Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  Another truck cleaner approached Farzana on a clearing, days later. His friend Nadeem liked her. Did she like him too? “Sochoongi,” she had replied, returning to fill trash into her bag. I’ll think about it. She began staying buried in trash scrambles around Nadeem’s truck, avoiding his gaze. She used the proceeds from the trash she sold to buy Chinese bhel, crispy fried noodles mixed with sliced cabbage, hot sauce, and Indian spices. It was a blend of two Eastern cultures that left Farzana and Farha orange-tongued and teary eyed. In the middle of getting their fix, Farha often nudged Farzana to show her: Nadeem was standing behind them, across the street. Farzana felt his eyes on her.

  Farzana heard his calls ring, wherever she was. When she and Farha got home, Farzana often dug out, from her little sister’s bag, the phone Farha had collected from the mountains and had repaired. She checked for Nadeem’s calls and hid it again, sorting the day’s trash, hoping Jehangir or Alamgir had not seen it. Sometimes, when Farha pushed Nadeem’s ringing phone in front of her, Farzana spoke to him, airily, for a bit, and quickly hung up. Weeks after Nadeem had asked through his friend, Farzana finally took his call to say she liked him too.

  Fires still simmered on the mountains. Drones hovered over slopes and television crews walked them. The mountains began closing in on them. Farzana waited at clearings but Nadeem’s truck often got sent to the Mulund mountains instead. On other days, he looked for her at clearings when she had already been sent home by the guards. They fought over their increasingly averted meetings. Farzana kept trying to make it through the fires, smoke, and security. Fevers raged in her, talismans filled her arms, but nothing could keep Farzana home when she had plans to meet Nadeem.

  In the evenings, Nadeem began following Alamgir to his kata to help organize the trash, weigh it, and pay pickers, except the fires had slowed business and there wasn’t much to do. They locked up early and moved on to Alamgir’s house to chat. Farzana hung around, usually ignoring them, occasionally turning to tell them their information about the guards, friends who had been beaten up or others who had paid to get in and work nights, was wrong. What did truck drivers know about pickers?

  When they did make it to the same trash clearing at the same time, Farzana and Nadeem walked together furtively, concealed in the still rising smoke. The blazing sun parched Farzana’s mouth, the smoldering mountains scalded the soles of her feet, peeling the skin off of them. Smoke made her cough and her throat and chest itch. Nadeem began bringing bottles of water for her.

  One afternoon, when Nadeem arrived, Farzana was waiting for him with a small, transparent plastic pouch in her hands. Nadeem looked up at the smile that lit her face, then quizzically at the bag. It was her gift for him, a grain of uncooked rice. “Dhyan se dekh,” she said. Look at it carefully. “Zyada,” she repeated. More carefully. She had had their names inscribed on the rice grain at the Haji Ali shrine. Nadeem and Farzana, united forever on a grain of rice.

  With Farzana’s eighteenth birthday, rains had cleared the fires and smoke, hills began filling with moisture and rising again. Adulthood had arrived, and Farzana spoke to Nadeem in the glow of the phone, after everyone had fallen asleep, asking him to meet her parents, speak about marriage. They were looking for someone. She had hung up green bangles at Mira Datar’s shrine. She would be married to someone else, if he did not come to see them soon. Nadeem was often at their home, avoiding her parents, avoiding Jehangir. He was waiting for his driver’s license, for the job that would come with it and that he hoped would impress her brothers. She slept fitfully and worked before dawn.

  Alamgir’s wife, Yasmeen, was already suspicious. “Naak to uski pakode jaisi hai,” she told Farzana one afternoon, asking indirectly about the short man who was always at their house. His nose looks like batter dropped into hot oil to make a pakoda. She had not had any luck getting information from Alamgir, who only said Nadeem was new on the truck and needed to learn how to drive. Did he like her, Yasmeen asked Farzana, eliciting no reply. “Naata hai vo,” she said, scrunching her nose. He’s too short for you. Farzana was the tallest of the six sisters, and Yasmeen thought she could do better than Nadeem.

