by Saumya Roy
Jehana, and others, huddled around Farzana. They stared quietly at the swollen head and crushed body, spattered in bits of flesh, blood, and muddy trash. The relentless pursuit of garbage had suddenly halted. Pickers were not sure what to do. Jehana heard the people around her saying that this was Jehangir’s sister. She watched municipal officials walk up from their office nearby, having heard the commotion. Pickers called out to Jehangir. She joined them. Someone had seen him buying trash nearby, a little earlier.
When Jehangir heard Jehana’s voice calling out to him, he thought Ramzan, their youngest brother, had missed school again and was up to no good at the mountains. He followed Jehana’s voice uphill, thinking of how he would drag Ramzan back home and give him a thrashing to make sure he didn’t dare venture back. Instead, he saw a small crowd milling around. He looked under the halted bulldozer and saw a battered person. Green and blue clothes peeked out brightly under a black jacket. As he got closer, he saw flesh hanging loose, a bone protruding, a swollen face streaked with blood. Blood soaked the trash around her. In her right hand, she clutched a half-filled bag of plastic bottles. Jehangir realized it was Farzana that they were calling him to see.
Jehangir got into the driver’s seat, Jehana recalled, and drove the bulldozer off his sister’s body. Scavenging birds swooped down, forming shadows over Farzana’s ripped-open flesh. Her insides spilled out on the mountain. A milky, white bone jutted out of her calf. Blood trickled down from her bulging eyes. Jehana stared, not knowing what to do.
Pickers suggested Jehangir take Farzana to Shatabdi, known officially as Madan Mohan Malaviya Shatabdi, the municipal hospital, not far from the mountains. He hailed a garbage truck that had just emptied. Friends helped him pick up the broken Farzana, carefully, in his arms. He laid her down on the back seat, in the driver’s cabin, and directed the truck through the mountains’ slushy tracks toward the highway. When Sahani arrived at the clearing, moments after they had left, she could still see Farzana’s outline pressed into the trash.
One of Jehangir’s friends, who had come with him in the truck, turned to look at Farzana in the back seat. “Uska haath dekh Jehangir bhai,” he said, staring at the blood and torn flesh spilling out of her left arm. Look at her arm, Jehangir brother. “Usko dekho,” Jehangir replied, wryly. Look at all of her.
At Shatabdi, Jehangir wheeled Farzana on a stretcher through the back door that opened across the emergency department. Jehangir pushed his way through the sick, waiting restlessly outside. The doctors he managed to stop recoiled at the sight of Farzana. They told Jehangir they did not think she would make it, that there was not much they could do for her. Their hospital was not equipped to deal with such grievous injuries. They asked him to take Farzana to Sion Hospital, officially known as Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital, one of the city’s largest and busiest public hospitals.
Jehangir demanded an ambulance to move Farzana there, so treatment could begin. Doctors called for it and bandaged Farzana loosely, for the ride. As Jehangir waited outside for his parents, for the ambulance to arrive, and for the money they would need for her treatment, Farzana’s life hung by a thread.
When Jehana came home and told him what had happened, Hyder Ali knew the Shaitan had struck. He had haunted Farzana for months, Hyder Ali said, and had trapped her and tripped her at that moment when she had faced the bulldozer. “Vo uska nuksaan karne ke liye hi aaya tha,” he said. He came to harm her and now he has. Hurriedly, he scraped together some money from friends and neighbors. When they arrived at Shatabdi, the ambulance that would transfer Farzana to Sion Hospital had still not arrived. Together, Farzana’s family and their neighbors hounded doctors and staff.
When the ambulance finally came, they inched slowly through the highway. Afternoon traffic was piled up in light rain. Farzana had heard the doctors. “Bhai mein bachoongi nahi,” she told Jehangir. I won’t survive. Her breathing was labored. “Don’t worry,” her brother repeated. “Don’t worry.”
