Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  * * *

  WEEKS LATER, ON a sun-baked afternoon, Nadeem walked Farzana back to Hyder Ali’s home. It was one of the last days of Ramzan: the rains had set in but that afternoon the air was warm, heavy, and humid. Banjara Galli wore a languid air. Most people had retreated into their homes to escape the heat, their energy dissipated by hunger.

  Hyder Ali and Shakimun were at Yasmin’s house, chatting about the Shaitan they believed they had beaten back from Farzana. “Vo khoobsurat thi na, usne fasaya” was Hyder Ali’s only reply, as they discussed why the Shaitan had gripped Farzana and tripped her right as the bulldozer approached on that overcast August afternoon. She was so beautiful, the Shaitan entrapped her.

  Nadeem and Farzana walked in; she was wearing a burqa for the first time. Shaheen had given it to her after she got married, Farzana said. She began unbuttoning it, revealing maroon, freshly made henna patterns on her palms, with Nadeem’s name written in English. Neighbors had dropped in with Mehendi cones the day before, to prepare for Eid, she said, curling her palm shyly into a fist.

  Hyder Ali basked in the glow of the triumphant wedding; his estimate of guests ranged from five hundred to two thousand. He could hardly afford any gifts for Farzana himself, and yet she had received thirty sets of clothes, he said. Nadeem’s driver’s license would come through any day, Shakimun piped in: he would graduate from cleaner to driver.

  Their lives buoyed in the rising tide of destiny, Hyder Ali had an explanation and it rhymed with Nadeem: Naseeb, or fate. He fiddled with the cracked plastic phone screen in his hand. A man’s deep voice rose, filling the room with a slow-paced song inspired by Koranic verses, Hyder Ali explained. On screen, the singer’s callow, thinly mustached face gave way to shots that panned through a row of dead bodies wrapped in white shrouds, one being lowered slowly into a grave. He was singing about Naseeb, Hyder Ali explained, even as Farzana looked away. How it steered lives.

  “Upar vala pahunchata hai apne naseeb tak.” God takes us where our destiny is. It was not me or her. Hyder Ali pointed at his wife. “Naseeb ne use Nadeem se milaya, shaadi karai,” he said, enjoying the rhyme. Fate, or Naseeb, had brought Farzana to Nadeem, her companion. It was her fate that helped him pull off such a big wedding, with so little money and that helped her escape the life he and Shakimun had worried she would have. It was her fate that the wedding party had been so big that food ran dangerously low.

  He fiddled with his phone. On the screen, the camera panned across darkened graveyards and freshly dug graves, keeping Hyder Ali on the subject of fate and destiny. Everyone has to go back into the earth, whether the person was from a bungalow or from a place like theirs, he said, explaining the verses. Only a few meters of cloth would go with them, this was fate. All the stuff that filled up the mountains behind would stay behind, he said, waving his bony hand at the hills that rose behind Yasmin’s house.

  Hyder Ali had spent nearly two decades collecting trash on the hills, and yet, they had only risen. The mountains would stay as people came and went, he said, pulling up more videos featuring graveyards on his phone.

  Sprawling graveyards of belongings had lingered on in New York City too, the struggle to close them nearly as prolonged. Things belonging to people long gone still filled a beach near Jamaica Bay. Dead Horse Bay, as the beach was known, had absorbed much of the city’s trash in the thirties. Half buried in sand were switchboards, cups, dishes, and other things made of Bakelite. An early plastic, it was easily moldable, didn’t break, didn’t conduct electricity or heat and could be made cheaply into products, allowing people to possess their desires in forms that ranged from rotary telephones to lidded serving dishes. Unbroken but soon unfashionable, these had been discarded for new things and found their way to the beach. The landfill had been emptied out and moved elsewhere. But its remains, including tights that gave women a shimmery sheen as they began working in offices, had stayed entangled in weeds, their stretchy nylon filament lasting over half a century.

