Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  * * *

  HYDER ALI DECIDED that Jehana would stay with Farzana at the hospital while the others would return to work so they could look for money for Farzana’s treatment. He mostly stayed at home. He cried too much when he saw his daughter’s broken body, and Jehana would have to send him away.

  After several surgeries, Farzana was moved out of intensive care to the hospital’s E ward, lost in a haze of pain and semi-consciousness. More than thirty female patients, and the smell of their sickness, filled it. Jehana walked through it, looking at patients she dryly called bhayanak, terrifying. They were all recovering from accidents or burns.

  But no one cried like Farzana did when doctors came on their morning rounds, to change her bandages and dress her wounds, every few days. Jehana turned away as they unwrapped the long, gauze bandages to reveal Farzana’s raw, pink body, barely held together. The doctors checked to see if her wounds were drying up, sprinkled powders, rubbed ointments, and wrapped new bandages on. “Poora kamra sar pe utha leti thi,” Jehana often recalled, with a wry smile, about dressing days. She had the eyes and ears of the whole room.

  When they left, Farzana often fell into a deep, exhausted sleep, while Jehana got medicines or test results. She chatted with relatives of other patients, who asked why Farzana was so bandaged-up. At night, when Jehana was sleepy, Farzana was awake, crying in pain. Bony and austere, Jehana had the firm air of being the oldest of nine and the mother of six. On the slopes, she had often been able to make the intrepid, unstoppable Farzana follow her terse instructions. But in the hospital, she could only watch Farzana mumble and shriek in the darkened ward. She could not bring Farzana back to her senses, as she always had.

  Later, Jehana would say that she thought the spirits had finally left Farzana as she lay under the bulldozer. But in those unending nights, Jehana thought it could only be the Shaitan flailing within. As lights went off in their ward, Jehana felt a fog rolling over Farzana. When she closed her eyes to sleep, Farzana found herself in front of the bulldozer on the cloudy, gray mountains that morning. She called out to the driver to stop moving back. She was behind him, she shouted.

  Farzana called out to their mother and God to get her away from the approaching bulldozer. Sweat soaked her body as she saw it move closer. She called out to someone called Riyaaz. Jehana thought Farzana could see someone invisible to her and wondered if it was the spirits within her who spoke and who Farzana saw through her sleepless eyes. Her mouth felt dry. Jehana got her plastic packets of fruit juice. Farzana sucked the cool juice hungrily, struggled to curl up her long limbs and sleep without tugging at staples or wounds. If she turned the wrong way, or too quickly, the pain could make her howl for hours. Jehana, who slept on a sheet she laid out on the floor, cried softly, waiting for sleep to come over Farzana, usually as dawn broke.

  One afternoon, Sahani, the sister after Jehana, arrived. The two chatted while Farzana slept. “Vo to naram kachre mein giri to bach gayi, nahi to …” Sahani trailed off. She fell in soft trash so she got saved, else … If the bulldozer had found Farzana on the road instead of the mountains, the outcome could have been worse, she suggested. Jehana asked if she knew who Riyaaz was. Sahani reminded her that there had been a boy in their lanes, around her own age, called Riyaaz Shaikh. He had left school to come to work on the mountains when his father’s hand was injured and he could not work anymore. They had not seen Riyaaz for years.

  When Sahani left, Jehana found Farzana awake. She didn’t remember calling out to Riyaaz or the bulldozer driver in her sleep. But Farzana reminded Jehana that they had known him, in the years before she came to work on the slopes all day. He too came to pick trash in the afternoons and usually stayed on after they left.

  On a stormy August morning in 2009, the sisters had seen a small crowd, on a hilltop, as they made their way up the slopes. They watched pickers standing in nearly knee-deep mud and soaked in rain. Jehana and Farzana had walked up and seen them huddled around Riyaaz, lying, pressed into trash, his face and body flattened. Thick tire marks ran over him. One of the oversized bulldozers the municipality used in the monsoon season must have rolled over him, pickers figured. They had taken him to Rajawadi hospital, but he arrived there cold and long dead. He had probably been lying amid the trash through most of the rain-soaked night.

