Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  * * *

  IN OCTOBER, THE rains retreated, and the season of fires had returned to the township. Smoke rose from the mountains for days, filling the lanes, while fire engines doused the flames to keep it from drifting into the city. But the pickers still woke up hours before dawn, walking through the dark and empty maze of lanes of Rafiq Nagar, its shuttered shop fronts and gambling recesses rising gently uphill. Half asleep, they slipped through the cracks they had hacked in the wall and walked up trash slopes in the dark, trailing trucks, sifting for plastic bottles, gadgets and wires, flashlights in hand.

  The lights Judge Oka had asked for time and time again had hardly been installed on the slopes yet, keeping the township’s darkness that successive judges had tried to dispel for years. Cameras flickered. Pickers hid in dark crevices if guards passed by, or picked until guard patrols began, at daybreak. They walked back into their lanes, with the early pink light balancing garbage bags precariously atop their heads.

  As the sun warmed over them, some of the women sat together and sorted through the bags they emptied in the lane outside their homes. They flicked away mud and dirt, making heaps of varying thicknesses of plastic and some glass all around them. They would have to sell it at katas farther away: the long stretch of deep and roomy katas that curved around the wall, and that had once been filled with trash by Atique and Rafique Khan, were bolted shut.

  For years, this had been the Khan brothers’ territory. Their cameras had lined these streets, and their grip had been fierce. But the women in Rafiq Nagar’s lanes remembered them with fondness. “Koi police ka matter rahega to vohi dekhte the na, nahi to hamari kaun sunega,” one woman said, flicking things away from a muddy tangle. They are the ones who helped us with police matters. Otherwise, who would listen to us? The brothers had lived close by and had lent them money when they needed it, bought their trash, and employed their children for years.

  It was that girl, Farzana, who was to blame for the constantly patrolling security guards and continually rebuilt wall, not the Khans, the women complained. “Main thi na us din,” one of them said. I was there that day. It had rained, she continued. The slopes were slippery. Her foot got entangled in something, so she was stuck. The bulldozer went over her slightly, she recalled. “Zara sa,” she repeated. Slightly. She touched her index finger to her thumb to show how slightly the bulldozer had gone over Farzana.

  “Ab to vo theek bhi ho gayi.” Farzana was married and walking around. She is fine now. The mountains should not get shut down because of her. The women didn’t seem to know of the court cases swirling over their township. Another woman piped in, saying she had worked there since childhood, that even her mother had picked trash. “Ham kidhar jayenge?” Where else would we go? It wasn’t as if they were going to ask the municipality for anything, she said.

  Moharram Ali dropped by with some friends and sat down to chat with the women, not letting on that he knew Farzana or her father from his days in Banjara Galli. He was new in these lanes, but these women were old friends from his years of night shifts on the mountains. He joined in, the group trading stories of cuts and wounds the mountains had given them. A broken tube light had once lodged itself in his calf, Moharram Ali chortled, lifting his pants to show them. He had hobbled home, bleeding. Later, he got fifteen stitches. Did they remember? He looked at the group expectantly. They didn’t. The men lifted their trousers and pulled up their shirtsleeves to reveal their own calves and arms filled with scars and memories they laughed over. They exchanged notes on guard patrol schedules. Best to work before the sun arose and guards arrived, they agreed.

  * * *

  THROUGH MUCH OF 2017 Yasmin wasn’t sure where Moharram Ali was. He hardly ever took her calls, only called occasionally to tell her he did not work on the mountains. He did construction work. He told her he traveled to Pune, Navi Mumbai, and other towns, farther away, building homes. He was away for days, he said. Then, a friend told Yasmin she had seen him emerge from one of Rafiq Nagar’s lanes, slim as a crack in a wall, their openings obscured by shops, houses, and a thicket of handcarts. He had melted into the crowd of shoppers and pickers before they could get to him. When she called to ask if it had been him, he told her he was working on the mountains only between construction jobs and would not be here for long. He was going back to the village. But the lanes around the mountains were filled with Muslims, Dalits, and others, with no land in the village, no cattle or anything to keep them there. Like Moharram Ali, who as a teenager had sat in a train and left, many of them had made the long journey away from having nothing.

  Gaunt but still exuding his old charm, Moharram Ali told people that in the village he performed the rituals he had learned from his father. Villagers came to tell him of ailments that they believed only he could cure, he said, beaming. A friend had recently come late at night and taken Moharram Ali to his cow, who had howled all evening with labor pains. Moharram Ali said he had chanted his prayers, and in less than an hour, it delivered a calf. Most of all, he performed a powerful Tohna ritual, he said. As he recited the prayers, a sharp smell of mustard rose and filled up the rooms, he said. Everyone scrunched their noses, uncomfortably. In a few minutes, the smell abated, and with it, their troubles vanished too, he said. His rituals seemed to resolve most problems—except his own. Debts from his sister’s wedding and from the city had accumulated, and he had sold the land he bought in the village with the gold chain he found on the mountains. His sister had committed suicide—although he believed her husband had murdered her. Moharram Ali had filed a police case, which only put him deeper in debt. He returned to the mountains, trawling for treasures already taken by city pickers. There was nowhere to go but back to the trash.