  Indians had not been as wealthy back in Deonar’s early decades. They reused what they could and sent mostly leftover food to the trash mountains, which would have rotted to make its soil fertile. Engineers who had studied mountain composition believed that only animal bones and bits of gold would have remained from the early years. But in the decades that followed, with growing wealth, trucks had begun emptying plastic takeaway containers, large cloth and plastic sacks that once contained grains, aluminum foil and plastic boxes for milk and juice, stretchy tubes to squeeze out toothpaste or sandalwood-scented creams. They had dumped metallic strips packed with tablets that pickers consumed, disposable syringes used by the growing diabetes patients that jabbed pickers, and other things that would never turn to soil. Mumbai’s age of dizzying growth was leaving its own immortal trail.

  In New York’s Staten Island, the sprawling Fresh Kills garbage township, where the city’s garbage had been sent for decades, had also endured as a monument to the country’s golden age of consumption. It was a garbage city so vast that there were traffic lights to direct the city’s garbage truck caravans through its towering trash hills. After the 9/11 terror attack, debris from the World Trade Center buildings was buried here, the city began closing the Fresh Kills trash township. At its entrance, there were crushed bathroom sinks and pots. They had been left to dry in the sun and would later get immersed in the ocean bed so oysters could breed on their surfaces. The name Fresh Kills came from the Dutch word for the fresh streams of water that had once flowed through here. Streams would run through the slowly detoxifying hills again, and fish would get reintroduced in them. Newspaper reports later said trees had mysteriously grown on the hills, though they had only a thin topping of soil over its core of decomposing trash.

  At Deonar, where newly discarded and unmeldable things were emptied constantly on the hills, only pickers took new trash away to be remade into new things. But now guards asked for ₹100 to let them pick through the mountains. Hyder Ali didn’t earn much more than that in a day. So, he mostly stayed home and watched videos like the ones about the graveyards. “Aur hain. Aur achhe,” he said, and sifted through the videos stored in his phone. I have more. Nicer ones. He continued, narrating their message. “Vo bata rahe hain, kaise sab cheez jama karo par naseeb yahi hai ki jana akele hai.” They tell you all about how you can accumulate everything, but destiny makes us leave the world alone.

  Nadeem shifted awkwardly. He had to get back for an afternoon shift on the truck, he said. He would take Farzana back with him. Shakimun wheedled him to let Farzana stay, promising she would get Alamgir to drop his sister home later, but Nadeem motioned at Farzana to leave. As Hyder Ali and Shakimun walked them to the end of the lane, Yasmin stayed behind to plan for Alvida Jumma, or the last Friday of Ramzan, the following day. The crescent moon that brought in Eid was likely to be spotted the next night, bringing in the luckiest day of the year.

  TWENTY-THREE

  AT THE NEXT COURT date, in July 2017, the case of Deonar’s trash mountains did not come up until it was almost lunchtime. Raj Sharma watched the crowd in the courtroom ebb and flow and thought his hearing would be quick. He had already spoken to a waste expert to arrange a visit and report back to Oka on whether his orders to fix the mountains had been implemented. When the Deonar case number was finally called, Justice Oka asked the lawyers if they had thought of an expert to visit. The municipality’s lawyer said there was no need for one; the township fell in the purview of the committee Oka had set up and included scientists. Why would the court look outside for help in monitoring the mountains?

  Sharma’s lawyer said the chairman of the court-appointed committee had resigned a few months before, after doctors had told him the mountains’ halo could worsen health issues. The committee had remained directionless ever since, and had not met often. The municipal lawyer interrupted, claiming the opposite: another member had headed the committee, while it looked for a replacement, and it had in fact met. Oka and Justice Vibha Kankanwadi, also
on the bench, watched, with bemusement, as their committee died and came alive in the sparring between the two lawyers, while the mountains and their people hung in the balance.

