by Saumya Roy
She tried walking down the lane, to her sisters’ houses, then farther, to friends’ places. That would heal her limp before Shaheen came, she figured. One afternoon, as she was walking down 90 Feet Road to a friend’s house, she looked down to straighten her knee. When she looked up, a bulldozer was rolling slowly toward her. She watched it approach. Its growing rumble rang in her ears. She stood in place. It came closer. Tears streamed down her face. There was nowhere to go, Farzana thought. It was coming at her, as it did in her dreams.
A neighbor had seen Farzana standing in front of a bulldozer, crying. It was retreating by then, pressing down molten concrete, to fix the road cratered by rain. The neighbor walked her home. Farzana had sobbed through much of the afternoon. “Vahi cheez thi,” she told Nadeem that evening, as they walked inside the house. It was the same thing. He kept her walking.
When he left, she massaged her knee to reduce the pain and swelling. Wanting to be married, looking like she did, walking like she did, did she want too much? Farzana fretted. But Nadeem came every evening. They bantered, Nadeem softly, Farzana more loudly. His soft voice making her brighter. He egged her on to stand, to walk, to move.
Farzana had no memory of being possessed and had never been sure about the spirits—or of anything that held her back. But with Shaheen’s visit coming up, she let Hyder Ali and Yasmeen fiddle with her amulets and have new prayers read into them, to ward away any leftover spirits that they thought trembled in her hand and dragged her leg. Farzana worried about what she would wear and how best to sit and sip tea without her hand quivering. She got Sahani to buy lime green glass bangles to match the rose pink salwar kameez embroidered with small, lifelike rosebuds and roses, their bright green stems and leaves in place. She would wear it the day Shaheen came, hoping she would see Farzana not as she was, but as she could be.
* * *
WHEN OFFICIALS HAD presented their plans to the court committee, some members had worried they were too ambitious. The plant might not make money even after the concession of the company that was to run the plant ran out after twenty years. Could they begin with a smaller plant? Besides, the incinerator would have to be fed dry waste that would burn well and produce electricity. But only unsorted tangles came out of homes to fill garbage trucks. Wealthy homes, which produced the most valuable trash, sometimes didn’t even have trash cans at all, their owners unsure about what happened to their possessions after they were done with them and handed them to household staff to dispose of. Everything—from food to shoes, to razor blades, used batteries, injections, tablet strips, and diapers—came to the mountains mashed together, and would make the incinerator less effective if fed together. But less than 10 percent of Mumbai’s waste got separated, surveys showed.
Since the 1970s, waste incinerators had been installed at Deonar and one in the city even predated the mountains. But as the incinerators had failed, pickers collected what emptied from trucks turning cuchra, or trash, into bhangaar, scrap or raw material for something else, for someone else. Phugawlas had trawled for plastic, Chumbakwalas for metal, Chindiwalas for scrap. They had brought it to their lanes, sorted and resold them to be remade.
Officials stepped up their campaign to get household trash separated. The municipality asked building managers to separate and compost the biodegradable waste in their compound and send only dry waste in trucks that left for Deonar, Mulund, or Kanjurmarg. If they didn’t, the managers could get fined or lose their building licenses. At the mountains, consultants had planned for screens and magnetic segregators to separate the trash instead of pickers, so they could feed the right kind of things to the plant. The mountains’ invisible army would be replaced but there would be better jobs for them at the plant, or in their cleaned-up lanes.
* * *
SAHANI DIDN’T KNOW how to tell Farzana that the more she tried to walk, the more her leg dragged. The evening before Shaheen’s visit, Sahani climbed up the shaky metal stairs to the loft where Farzana lay awake on the bed. She wore a blue salwar kameez, her head demurely covered. Sahani threw away the quilt and lifted up her sister’s loose-fitting salwar to look at the pink wounds that began a little above Farzana’s ankle, traveled up her left leg, and ended at her buttocks, which were caved in from being stitched up over missing flesh. Long stitch marks ran the length of her arms too. Sahani jabbed at Farzana’s swollen knees and ankles. “Kaun isse shaadi karega aise,” she asked, agonizing over the test that lay ahead. Who would want to marry her like this?