At Sion, Jehangir pushed her stretcher through the frenzied emergency department. Doctors drew the curtain around Farzana’s body to make a small examination room. They put on an oxygen mask: the long and painful breaths she drew to get even the tiniest bits of air suggested the bulldozer had punctured her lungs, which were filling with air.
Her left arm and leg were filled with broken bones and open wounds. Her left calf bone stuck out of her leg. Lumps of dark clotted flesh spilled out of her left thigh. Her right calf was wounded too, the doctors wrote in their examination report. Her left arm was broken. Scans revealed her liver and intestines were injured and there was fluid, most likely blood in her abdomen. Her back and pelvis were fractured. There was hardly a part of Farzana’s body that was not injured, their report suggested.
Doctors moved a flashlight near Farzana’s eyes. When they brought it close to her, Farzana could follow it with her right eye, but not with her left eye. It was her distended face with a contusion and head injury that had worried the doctors at Shatabdi the most. They thought her brain might be swollen or injured. She was so badly injured it was hard to know where to begin fixing Farzana.
There isn’t much hope, the doctor said to the crowd of mud-splashed family and pickers waiting outside the examination room, but they would try their best to treat her. The next three days would be crucial. If Farzana responded to treatment they could begin treating the rest of her injuries. Jehangir’s glass business and private garbage clearing had nearly ground to a halt since the fires. But he went home and emptied his savings and deposited them at the hospital. Then he left for the Shivaji Nagar police station to file a complaint about Farzana’s accident.
Farzana’s sisters and brothers crowded around her, crying. They bent low to hear her repeat, “I won’t live long.” She whispered that she was sorry for all the troubles she had caused them. Yasmeen and Sahani told Farzana they would pray for her. “Tu theek ho jayegi,” Sahani said softly into her ear, teary and unsure. You’ll get better.
Doctors moved her to intensive care, the corridor outside filling with hundreds of pickers in their muddy clothes and oversized gumboots that left trails on hospital floors. Some were neighbors and friends, others were not even sure who was inside. It could have been any of them, the people whose lives existed in the flash between trucks emptying trash and bulldozers moving in to shovel it away. Farzana’s was the kind of accident they tried to push out of their minds while they worked. It brought back memories of a lifetime spent under trucks, ferreting out garbage, jumping onto moving vehicles, dodging bulldozers as they picked trash and stepping aside just as forklifts moved to scoop them up with the trash. They had held tight to tipping trucks and turned away from bulldozers just when they got too close. Some had crushed fingers, others had limps that came from failing to escape as truck tires approached. As they waited to hear about Farzana, they shared stories of their narrow escapes and unspoken nightmares.
The doctors began with inserting a tube between her ribs to help her breathe, blood transfusions to make up for the blood loss and sending her for brain scans. That evening, Farzana was recovering when a police officer arrived to record her statement. Doctors had recorded most of her injuries as grievous in the medical report they submitted to be attached to the police complaint. The officer spoke to Jehangir, Jehana, and Shakimun instead and recorded their statements. Other officers had visited the mountain clearing and spoken to pickers who had seen the bulldozer roll over Farzana. They filed a complaint against the driver for causing grievous injury by accident and rash and negligent driving. If he was convicted, it would lead to a maximum of a couple of years in prison and the driver’s license being revoked.
Police got the plate number of the bulldozer from the registers at the mountain gate where it had entered that morning. The driver’s name was Mohammed Hashim Khan. Pickers who had seen him that morning described him as a slim, young man with an intent stare. By coincidence, he lived in the same sprawling complex of buildings that the pol
ice station had recently moved to, occupying a white, multi-storied building at the entrance. The elevator did not work and there was nowhere to eat close by. But it was a relief from the constant smell and the knee-deep, murky monsoon waters that had periodically filled the squat old police station near the mountains.
Officers walked through the tightly packed complex of one-room tenements to his apartment. The complex, which took up a vast tract between the mountain communities and the highway, was a step up from living on a street. People constantly arrived from the flimsy settlements that filled Mumbai’s pavements and rail tracks, claiming their first concrete homes, their first address. Hashim’s older brother opened the door and told them Nanhe, or the little one, as they called him at home, had not returned from work that day. Police parties searched for him through the night.