  The judges resumed their attempts to shrink the halo that had quivered but hardly moved from over the mountains and their denizens. Oka asked the court committee to visit and report back on what progress had been made. While Sharma had surreptitiously gotten through to photograph the mountains by himself, this time the entire committee would go. The day before the visit, in late July, one of the committee’s two scientists pulled out. At the newly renovated municipal office at the dumping grounds, the others watched a presentation on the waste-to-energy plant that officials still hoped to attract bidders for, months after they first invited them. The group then left to inspect the hills, their stomachs churning as they bumped along the cratered road and inhaled the heady smell, unable to get to the far end. Garbage hills rose on either side, gray with monsoon water and Mumbai’s broken detritus. A broken electricity pole joined one craggy hill edge to another. Security guards had kept pickers away, giving the dogs and swooping birds their pick of the garbage that fell out of garbage trucks that afternoon. The mountains looked like an isolated archaeological find, filled with the city’s dated desires, ringed by rising new buildings of glass and steel.

  * * *

  A FEW WEEKS later, at the end of August 2017, Oka’s court hit news headlines. Sharma had often watched proceedings on another petition, which asked for national regulations on silent zones, where the city’s blast would be reduced to a whisper, to be met. Oka had ordered that any place within 100 meters of a court, hospital, or educational institution had to be a silent zone. Enforcing his order in a city where everything and everyone was jammed too close to something else would mean gagging the festivals, marches, whistles, horns, processions, protests, and music that floated incessantly through Mumbai, keeping it always on edge.

  When new national guidelines let state governments mark their own silent zones, officials quickly sidestepped Oka’s orders. Oversized drums from Mumbai’s rambunctious festival season would soon roll into the city, loudspeakers would fill streets. But Oka persisted. The state’s lawyers accused him of bias and asked for his recusal. The chief justice replaced him on the noise pollution cases.

  Lawyers’ associations organized packed protest meetings in support of one of the toughest judges they had faced, and he had to be brought back on the case. But Oka’s victory was a Pyrrhic one. The state withdrew its opposition in the High Court only to appeal in the Supreme Court, days later, which scrapped his silent zones and restrained him from passing any further orders on the issue. Just as the mountains had stayed unmoved, Mumbai’s messy orchestra would stay too.

  Oka had spent fourteen years as a judge and more than two decades as a lawyer before that. His father, Sreenivas Oka, had been a lawyer in neighboring Thane’s district courts and Oka had taken over his grandfather and father’s busy legal practice. He had probably spent his career seeing things, growth, justice, waste plants, and even clean air, move forward in courts and nearly arrive in the city, only to turn and slip sideways at the last moment. He probably knew, cities such as Mumbai sometimes appeared to move only to stay in the same place.

  * * *

  THE WASTE RULES required that thin layers of soil, or debris, top garbage mountains in order to keep them stable and prevent landslides. In the summer of 2017, municipal officials had brought in larger than usual amounts of debris from the city, although within permissible limits, to fill the potholed roads that wound through hills. They dumped it into the waves crowded with trash and mangrove to extend the township and make internal roads so fire engines could reach its far end. They topped the mountains with debris to bury the fires burning within so the township could stay unseen in the city and Mumbai’s garbage caravans could keep coming.

  Fires, landslides, and other disasters were usually how garbage mountains became visible in other cities too. A few months before the committee’s visit to Deonar that summer, there was an accident at the Koshe trash mountain in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The capital city’s partly consumed belongings tumbled down in an avalanche and buried pickers and their sloping homes, as they hunted for things to resell. The authorities had struggled even to get ambulances and stretchers to the mountain crevices, and surviving pickers had fashioned stretchers from trash to bring down the injured and dead. The landslide of used belongings had probably killed more than a hundred people, although no one was sure exactly how many people had lived and died on the slopes of Mount Koshe.

  At Manila’s Smokey Mountain in the Philippines, garbage had erupted down in fires and landslides for years, burying pickers. Tired of the deaths and ensuing headlines, the city had ultimately razed it in the late nineties. Pickers simply moved to the Promised Land mountain, where the waste slopes inched higher and garbage landslides and quiet burials continued.