  * * *

  ONE MORNING, NADEEM had come to the mountains, riding next to the driver, in a garbage truck, his water bottle rolling under his feet. Farzana waited for him. When she was done picking from his truck, Nadeem handed her the water. It dribbled down her long neck as she drank thirstily, chatting and giggling at the same time, barely pausing to breathe. When he returned from his round in the city, late in the afternoon, he didn’t see Farzana or the usual crowd collect around his truck. A picker told him that the others had taken someone who had been crushed by a bulldozer and left for dead in the clearing to the hospital. They would be back soon. The victim was unlikely to survive.

  The mountains were filled with stories. Nadeem had heard about children getting eaten by mountain dogs while their mothers whirled within garbage scrambles. He knew gang rivalries led to stabbings on quiet mountain peaks. A gangster had hidden, rolled up in a discarded carpet, for days, to avoid police. Cocooned within, he had been reformed, and when he emerged he had become a cleric at a mosque close by. It was hard to say which of the tales that filled the mountain air were true and which ones were not.

  Then Nadeem heard it was Farzana who had come under the bulldozer. He left the truck midway through his shift and hung around in hospital corridors for days, unable to see her. Their friends had slowly returned to work but Nadeem had waited outside the swinging doors until Alamgir told him that Farzana had called out for him. Even as the doctors gave their dire prognosis, Nadeem heard, she had mumbled his name. For weeks, Nadeem spent nights at the hospital and days on the truck, keeping his household running and his head in a daze. As the days wore on, both his mother and Hyder Ali thought Nadeem would stop coming to see Farzana, that he would return to his own home at night. But Nadeem had kept returning to hospital corridors, the ward, and then later to Hyder Ali’s home.

  Speaking with his son that night, Hyder Ali realized it was Nadeem that Farzana had worked through the smoke-induced fevers and coughs for, and whom she had called out in the hospital for. He immediately asked Alamgir to call the young man. Hyder Ali asked Nadeem, why did he come every day? He knew how mangled Farzana’s body had been. How scarred she still was. Nadeem told Hyder Ali he hadn’t stuck through the long nights at the hospital only to leave Farzana now. He wanted to marry her. Tears welled in Hyder Ali’s eyes.

  For weeks, his friends had told Nadeem that Farzana could be deformed for life. It wasn’t the only problem: his older brother had told him to keep away from mountain girls. “Love shove shuru ho jata hai,” he said. They start love affairs on the slopes. “Bhai tu door hi reh,” he warned. Stay away, brother. But Nadeem had given his word to Farzana and then to Hyder Ali. Jehangir, too, had wanted a match who would take his sister away from the mountains. But he knew, word traveled fast in the marriage market. Who would marry Farzana as she was? Besides, she would not budge. “Usse nahi karoongi to mar jaoongi,” was all she would say about it. If I don’t marry him, I will die.

  The plans were put in motion. Nadeem told Hyder Ali he would bring his mother to approve of Farzana. Then he would have to bring his uncles over, from the village. As the elders of the family, even though they had never lived together, the uncles would have to endorse the match. Hyder Ali charged Alamgir with taking Farzana’s marriage proposal to Nadeem’s mother, as is custom. Enduring, unchanging rituals of arranged marriages would replace the promises made between Nadeem and Farzana, two young souls on the shifting, rising trash peaks amid wafting smoke.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, THE MUNICIPALITY also advertised for a match for its intractable mountains. Interest in prebid meetings had remained tepid. A municipal engineer said they had often been sent for seminars on what makes a good tender, how to write it so it would work well, so it would elicit bids. They had tweaked this one. But finding the balance between what worked for the
municipality and what would attract an eligible suitor for its trash township was hard. The company that made the plant would have to pay a large deposit that it would get back only after five years, to ensure it kept the plant in good running order. An Indian partner was to operate the plant, but such a big plant had never been run in India. Companies worried the city’s terms were too hard to meet.

  Potential bidders worried also about the messy fallout with Tatva, the allegations that the municipality had not met the terms they had agreed on, the ongoing arbitration. Then there was the mountains’ army of pickers that despite so many efforts to evict them, had never left. “It is true that we have never really been able to build a wall” around the mountains, a municipal engineer involved in planning the plant said. But without the wall to mark it as theirs and keep out the army of mountain denizens, how could a new company settle on the slopes, potential bidders worried.