On August 18, he walked into the police station and turned himself in.
An officer recorded Hashim Khan’s statement. He said he had come from his village five years ago to live with his brother and sister-in-law. He was twenty-six years old and had worked as a bulldozer driver for several years on the mountains. He had started work at his usual time of 7 A.M. that day and had been shoveling trash on mountain slopes all morning. A little after noon, a truck had emptied out garbage at a clearing near him, he said. While going down the mountain slope, the truck had become stuck in the tracks, which were muddied by rain. Khan was driving his bulldozer back to help clear the way so the truck could move.
He had been struggling to shovel away mud and trash for a while before he saw ragpickers waving and yelling in his rearview mirror. He stopped and got out as soon as he heard the commotion and found a girl under his bulldozer. She had headphones on that had drowned out the sound of his bulldozer getting closer, he said. He thought the pickers had waved at her too, to warn her, but she had stayed in place, not responding to them or his approaching bulldozer. He ran back to his cabin and drove the bulldozer forward, from over her body.
He had been so frightened of the pickers that he ran away from there until he reached near the mountain gate. He sat outside the municipal office under the old banyan tree that marked the end of the vanished cuchra train track that had settled their township, turning the swamp to the mountains. He watched the usual hum inside the small, single-story municipal office. He caught his breath and then walked home. He had come to report the incident on his own, he told the police officer. They arrested him.
On the mountains, work ground to a halt. Some pickers joined the vigil at the hospital, while fear and anger paralyzed others. Guards patrolled zealously to keep away those who still came to work. Older pickers spoke to staff at the nonprofit that gave them informal identity cards. After Farzana’s accident, rage—that had been simmering for years while they stayed invisible to the city that relied on them to clean up after it—had boiled over. The pickers planned protests and met municipal officials. Any of them could have been crushed like Farzana, like the garbage they picked. They pressed officials to punish the driver, to compensate Farzana’s family, and to protect them while they worked on the mountains.
The accident took place on municipal land. Farzana should never have been there. Jehangir, who had filed the police complaint, had appropriated a tip of the mountains, and was liable for punishment. It was a painful reminder to the pickers that they lived in an unofficial world of shadows, less people than intruders.
Officials had seen Farzana’s accident and probably noted it in the daily registers they kept at the mountains but they seemed to be lost. No one, other than Nanhe, the little one, was responsible for what happened to her.
Hashim was produced in court the day after he turned himself in at the police station. His brother, Azad, posted bail and he returned home. Pickers heard Azad did house calls as an electrician. He had apparently borrowed money to post ₹20,000 as bail. Hashim put out word for new jobs to pay back the money, while the police built a case against him in court.
Meanwhile, Farzana’s family prayed and waited through the longest three days of their lives. Hyder Ali sat in the filigreed gold corridors of Makhdoom Shah Baba’s shrine, praying. He brought back a rose that he placed under Farzana’s pillow in the intensive care unit. Jehana kept her company by her bedside, while the others waited anxiously outside. Nurses used eye drops to shrink Farzana’s staring eyes.
Every day, the pickers waited in the chaotic and teeming corridors of Sion Hospital to know Farzana’s fate. Yasmin was often in the crowd. Every time the doors to the air-conditioned intensive unit swung open and doctors came out, to a gush of cool air, she felt a gnawing pit in her stomach. Each time, she could not help thinking that the doctors had come out to tell them that Farzana had gone.
SEVENTEEN
AFTER THE THREE DAYS were up, the doctors told her family that the swelling in Farzana’s brain was receding. They would begin the long and arduous part of putting her body together again. Hyder Ali believed it was the intercession of Makhdoom Shah Baba, tugging his daughter back to the land of the living.