The following day, Shaheen walked up the stairs in Hyder Ali’s house to meet Farzana. She had a plump softness that might have come from never having worked on the mountains, never having scrambled for garbage. The two spoke little but felt they knew each other. Nadeem had told his mother that Farzana could not carry heavy things or squat to wash clothes. “Mil ke ghar chalaenge,” she told the bride-to-be. We’ll run the house together. She came down and gave Hyder Ali her assent for the marriage. “Nahi to bachon ka dil tootta hai,” she would later recall. I would have broken their hearts if I didn’t. She told Hyder Ali that Nadeem’s uncles would come for a final approval when they visited for his father’s first death anniversary, next April.
Hyder Ali walked up the stairs to tell Farzana. She had waited weeks to hear this news. But he found her asleep, exhausted from making sure her leg did not drag, that the gauzy dupatta did not fall off her head, that she did not speak, from being the observant, pliant, and protected girl for the marriage market. It had worn her out, but a life with Nadeem lay ahead.
Hyder Ali came back downstairs, thinking about how he could stall the wedding without canceling it. Shaheen had told him that this was the first wedding in her family, since her own. Much of the groom’s large and extended family would come. Hyder Ali could barely even pay for his half of the wedding. There was no one he could ask for money anymore, not even Jehangir, who had borne the brunt of Farzana’s hospital expenses.
* * *
HYDER ALI FIXED Farzana’s wedding for June 2017, nearly eight months later. He desperately needed money, but work on the mountains remained erratic. Guards had not let pickers work since they began finding money in the trash a few weeks before. Hyder Ali heard that someone had found a burlap sack full of notes. As word spread, police arrived, took the cash away, and told them most city notes were worthless. On November 8, 2016, the prime minister had banned high currency notes in order to prevent terrorists from printing fakes and undermining India’s rising economy. Notes stashed secretly in the city for years had begun arriving at the mountains. They had suddenly turned to rubbish. Pickers sold them for less than the printed amount until guards and policemen blocked their entry into the mountains. Why was it that when money arrived at the mountains, packed in bags, it was useless, Hyder Ali thought.
“Pradhan Mantri hamare liye i-card bhej rahe hain,” he told Badre Alam, his cousin who lived in their loft, as they chatted at home one evening. The prime minister is sending us identity cards. He would work at the mountains only when the cards, which let him walk the mountains officially, came. The guards would not be able to drive them away, if he had the prime minister’s card on him, Hyder Ali thought. It was how he had understood the new solid waste rules that volunteers had told him about, the ones that said pickers were to be included in managing the city’s waste.
The cousins chatted about reviving the embroidery workshop before Farzana’s wedding. Hyder Ali softly let on that despite his resolution, he had gone to work on the mountains yesterday.
He had collected ten kilos of squashed plastic, he told Badre Alam, looking toward the black bags in a corner of the room. Badre Alam threw him a befuddled look. Hyder Ali just threw his hands up. What was he to do? Farzana’s wedding was only months away.
Ten-year-old Ramzan, the youngest of the children, walked in. “Isko kabhi nahi bhejoonga,” Hyder Ali said. I’ll never send him to the mountains. His eyes shone as he spoke of how Ramzan was the only one of his children who woke up on his own, ma
de his tea, and left for school by 7:30 A.M. Ramzan’s school tie and bag hung on a wall hook, along with Farzana’s back brace. Ramzan responded saying he loved going to the mountains. Hyder Ali stared in mock horror. “Bagule marne jata hoon,” Ramzan reassured his father. I go there to kill storks, using the Urdu equivalent of “shooting the breeze.”
As 2016 came to a close, the strange harvest of currency notes had left the mountains as trash had continued to fill them. The gray market for the old notes shrank, new pink and orange notes arrived on the market. Pickers gave up on waiting for their official identity cards. Security eased and they had returned to picking trash. Officials waited nervously for fires and prepared to quell them. The deadline for the plant tenders was in January 2017. Not a single bid came.