  On his phone screen he showed friends photos of Hera with her baby son, his first grandchild. She only saw him from a distance, entering rickshaws or getting out of them. “Kudrat ka keher gira hai,” she told her mother when she returned home. The wrath of nature has fallen on him. Yasmin nodded reluctantly in agreement for the man whose shirts she had spent years keeping stain-free and whose deodorant she had kept replenished.

  Moharram Ali tried working night shifts again. Sometimes, he said, when the guards spotted his tall frame in the dark, they hurled their sticks at him. The sticks gathered speed as they traveled through the air and hit his calves or the back of his knees, flattening him with pain. If only Farzana had not brought this on them, he complained.

  * * *

  AT THE OTHER end of the mountains’ long, looping, and fragmented wall, in Padma Nagar, Farzana stayed curled in front of the television, her neck spilling into her face, her eyes glazed, bile rising in her throat. Shaheen waited for Nadeem to have an afternoon off and asked him to take Farzana to the nearby Shatabdi hospital, where Jehangir had first taken her after she was crushed by the bulldozer.

  They waited for more than an hour in its heaving corridors to see a doctor, Farzana warm and itchy in her burqa, Nadeem in a hurry to make it back in time for his work shift on the truck. The doctor prescribed tests and the two left, realizing on their walk back that they had forgotten to ask about her neck. A few days later, Nadeem and Farzana returned reluctantly to the hospital. Pulling out the test results, the doctor told them that Farzana was pregnant.

  The medical file Farzana took home said she had no previous illnesses. In the busy examination room, Farzana had told the doctor she had nothing to report. She believed that the mountains had retreated from her bones. There was nothing to say.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE HIGH COURT HEARINGS began again, early in 2018. It was more than two decades since the first petitions asking to close the mountains had been filed, and a decade since Justice Oka began hearing the case. It was nearly 120 years since the swamp at Deonar began filling up with trash. In that time, the municipality’s attempts to shrink the mountains had sunk into their soft, towering slopes, which were mirrored in the growing mound of papers on Oka’s desk on an early January morning. A fog had arise
n in the court that seemed to match the mountain’s immovable halo.

  Oka looked at the case papers and asked the state government’s lawyers if they had provided the two plots that had been promised to the municipality so they could establish a new trash township to replace Deonar. One was at Karvale, in Navi Mumbai, and the other at Mulund, where the old dumping ground close by was to shut. The state’s lawyer nodded to say yes, the municipality’s lawyer shook his head to say no.

  The municipality’s lawyer said that the city had paid the state an advance but could not accept the land at Karvale, offered more than a decade ago. Oka looked down and asked the state’s lawyers to turn to paragraph three on a page of their submissions. He asked how the city could even begin dumping garbage at the plot when more people lived there now than when it had first been offered. The plot had come up in court time and again because the tribal people settled there had blocked officials from even surveying the land, let alone seizing it.

  The state’s lawyer said only a few of the thirty-eight hectares of grounds had people living on them. It could fence these settlements off and give the rest of the land to the municipality for dumping and processing waste. “But the encroached pockets are all over the site,” Oka noted, pointing to more lines in the middle of its thick written submissions. He asked the state’s lawyers to look into resettling the residents or finding other dumping grounds by the next hearing, scheduled a few weeks later.

  * * *

  AT THE NEXT hearing, on February 11, the municipal lawyer spoke of the gas pipeline that ran the length of the grounds. Waste heaps could not cover the pipeline, the rules said. Could the pipeline be re-routed around the plot? the lawyers discussed.

  Oka moved on to another plot the state government had offered the municipality, near the existing and aging dumping site at Mulund, within the city. Some municipal maps already showed it as garbage dumping grounds. But when officials went to survey it, some years prior, the central government’s Salt Commissioner’s officers had blocked them. The land was filled with salt pans, they said. They owned it. The state government had been fighting for it, in court, for years. Unless they lost the case, salt commission officials would not hand over the land to the state government, which had already promised it to the municipality for new dumping grounds.

  On March 15, the Supreme Court allowed construction to restart in Mumbai, even if there had been no progress at Deonar, a little less than two years after Oka had banned it. Without striking down his ban, it allowed a six-month construction window to “explore the possibility of [a] safe method of permitting certain constructions,” bringing instant relief to the city’s developers. Sharma and the monitoring committee, which still remained without a chairman, was charged with “preventing dispersal of particles through the air,” by ensuring construction was allowed only after Mumbai’s debris-filled caravans emptied at quarries far outside the city, not at the Deonar township. The last chairperson had left because mountain air could sap his health, the court was reminded. “Anyone will have this problem. They will have to visit,” Oka said with a smile, and asked for names of possible chairpersons for the committee.