Days turned into a haze, as surgeries went on. Farzana drifted in and out of consciousness. Her painful cries ebbed only when her swollen eyes, shrinking gradually back into their sockets, closed in a sedative-induced sleep. She awoke too soon, cold in her metal hospital bed, howling with pain.
At times, Farzana seemed to drift back to their world, asking for friends, or something cold to drink. At other times, hearing her scream, Jehana felt, Farzana spoke from the world of the spirits that pulled at her limbs and had dragged her down under the bulldozer. Looking at Farzana’s broken body, Jehana wondered if she may already have slipped into some kind of underworld where she was unreachable. It was as if the world of the living and the world of the dead battled within Farzana. Jehana kept her covered with a blanket.
Farzana remembered waking up in long corridors, outside operation theaters, waiting for them to be free. She waited for hours, alone, afraid and crying. Later, attendants arrived and sent her back to the ward: there were too many surgeries lined up at the theater. She returned to wait outside operation theaters for days before finally making it in. Farzana woke up from surgeries to find herself increasingly bandaged. Her chest was held in a brace. So was her left leg, to draw her calf bone back in. She could barely move.
To keep the surgeries going, Jehangir dipped into his savings, carefully accumulated over years from his trash business, his own mountain clearing and from Javed’s patronage. When it all fell short, he sold the motorbike that had helped give him a glow of success in their lanes. He was sinking fast, but all Jehangir could think of was Farzana. With nothing else to fall back on but the fickleness of mountain luck, love in the shadow of the mountains acquired an intense, burnished glow. Through the precarious turns of their lives, it was often the only constant. It was all they had when they had nothing.
When Jehangir’s money began running out, Hyder Ali walked up to Farzana’s hospital bed and took off the earrings she wore, as gently as he could, and sold them. “Jab ladki hi nahi bachegi to sona leke kya karenge?” he later explained. If she doesn’t make it, what good is the gold?
At the mountains, pickers kept away, or were kept away by guards. They protested everywhere they could, trying to get help for Farzana and to make themselves visible. They heard a local corporator owned the bulldozer that had run her over. They protested outside his office. He was not there to meet them. Later, they learned he didn’t own the bulldozers after all. Still, they kept up their protests, finding new spots for them. They had spent decades trying to stay invisible to the municipality, the police, the city, to trucks, and to bulldozers. But something had changed with the fires, tightening security and Farzana’s accident. Now they fought to return to the world of the visible. For someone to see them. Someone to avoid them if they got too close. And someone to be held responsible for running them over.
* * *
AT THE MUNICIPAL office, officials were consumed in their own battles. In the plant’s s
chedule, made to match Oka’s deadline, September was the month for pre-bid meetings. They would confer with interested companies and take in their suggestions before inviting first bids in October, little more than a month away. Consultants had suggested that only companies with years of experience building large waste-to-energy plants be allowed to apply. But if Deonar’s was to be India’s largest waste-to-energy plant, no one had made anything like it before. Through August and September, rumors circulated that municipal officials had met companies from China, South Korea, and Brazil. They would partner with Indian companies, it was said.
In meetings, though, these company officials voiced worries Tatva’s troubles could return to torpedo their plant too. They too could be stranded without garbage to incinerate, without the land lease, funds to construct the plant, or the municipality’s support. The specter of the failed project, the continuing arbitration with the municipality, haunted the proposed project, dampening interest. Back at the mountains, pickers’ frustration was growing. They looked for the bulldozer owner, whom they later found and brought to Hyder Ali. Farzana should not have been on the mountains at all, he said. The bulldozer was nearly as big as his room. Why had she not moved away as it approached? Was she crazy? They had heard that she was.
Sahani heard that bulldozer owners had told municipal officials that they would not work on the mountains if people came under their bulldozers and they were asked to pay compensation. They knew their bulldozers would have to keep moving for garbage caravans to keep arriving from the city, and the contents to be pressed down onto hills as they always had been. This shouldn’t be our problem, Sahani heard bulldozer owners had said to municipal officials.