  On October 25, 2016, the municipality issued invitations for bids to make the waste-to-energy plant at the Deonar mountains. On November 9, Sanjay Mukherjee, Mumbai’s additional municipal commissioner, was upbeat, telling reporters that “this will be one of the largest plants in the world.”

  The Hindu festival season ended days later, leaving the winds on the mountains drier and fiercer. They would soon wither the plants, turning the mountains brown and squeezing out any rain left within, deflating them again. As warm winds traveled through slopes, they could hit gases emanating from the slowly putrefying mountains or trash boiled by sun, and erupt in fires, even while bids were open. Guard patrols stayed tight. Hyder Ali watched pickers make their way slowly up slopes, guards gather around, batter them with sticks, and turn them back. He hoarded and relayed these worrying stories to friends who dropped by at home in the evenings. They recounted their own. A chill ran down their lanes.

  Ragpickers from far ends of the city came before daybreak and worked in deep, unpatrolled mountain recesses. Days later, as guards discovered them, pickers scouted for new places to trawl for trash in. The secret spots shrank rapidly. Hyder Ali heard of more friends working nights, returning home before guards arrived in the morning. The guards began patrolling at night too.

  On his bench outside, Hyder Ali pulled his knees up, resting his chin on them. He stared at the silvery gray remnants of a fire that Sahani and Yasmeen had made with scavenged wood scraps to cook meals on. The family’s life lay suspended between Farzana’s illness and the fading mountain luck. Hyder Ali had not bought cooking oil for the stove inside in weeks. The soap operas that had wafted out of the television all day, had been silenced after he stopped paying cable bills. Shakimun’s sewing machine and the blender had sputtered out too. Sahani brought a mortar and pestle and ground chutneys to eat with chapatis they cooked on the silver-ringed fires. Hyder Ali had been getting property tax bills for three years—this was the municipality’s acknowledgment that he lived here—but he had not paid any of them. “Bhar doonga. Ayenge hatane to bhar doonga,” he said. I will pay if they come to evict me.

  The municipality planned that the bids were to be submitted by January 2017. Work would only begin after April. The plant would then take nearly three years to build, making Justice Oka’s June 2017 deadline impossible to meet. But by making a little progress, officials hoped to keep the mountains going for just a little longer.

  NINETEEN

  NADEEM’S MOTHER, SHAHEEN, HAD waited for weeks for the arrival of the marriage proposal. She knew that Nadeem had stayed out nights on end because a friend’s sister was in the hospital, after an accident. When he asked her to cook for the girl, who didn’t like hospital food, Shaheen’s neighbor had asked if she knew she was cooking for her prospective daughter-in-law. She watched him fix his hair endlessly in the small mirror stuck on the wall, and figured it was for the girl in the hospital.

  When Alamgir finally appeared, in December 2016, Shaheen told him that their house was unlike Hyder Ali’s. Theirs had been the first plinth of brick and stone in a lane of trash-made homes, marking them as one of the more prosperous families in their settlement. It rose over the rainwater that flowed down the mountains through their lane. The house had risen in fits and starts above this foundation. When Shaheen had been a bride, it had only two side walls. Fierce monsoon winds and rain blew through the house. Alone at home, while her husband was at work, she had sat at the front opening, with a stick, to keep the Shaitans out. Nadeem’s father had slowly built a front and back wall and then a second floor. But unlike Farzana’s flimsy house, which Shaheen had heard of, this one was solid, all brick. Farzana would be marrying up.

  It was agreed that Shaheen would come to inspect Farzana a few weeks later. When Hyder Ali heard this, he paced Banjara Galli all afternoon, fretting about the tests Farzana would have to pass. It was for Nadeem that Farzana had forced herself out of bed, dragging her leg painfully, to walk. It was with him that she would have the life that others thought she could never have. If only she could make it through the bridal inspection. But how could she? he worried.

  A few weeks earlier, he had watched fairy lights getting strung in their lane, glinting past his house toward the mountains. They ended at Parveen Shaikh’s house. For years, the bespectacled, petite, and dour Parveen had taken pride in saving up from picking trash to push both her sons through high school. She had checked their pockets, every evening, to make sure gangs didn’t lure them away with money or drugs. “Khaane se zyaada to maine fikar khayi hai,” she would often tell Shakimun. I ate worry more than food when my boys were growing up. Shakimun was never sure how to respond: aside from the youngest, Ramzan, her sons had never seen the inside of a school.