TWENTY
LATE ON A BREEZY January evening, Yasmin returned to her house after a medical trial. She paid rent with the money she brought with her and moved back into the room that she had vacated before she left. The children returned, bringing back bits of their home, which had been stored at katas’ and others’ places during their mother’s absence. Mehrun resettled the family, folding everyone’s clothes into the metal cupboard and lining up dishes along the kitchen counter while Yasmin dozed off.
The following afternoon, a long line of people blocked Banjara Galli’s entrance, wanting a consultation at the free health clinic that had opened across the slim entrance. Perched atop the clinic was a board with a bicycle painted on a background of green and red, the symbol of the Samajwadi or Socialist Party. Elections for Mumbai’s municipality, said to be India or Asia’s wealthiest, were weeks away. Mumbai’s election machine was moving through their lanes, glinting in them. But its promises barely reached Yasmin’s house, dark in the mountains’ shade, teetering at the edge. Inside, Mehrun, who was always home, was graduating from the cusp of teenage straight into adulthood.
The faintly sweet smell of rice Mehrun was steaming filled their room. Some of the women had not made it through the tests, Yasmin, in a sunflower yellow salwar kameez with pink and gold flowers scalloped at the edges, told Sharib, her older son, and Mehrun. So they had to be sent home. But she passed the tests and felt nothing after she took the drug, a contraceptive; Yasmin beamed. In a few weeks, she would return so doctors could check if the medicine had any side effects, earning her another month’s rent and expenses.
The kitchen counter darkened and Mehrun turned to see her brother Sameer, who was two years older, standing at the door, blocking the light. The sun streamed around him, framing his edges with a gold rim. Coated in a patina of dried mountain mud, he looked like a sepia-tinted photograph, except for the blood trickling down his legs. Mehrun served Sharib, the older of the brothers, who looked up with a sour expression, aimed at Sameer.
He had been walking to work in the morning, Sharib told them, when he heard screaming. He turned and saw guards raining their sticks down on a picker whose long body curled up tightly under their blows. As their sticks swung back up in the air, he uncurled to breathe, and they kicked his stomach, curling him up in pain again. Pickers stood around and along the slope, watching. As Sharib, breathless, drew near, the guards stopped and the dusty figure uncoiled beneath them. It was Sameer.
Sharib had pled with the guards to let Sameer go. He would never come back, Sharib promised, retrieving Sameer. The two had walked down the slope, until Sameer veered, limping toward the market to scour the overflowing dustbins that garbage trucks hardly reached. He eventually returned home, trickling blood that Yasmin asked him to wash off before Friday prayers and Arabic class.
Whenever she returned with money from trials, Yasmin repraised her efforts to push her children out of the mountains’ shadow. Sameer ate the rice Mehrun served, then messed through the clothes she had laid out in the cupboard, nearly missing prayers, until he found a dark, mismatched set and left with Sharib.
Mehrun tidied the cupboard and settled to fill a long saree border with gold flowers, when Hera arrived. She was followed by her mother-in-law and sister-in-law. Her sister-in-law wore a red salwar kameez topped with a red and green dupatta with a bicycle motif, as if the board above the clinic had draped itself around her shoulders. Mother and daughter had spent the morning walking through their lanes, campaigning for the Samajwadi Party.
The Party’s traditional vote base was among the Muslim and Yadav communities in Uttar Pradesh, where it ran the government. Its roots had spread in the mountains’ shadow as pickers came from the state to fill it, and these lanes formed the Party’s stronghold in Mumbai. The city’s major parties—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena who had controlled the city and its wealth for almost two decades—mostly stayed away. Instead, they mounted furious campaigns in the city; after years as a junior partner, the BJP had taken control of the central and state government, and had now set its sights on one of India’s largest and richest cities. Devendra Fadnavis, Maharashtra’s young chief minister, smiled out of campaign hoardings across Mumbai. Among the promises splashed on them was one to make electricity from the waste at Deonar. The tender dates had passed by without any bids coming for the project at Deonar, but the promise remained, unwavering.