  Farzana heard his mother, Shakila, had walked the soggy slopes all morning looking for him. Maybe he had stayed the night on the slopes because evening had come before he’d found enough trash, she thought. Maybe he had tired of looking, and not wanting to return with an empty trash bag, had waited for trucks filled with valuable trash to arrive from hotels and slept on the slopes. Shakila asked pickers if they had seen her son sleeping in trash. He was in brown trousers that may have faded into the muddy slopes. She had gone to the hospital when she heard someone in brown trousers had been taken there. Riyaaz’s death certificate had said his was an accidental death. That gray morning swam in Farzana’s eyes. She saw Riyaaz’s flattened, tire-marked face when she tried to sleep, she told Jehana.

  Riyaaz’s father had sat by his son’s grave, all day, for months, while Shakila had walked adrift, in Banjara Galli. She seemed like half a person, gaunt as a ghost, tears never far, never leaving the lane, except to take loans to run a small corner shop with which she sustained her three younger children. There had been weddings in her village, her mother had fallen ill and died but Shakila had not left. “Usko yahaan chhod ke kaise jaoon?” she would say. How can I leave him here? “Mujhe dhoodne aaya to?” What if he comes looking for me? she would ask, even a decade later. Riyaaz wouldn’t leave Farzana either.

  * * *

  JEHANA KEPT UP her tired vigil as Farzana drifted painfully between the world of the living and dead. As dusk fell every evening, Alamgir’s friend Nadeem came into their ward, the shimmery pompadour in his hair just a little paler than the golden sun, deepening outside. The crowd of pickers had thinned out but he still came. Jehana often sent him to get painkillers, or asked him to help prop Farzana up on pillows. The sides of his head were buzzed to make his pompadour seem taller and win him a few extra inches of height. He came in, taking long, hurried strides, as if to make up for something: his lack of height and for having been away all day.

  He became Farzana’s shadow. His arms moved as if they were her own bandaged, immobile ones, massaging her head and her swollen feet, until she slept. He fiddled gently with her bandages so they didn’t tug painfully at her and make her cry. He moved as if he was her still-broken legs, bringing water to drink, or a blanket. He perched himself next to Farzana, on the bed. Jehana could not hear what he spoke, softly into her ears. But sometimes, she saw it bring a weak smile on Farzana’s face.

  Jehana had first seen Nadeem in the crowd of pickers in the early days, when their lanes had poured into the hospital’s corridors. Most people she knew from their lanes were there and she had barely noticed him, passing by while looking for Jehangir or Alamgir. At first, when Farzana was moved to the ward, Nadeem began coming in to see her with Alamgir, and then by himself.

  Every evening, as the sun faded and the lights came on, Farzana tossed restlessly in her bed. Nadeem arrived, muddy from work, his pompadour wobbling, nearly falling to make gold streaks on his face, and sat at Farzana’s bedside. Jehana saw them bicker and talk. She was not sure he should have been there. But he offered to bring any medicines she had run out of, or juice from the cafeteria. Jehana began to leave him to watch over Farzana while she took short breaks from her bedside.

  She paced up and down the corridor outside, watching night attendants walk by hurriedly, holding bedsheets and woolen nightcaps. For the first time in the day, she thought about her children, wondering if they had been given dinner. Trying to scratch something together for them had taken up her evenings for years. Now she barely thought about it. Jehana had tried to get her husband to work. But the card games, and the gossip, alcohol, and drugs that went with them, around the mountains’ rim, had filled his mind with st
ories of suspicion and conspiracy, making him lash out at Jehana. In his mind, she was always with someone else. He chased trucks desultorily and earned enough only for his stash. He searched carefully for the jewel-colored bottles of alcohol steeped in the trash, and stayed late on clearings, emptying their sour, leftover dregs.

  Jehana’s husband and his friends, their hair slicked back with gel, eyes lined with kohl, their bodies emaciated, had reoccupied the abandoned sheds made of dried leaves of the sort that Farzana and her friends had once built for their parties on the mountains. Their minds and bodies had shriveled by their intoxications that fueled suspicion, uncontrolled fits of rage and violence. They poured it all out on their women.

  Jehana had tried picking trash to keep the house going but time and again her husband’s jealousy had pulled her back. Tears ran down her eyes as she thought of long evenings planning dinner, around an empty stove, with him circling outside to ensure she didn’t step past the threshold. Eventually the children would ask her for a few rupees to buy a bag of chips or biscuits. She would tell them to get it from Hyder Ali’s house.