  At Deonar, municipal officials knew the construction debris would augment the mountains’ noxious halo. Fed to the incinerator, it would not burn well to produce power. And yet, it was all that could keep fires buried within the mountains. As the rains retreated that year, fires had still erupted in October 2016 and again in 2017, though they were not as fierce as the ones in early 2016.

  * * *

  AWARE THAT THE mountains were closing on them, their luck draining fast, pickers tried breaking away. But there was nowhere to go. The mountains drew them back. Through the winter of 2017, after Javed Qureshi had been arrested, Jehangir made several flailing attempts to find work away from trash. Javed had been arrested for being a part of Atique and Rafique Khan’s organized crime ring, making it hard to secure bail. Jehangir met a private contractor who supplied people who traveled on trucks and emptied trash cans into them and asked him for a job. In a few years, Jehangir would graduate to municipal rolls, getting him an official identity card, salary and, he thought, work until he retired, a pension after that. It was one of the most vaunted jobs in their lanes.

  Since the municipality had asked suppliers to stop hiring garbage fillers, unable to afford their gushing pipeline onto its already overfull rolls, the agent had fitted Jehangir into a job that had emptied a year ago. Jehangir hired a young boy to do his job for him, paying the boy part of his salary, part to the contractor. It left him with hardly anything and he tried sidling into the space the Khan brothers had vacated after their arrest.

  He tried collecting parking fees on a strip of 90 Feet Road that the Khans had managed, until he began getting anonymous calls asking if he had a fee collection contract from the municipality. The Khans were said to have collected parking fees for that stretch of the road for years, even after their contract with the municipality had ended. Jehangir did not have one at all. He would get arrested just as they had been, the anonymous caller threatened. Alarmed, Jehangir yielded the parking zone and got out of trouble. His attempts at breaking away, both illegitimate and legitimate, foiled, Jehangir returned to accumulating glass and plastic on the mountains.

  * * *

  FARHA OFTEN WENT over to see Farzana at her new home in the afternoons, after work. She usually found her older sister watching movies on the television, its noise washing over her, untouched by the increasingly desperate hunt for trash that filled Farha’s own days. She talked to Farzana about how she hardly saw Jehangir these days. “Is baar kuch bada soch raha hoon, dekhna,” was all he would say. I am thinking of something big this time. You watch. Farzana hardly made it back to the family home either. Nadeem was usually working and could not accompany her, and she was not to step out of the doorstep by herself, he had warned her, or she could end up at the mountains, pulled into their dangers again.

  Only Nadeem could afford for Farzana to stay home, Farha thought. Jehana and Sahani both worked on the mountains, struggling to produce food for their families. Often, Farha saw Farzana in her rose pink salwar kameez with tiny rosebuds and green stems, the one that she had worn on the evening Shaheen had vis
ited their home and given their approval for the wedding. She covered her head demurely with a dupatta and draped it around her neck, obscuring it from view. It was how middle-class women, away from the mountains’ shadow, lived, Farha thought. Farzana—whom Farha had seen aglow in mountain sun, afloat in its breeze—had quieted and become cocooned in the candy pink walls of Nadeem’s home. The mountains had drained out of her, Farha figured.

  Sometimes, Farzana’s dupatta slipped and Farha caught a glimpse of her swollen neck. It made her face seem bloated too, her eyes bulging. She looked a bit like she did when they had gotten dressed for Parveen’s son’s wedding. Her neck had seemed swollen then too, Farha recalled. Sometimes she saw it balloon on one side, pushing her face to the other. At other times, it looked swollen all around and her face shrunken and at still others, it seemed smooth behind her flimsy dupatta.

  Shaheen, too, had noticed Farzana’s ballooning throat with alarm. She planned to ask Nadeem to take Farzana to the doctor. But these days she only saw Nadeem at night—if at all. He worked ten hours a day ferrying city trash to the mountains at Deonar or Mulund. Weeks later, when Farha returned to Nadeem’s house, she saw uneven bumps swelling around Farzana’s neck again. Farha wondered if the wounds from her sister’s accident on the mountain were reappearing from within her, bubbling under the surface of her skin.