  Parveen’s oldest, Ismail, collected payments for a cell phone company while her younger son worked as a tailor and passed on scraps for her to sell. A few days earlier, when Parveen was cooking dinner, Ismail had walked in with a bride, a girl from work he had secretly married. Parveen’s dreams of finding a pliant girl from their village had crumbled, but faced with a bride at home, she planned a wedding ceremony and reception, and had lights fixed in the lane.

  Farzana had grown up with Ismail; he was only a few months older than her. She decided she had to go to the reception. Besides, she wanted to see the bride, who had upturned Parveen’s carefully nurtured plans. Everyone in Banjara Galli was talking about her. Farzana said she would go early, before her parents, and not stay long. The reception hall was at the lane’s entrance. Hyder Ali could not bring himself to say no.

  Farzana picked out a long blue skirt and top, sewn with gold thread work, to wear. Sahani helped her dress up. As she fixed her hair in the mirror, Farzana thought her throat bulged out awkwardly, making her face look frozen and distorted. She wrapped her blue dupatta with gold tassels tightly around her face to cover her neck, and powdered her face to brighten it. When she came out, Hyder Ali saw a skinny, drawn shadow of the old Farzana.

  As she walked slowly down the lane to the wedding hall with Farha, Hyder Ali settled down with a tumbler of tea on the bench jutting out of the house. He heard Farzana crying. It was all he ever heard these days, Hyder Ali thought. But her crying only got louder. He put his tumbler aside and craned to look down the lane. He saw Farzana limping slowly back with her arm around Farha. Tears smeared her whitened face, crumbling the glowing excitement she had left with. Sahani helped her into the house, sat her on the floor, and tried fiddling with her dress.

  They had only walked halfway down the lane, Farha explained, when a long, metallic thread from the scallops embroidered on Farzana’s skirt had caught on one of the sutures that held her calf together. Farha bent down and tried to get it unstuck but tugging at it threatened to reopen the wound, Farha thought. Farzana could feel her leg throbbing. The lane spun in circles around her.

  Farha cried with Farzana. Her palms got clammy and slipped on her sister’s skin. She had stood up, wrapped Farzana’s arm around her shoulder, and brought her home, hobbling. Farzana’s screaming filled the house as Sahani and Farah tried dise
ntangling her skirt from her calf. Hyder Ali cried helplessly outside. He heard them ask her to stay still so they could unfix the gold thread.

  Then the room fell silent. She must have got out of the dress, he thought, relieved. The silence stretched on. She must be asleep, Hyder Ali thought, sipping his by then tepid tea again.

  Then, Farzana stepped out again, this time in a baby pink salwar kameez. She had fixed her hair and her face again and was ready to leave. She had missed the wedding already but would not miss the reception for anything, she told him. It really was the old Farzana, Hyder Ali thought, as he watched her walk down Banjara Galli again.

  Nadeem came over in the evenings. Farzana took slow steps forward with her hand on his shoulder. Was she taller than him, Yasmeen asked Farzana. Is that why her hand sat so comfortably on his shoulder? He was bending for her, Farzana said, bending a bit herself. She stopped in the middle of their walks, inside the house, on most evenings, turning to ask him what he would give her as a wedding gift. She would have to wait to know, he said. The wedding suddenly shimmered ahead. She had to get to it.

  * * *

  FARZANA JOINED KHULA Aasman, a free soccer class for girls in their lanes, to try to fix her limp. Mehrun and some of the other girls all tried to finish up their chores: cooking, fetching water, and embroidery by the afternoon, so they could play in a small and tilting open space. Farzana, with her limp, was sure to make any team she was in lose. The others begged her to sit out the games and just watch them play. But Farzana wore her baby blue t-shirt with “Khula Aasman,” or “Open Sky,” emblazoned on it and was there before the game began, twice a week, waiting to be picked. Doctors had told her to get some exercise, she told them. She loved coming home exhausted, having tried to run.