  Her days with Farzana had been painful and sleepless. But they had taken her away from the constant anxiety and failure to produce meals at home. Farzana’s struggles had lulled her own, given her something to think of other than her own troubles. She thought of Farzana’s endless nights of crying and moaning, as she paced the corridor. Jehana realized, Nadeem, which means companion, was the name she took the most in her nightly mumblings. It was that Nadeem, the little man elongated by a gold pompadour, who had visited to care for Farzana, who had become her shadow, who had turned his limbs into hers.

  Nadeem offered to bring the dinner Shakimun cooked every evening to the hospital. Even looking at it made Farzana nauseous. Jehana insisted she eat, and the two sisters squabbled over Farzana’s barely touched dinner. Nadeem stepped in to broker a truce. He made little morsels and fed her.

  Farzana, whose stomach had churned at the sight of food for weeks, began finding it bland. Suddenly, she wanted something spicy. One evening, he arrived with dinner from his own home. He had got his mother to make a saalan, a deep and rich lamb curry, with rice.

  She tried fighting, feebly when he was late. He sat with her all night, watched her cry, helped her turn over, and spoke softly until she slept. Jehana and he watched her scream in pain, at the smallest movement. When Farzana finally fell asleep, just before sunrise, Nadeem left for work. A little before dawn broke, he rode garbage trucks as they began their rounds of the lightening city, filling them with its debris and emptying it on the mountains.

  EIGHTEEN

  TOWARD THE END OF September 2016, Farzana had returned home to the ebbing rains. The season of fires would begin on the mountains again. Warm, dry winds would soon bluster against the scorching sun of Mumbai’s returning summer, blowing up dust, making a haze above them. In the haze, new guards appeared. They stood on watchtowers—freshly built by the municipality to police the hilly township of trash—and surveyed its edges with binoculars.

  Carefully, Jehangir and Alamgir had carried Farzana in their arms from the entrance of their slender, long lane and laid her down on the floor at home. The doctors had finished her surgeries, Hyder Ali had claimed some expenses from a government insurance scheme and used up all his money to have her treated, but after a month and a half in the hospital, Farzana had hardly healed. Yasmeen and Rakila learned to change her dressings at home, to avoid the arduous and expensive journeys back to the hospital. She still cried until the neighbors arrived, to see what was happening. Shakimun sat hunched over her daughter, chasing out boys who strayed in to collect cricket balls and soccer balls from games in their lane and gawked at Farzana’s still disfigured limbs.

  Through September and most of October, municipal officials had presented potential bidders their plans to mend the mountains and shrink their halo. They had elicited suggestions from companies and offered to tweak their plans accordingly. But the troubles with Tatva, its continuing court cases, loomed over the meetings. Who would want to take on management of the township, with its fires, its shadowy army of pickers that stalked slopes, its messy past? Could the place ever really change, they worried.

  As the date to begin submitting bids came closer, the specter of fires came to meet them. The municipality had hired the Maharashtra State Security Force (MSSF)—a commando force that was trained by police and could be hired to guard installations, companies, and wealthy people— to secure the mountains.

  Hyder Ali stood by the wall watching these new guards dressed in army fatigues, baseball caps, dark glasses, looking bigger than anyone he had ever seen guarding the mountains before. He squinted against the afternoon sun to crack their patrolling schedule. When did they take breaks for lunch? When did they walk to the far end of the mountains’ long, looping periphery so he could get in? When did their shift end? Someone always seemed to be there. The new guards were to rid the mountains of old ghosts, of fires, of encroachers, and prepare them for new suitors.

  One evening, Hyder Ali returned home late from analyzing the new guards’ ceaseless patrols, and he saw Farzana standing up. The stick they had found for her to use as a crutch lay abandoned on the floor. She was leaning against Nadeem instead. Hyder Ali had heard people speak about Farzana, in his walks to the mountains. Would she be scarred forever? Could she ever get mended? Most of all, they asked, who would marry her? Could she have children? They had heard all her bones were broken. They had heard she had come back from the dead. Is this how the rest of her life would be? Hyder Ali had evaded Nadeem for months. Everything about the young man meeting with Farzana was inappropriate. If being seized by spirits, crushed by a bulldozer, and left for dead were not enough, news of his unmarried daughter, being visited by an unrelated man who had not been selected by her family, at night, would strangle her marriage prospects entirely. And yet, here was Nadeem, day after day, bringing Farzana to life again.