The Samajwadi Party’s councilors had opposed the plant, saying it would sicken the lungs of their constituents, weakened by years of inhaling the city’s detritus, without giving them the jobs the pickers had waited for. With the municipality controlled by the Shiv Sena and BJP, who represented the city that sent the waste to the unseen mountains, the plans were finally approved. The plant would come to the mountains, if only someone would bid for it.
* * *
IN YASMIN’S HOUSE, the city arrived, a little through official means, but more often through unofficial routes, couched in stiff officialese. While the women chatted that afternoon, gang payment collectors waited at the door to collect payments for the power they had illegally connected to homes in their lanes. Mehrun asked them to come back in a little while. She would borrow money to pay them.
Within days, Yasmin had nearly run out of the money she brought from the trial and returned for another. An angry red rash began growing across Sharib’s back. It stretched and reddened in the sun, as he constructed a house near Ashra’s school. Watching it grow, the boss had sent him home, where Sharib laid on the floor in pain, turning on one side and then another.
In charge of the house, Mehrun planned days around bringing back the free municipal water supply. She would have to walk down their long lane to 90 Feet Road, slip into the loud, slippery gaggle for the municipal water tanker, then make sure she ran into someone to help her bring back water cans. She could also buy water from a neighbor who had surreptitiously connected his pipe to the water supply. But he asked for a fee she could not pay.
Through the afternoons, she stayed buried in fixing flowers on women’s sleeves, worrying her brothers would ask her what was for lunch when she had nothing. Yasmin returned, sooner than expected: she had tested as anemic and been rejected from the trial. She had begged them to take her anyway. She needed the money, but had been turned away only with travel expenses. The early winter dusk often set in before Mehrun could buy supplies and light up the stove to cook. Over these long, quiet afternoons, Mehrun embroidered beads, her hazel eyes getting larger, her face thinner. The gold flowers she stitched floated in her eyes and her empty stomach.
The only topic that made her seem like the twelve-year-old she was, was the collection of discarded dolls, accumulated from the mountains, now lost in the many moves in and out of the same house. “Vo log ub jaate hain na,” she said. The owners must have gotten bored of them, right. Theek hai. Tabhi to hamein mila. It’s okay. That is how we got them. This too, was how the city arrived at their house.
* * *
AS THEIR LANES filled with party flags, Yasmin searched for work in the election industry. A friend had taken her along to a campaign rally in the city, where she heard their state representative say he had brought water to the lanes around the
mountains. She knew it hadn’t reached their house but Yasmin clapped on cue. Later, she heard that the rate for filling crowds at rallies had gone up to ₹800, far more than her first visit. If she went to a few rallies she would not need to go for a medical trial for a month, Yasmin thought. But she could not get any work, too many people wanted the well-paying jobs as crowd fillers at rallies.
Yasmin used the last of her notes for ointment to shrink Sharib’s rash and handed Mehrun more embroidery instead. Late one afternoon, Mehrun and Ashra stuck tiny gold crystals onto a black burqa, making lengthening trellises on it. “Bhook nahi hai,” Mehrun said to Ashra, and almost to herself, I am really not hungry. Ashra soon left, unable to focus on work. Mehrun stood up, holding up a gold saree border that was longer than she was and would buy them a meal.
Explaining why she left Mehrun to fill the intricate borders and sleeves, Yasmin would explain that the medical trials had weakened her. She knew people in her lane talked about her long absences, with Mehrun locked in the house, her odd hours and irregular, mysterious earnings. She knew that they thought it was why Moharram Ali had left her.
* * *
YASMIN WANTED TO enroll Sameer for a drug rehabilitation program. She suspected his foggy mind, slow, halting speech, and fitful head rolls were clouded by more than just the gutkha, or chewing tobacco, that had stained his teeth. But he also pulled out money when she could not find it anywhere else. She put off his treatment until after she had gotten Mehrun out of their lanes. Stuck in the mountains’ shadow, Mehrun had stayed out of school, scrounging for meals, struggling for water, getting quieter and more translucent by the day, even as creditors crept closer. Yasmin wanted her out.
