalaludin. Shakimun, Sahani, and Farzana stood in the crowd and watched. As the Dargah’s healers coaxed out the spirits stuck in them, through the sound of their drums, Sahani watched loose hair and bodies swing and then blur to the quickening beat. Their bodies slammed on the ground and rose again, to the drumbeating. As the sky darkened, lights came on, the drumming ceased and the whirling bodies fell to the floor, drained. Akbar Bhai told Shakimun to bring Farzana for eleven Thursdays in a row, so Baba could extricate the Shaitan.
At home, Shakimun flopped on the plank they had fixed to the outside wall, so that Hyder Ali could sit and watch Banjara Galli go by. Sahani said she could not go to the Dargah again—the swaying, falling bodies had frightened her. Budhi, a plump old woman who had squeezed onto the bench between Shakimun and Sahani, said she could go instead. Budhi’s silvery, candy-floss hair and soft, plump frame had begun appearing with the dark and settling to sleep on the bench soon after it was made. “Usko dekhne vala koi nahi hai na,” Shakimun later recalled how they had come to take Budhi into their home, though it was already swollen with people. She has no one to look after her.
* * *
AS RAMZAN APPROACHED that year, Farzana’s trips to Chembur Dargah continued. Pickers from their lane tried running the seasonal businesses that would swell the 90 Feet Road market. The month of daylong fasting and evenings filled with prayers was meant to set followers on a path to abstinence, purity, and God. Pickers set up stalls to sell fruit, juices, and food to break their fasts with. Others set up trinket stalls and clothes and shoe shops on bedsheets. It was the small indulgences that made the long abstinence possible, they figured.
Hyder Ali too planned to restart his zari, or gold thread embroidery, workshop. Eid is when women wore their best clothes and there would be demand for his embroidery, he thought. He took bus rides into the city to take fresh loans while Farzana went to the Dargah. Traveling in opposing directions, father and daughter watched the slim, finger-shaped city turning slowly into a dusty construction site, straining and nearly coming apart as it stretched to house its more than 20 million residents.
Farzana was going to the right place, the aging and voluble Roshan Shaikh, who lived in a tenement building near the shrine and often hung out in its courtyard, explained. She must have been standing on a mountain with her hair loose, Roshan said. She did not believe in such superstition, Roshan said, but a young woman from her own building had recently been cured by Baba Jalaludin of an invisible but toxic spirit that had gripped her this way. The family had quickly got her married to someone outside the city, so the jilted Shaitan couldn’t repossess her.
Girls these days! They dab scent on, pin flowers into their hair, and go where the spirits lie in wait, Roshan fretted. It is how Farzana, whom she did not know personally, must have been trapped, she said. “Shaitan aashiq ho jaate hain,” Roshan concluded. Shaitans fall in love with them.
THIRTEEN
THE MORNING OF JUNE 2, her eighteenth birthday, Farzana emptied the money box she had been filling for months. She walked to the 90 Feet Road market and bought herself a pair of jeans. After all, this was it. She was finally an adult. She watched lights getting strung through the long, chaotic street, in preparation for Ramzan. Pickers carefully piled up hills of prayer caps, shoes, and fruit on the pavement, on the road and on folding tables that straddled the two. The fasts would begin within days. Farzana went to the packed sweet shop where she usually bought cream clouds floating in sweetened milk with her carefully saved money. That day, it was cake, wafers, and chocolate.
Turning back for home, she saw pale gray clouds hanging over the mountains that rose ahead and hung like hulks over their communities. Sisters, nieces, and nephews dropped in to wish her a happy birthday through the afternoon, but Farzana had left her bags at home and gone to work. All of the sisters had been the same since childhood, Sahani would often say. They got fevers if they missed walking the mountains for even a day—their bodies ached. Farzana couldn’t stay away.
In the evening, Farzana wore her jeans with a new long black top, decorated with multi-colored patterns. She wore gold hoops in her ears and made up her face. The house filled slowly with all the Shaikh siblings, their spouses and children. Only Jehana, the oldest, stayed away: her husband thought he had seen her with another man at the mountains and when they returned home, he hacked his garbage fork into her head, making a deep, bloody gash. That evening, he sat at their doorstep, while she stayed inside. At Hyder Ali’s house, the others huddled around Farzana, as she cut the square cake with her name written in white sugar icing.
Even as she sliced the cake and began serving it, Ismail began teasing her, saying that this was the year she would get married … but to whom? “Tere se achha dikhna chahiye!” Farzana replied. It better be someone nicer looking than you! He threw something at her and they chased each other around the packed room, bumping into the others, trying not to trip on Faizan, Alamgir’s nine-month-old son, who crawled around underfoot.
Hyder Ali sat next to Jehangir, who had been in the middle of moving out of the house for months, and looked ahead as he spoke. Jehangir had his own trash business now, his own motorbike. “Gharwalon ke saath kyun rahega? Kyun paisa dega?”—Why would he live with his family or share his money with them?—Hyder Ali asked, caustically. Jehangir didn’t respond. He, Rakila, and their three children ate at home but walked over to sleep in a house he had recently rented nearby. Soon they would be gone, and Alamgir too was hoping to follow his brother out, with a new job driving a garbage truck. If that happened, Farzana would become the oldest of the children who handed money over to their father, to keep the household limping on.
Look for a husband for Farzana, Jehangir said, turning to Afsana, the only one of the sisters whose marriage had taken her out of the mountain’s shadow. He didn’t want someone from the dumping grounds. What if the Deonar grounds close down? Farzana turned sharply away from Ismail. “Mujhe karna hi nahi hai bhai.” I don’t want to be married! “Main yahin rahoongi, tere saath,” she protested, tears suddenly running down her powdered fac
e. I want to stay here, stay with you brother.
* * *
THREE DAYS LATER, the sun stayed behind clouds that had been gathering slowly through the day. Farzana, picking on a trash peak in a gentle breeze, had not noticed the sky darken, until, a little before sunset, she was drenched in the monsoon season’s first showers. That night, she slept fitfully, to the sound of thunder. The holy month of Ramzan had begun before dawn. When she stepped out into their lane, it glowed before first light under a canopy of freshly strung, silver bunting, high above. Farzana, fasting, already felt hungry.
As the rains doused the fires, the official plans to evict the pickers intensified. The municipality had asked consultants to plan for a plant that would consume 3,000 metric tons of waste, more than half of what arrived at the township every day. In court committee meetings, some members were skeptical such a big plant would work all at once; it could perhaps be made to work in phases. Oka’s deadline to stop dumping at Deonar’s hills was only a year away, and the fires that had burned all winter were on everyone’s minds. The project that had glimmered and faded on and off for decades gained a sudden sense of urgency.
Farzana worked on, watching the outer slopes turn emerald with grass, just as they had when she first came to work. Lotuses bloomed and melted in the rain that rose in troughs. She forked over old trash, gloopy from rains and charred from the fires. A few weeks earlier, Shakimun and Buddhi had accompanied her to Baba Jalaludin’s Dargah. Shakimun had unbraided Farzana’s long hair so the spirit would not get tangled in it when Akbar Bhai teased it out of her body with his incantation. Alone amid the crowd of entranced people, Farzana had not moved or swayed to the rising drumbeat. The spirit had retreated from her, the healer had told them. The job that should have taken eleven weeks was done in only a few. Shakimun returned home feeling calmer.