  That night, Hyder Ali decided he had to know more about Nadeem. He called Alamgir, sprawled and nearly asleep, on the floor near Farzana. He came out, wearing a stiff, sleepy air, and was followed by Nadeem, who then left for home. Alamgir told Hyder Ali, Nadeem was from Padma Nagar, the last of the communities that hugged the mountains, said to be settled on a swamp of lotuses. His father had been a mason, who had earned well as the city inched its way toward Deonar. For a time, he had built a life away from trash, even if living in the mountains’ shadow. He enrolled Nadeem and his brothers at a private English school nearby. At several city hospitals, he sought treatment for his daughter, the youngest of the children, who was born with a heart defect. As she grew older, they discovered she could neither hear, nor speak. He began retrieving Nadeem and his brothers from the mountains, where they were skipping class. His disappointments mounting, he transferred the boys to the municipal school. There too, all three boys soon dropped out. Alamgir had seen them on the mountains ever since.

  Nadeem’s father had died in April 2016, losing his battle with cancer. Days later, with debts to clear from the treatment, Nadeem had begun working as a garbage truck cleaner, washing trucks and helping fill them with trash. Often, he was assigned to the ones Alamgir drove. They sped through empty streets as dawn lightened the city. The early morning breeze blowing over them, they hardly noticed the stench their gradually filling truck emitted. They did the rounds of the central suburb of Kurla, filling the truck with sooty remains from one of the city’s longest stretches of spare parts stores and car garages. The cutouts of cheap rubber soles from the city’s shoe-makers and fish food from aquariums, emptied into their truck. They watched a mall rise over the stunted skyline and tall buildings stretching up from the far end of a swamp to make a gleaming new financial district. They drove on to Saki Naka and then Powai, where low-slung lakeside homes were giving way to condominiums, call centers, technology start-ups, and softly lit coffee shops. Nadeem kept things aside from the trash for himself and Alamgir to sell later. As Alamgir
drove on, Nadeem leaned over to watch. Somewhere between filling the old Kurla and Powai and bringing it to the Deonar mountains, the two had become friends.

  Alamgir often kept his headlights on, even in the day, to get to the more distant edges of the still smoky, burning, curving township. The fires had upended life on the mountains. Fresh trash fell on the old and charred. Hidden treasures surfaced from under burned layers. Around then, for the first time, Nadeem had noticed a tall, slender girl pulling out bottles, glass, and metal wires from his emptying truck. She was beautiful, unstoppable in the melee of pickers—and paid him no attention at all. Friends told him it could only be Farzana, Jehangir, and Alamgir’s younger sister. Hadn’t he seen her before?

  Jehangir was Javed’s man, rising on the hills with his restless energy and lispy chatter. Nadeem needed to learn driving from Alamgir if he was going to follow his route to a garbage truck driving job. Neither of the brothers could be messed with. Farzana was trouble. And yet, on days when he didn’t see her brothers around, Nadeem watched Farzana edge into garbage scrambles and turn into a blur.

  One afternoon, Nadeem was returning to the city, his emptied truck winding slowly down a slope. He spotted Farzana standing below, with Farha. Could he help, Nadeem stopped near them to ask. Farzana recognized him as Alamgir’s long-haired friend who always wore brightly colored net vests that peeked out of half-open shirts. As Farzana and Farha clambered into the back seat, conversation froze. They watched the trash hills pass by outside, in silence. Nadeem deposited them at the katas near the municipal office so they could sell their trash and left.

  After that day, Nadeem thought he saw Farzana watching him at garbage clearings. One afternoon he noticed her speak to her friends and giggle. She seemed to be pointing at his long, poker-straight hair, which gave him a slightly electrocuted air. Nadeem’s heart sank. A few days later, when Nadeem’s truck arrived at the clearing, his hair was buzzed at the sides, and the pompadour had appeared atop. When she saw him, Farzana nodded tightly to approve, turned around, and burrowed herself into the trash shower erupting from his truck.