  Then he turned back to the nearly two-decade-long search for grounds to replace the Deonar township. “Why this insistence on encroached land?” he asked Ramchandra Apte, the state’s lawyer. He responded by saying the government would clear the encroachments at the Karvale grounds, buy the tracts it did not own, and hand it all over to the municipality soon. Oka pointed to a line in the submission stating there were seventy-nine houses on the land. “From your experience, Mr. Apte, how many lawsuits do you think that will lead to?” Oka asked. Lawsuits from evicted residents could drag on for years, adding to the fog in court and the paper hills, holding up the transfer of the grounds and stretching the Deonar township’s life on indefinitely, he suggested.

  Days later, on March 20, the familiar sight of the Deonar hills throwing up flames and smoke against the dark sky lit up television screens. It was the second fire in two weeks. More than a dozen fire engines sprayed water night and day. In spite of all the debris the municipality had topped the mountains with, fires still swirled within the decaying trash.

  The municipality would soon get water tankers at the township to spray water to cool the constantly warming, often burning trash hills. Dr. Anurag Garg, a professor of environmental engineering at Mumbai’s Indian Institute of Technology and a member of the court committee, had asked to spray foam on the mountain fires instead of water. The water would seep through the mountains, collecting trash, and flow into the creek, polluting it, he had said. A contract for foam was opened too. Until a supplier was found, fire engines would continue to spray water, dragging mountain trash into the creek.

  * * *

  OVER THE DECADES, Deonar’s case had appeared to be on the verge of resolution several times. Oka had set deadlines—checked if they were met, pushing officials to meet them. Each time it seemed as though the mountains trembled on the brink of movement. The municipality had needed only a few more weeks, and then a few more months, and each delay had stretched the mountains’ life precariously on. The mountains had stayed. Oka presided over a similar case to find a new home for the high court building, allotting land in a distant suburb, then near the new financial district. But the court too had stayed in place.

  Meanwhile, in the spreading edges of Delhi, some trash peaks had risen so high—while court cases to fix them stretched out indefinitely—that they nearly touched the power lines looping into the city. When pickers on those mountains, immersed in the search for trash, brushed against the wires, they died, electrocuted. That summer, garbage had tumbled down in a landslide there, killing a picker, and bringing the capital’s trash mountains into the Supreme Court’s view, which asked its municipality to fix them.

  At the next Deonar hearing on July 25, the fog around finding a replacement for the township was only growing. Oka began by reading the response the state government had filed, that morning. He read and then looked up, surprised. It said the land at Mulund had been rented out to a private salt maker, who harvested salt there and who had sued the salt commissioner, also in the Bombay High Court. This case too had gone on in the same rambling court building for more than a decade, unbeknownst to Oka. The tussle over the land that he thought was three-cornered had been four-cornered. Oka asked Apte, with rising indignation, what the chances were of the municipality getting the land. “Bleak? Very bleak?”

  * * *

  AS OKA PUSHED to fix the trash township in court, the distant hamlet at Karvale in Navi Mumbai, which had been allotted to replace the Deonar township years ago, had withered to a stub. Months after the hearing, it became a green expanse filled only with streams, empty husks of homes and the shadow of the Haji Malang shrine, perched on a nearby cliff. When Farzana had drifted between their world and the netherworld at Sion Hospital, her sister Afsana had gone to visit Haji Malang, said to be the saint of common people. She had brought back a bracelet and tied it to Farzana’s wrist. That talisman had tugged her back into the world of the living, Afsana believed.

  Just before Farzana’s wedding, she, Afsana, and Afsana’s in-laws had walked up the last stretches of the rocky cliff to the shrine. They thanked the saint for Farzana’s improbable life. The sisters had sat at the edge of the cliff, soaking in the breeze, the last fragments of Farzana’s single life and the unending stretch of green that lay ahead, slim streams shining through it. They didn’t know then that their putrid mountains and their spirits could come to fill a patch of this green one day.

  While Farzana conducted her pilgrimage to Haji Malang, in the hamlet below residents were meeting their representatives, who had promised to keep their homes in place. They thought of filing a court case but their representatives had told them there was no need. The city’s endless trash caravans would not make the bumpy two-hour journey to deposit trash here. Besides, they could hardly afford to pay for a lawyer, perhaps for years, and even getting t
o the court, hours away, would be hard from here. As Oka’s indignation grew in court, the representatives had returned empty-handed. By late 2018, the police had evicted residents, forcing them into boiling tin-sheet homes that lined the edges of the plot instead.

  * * *

  NEARLY TWO YEARS later, in July 2020, Oka gave a video talk to law students. He had no memory of why he switched to study law, from studying math, nearly four decades before. As a young lawyer, he only got cases from litigants who could not afford better, cases with little hope of winning. “When you connect with such litigants you learn what life is about. After becoming a judge I realized … the real challenge before our legal system is not of docket (legal file) explosion but of docket exclusion.” He went on, “There are certain deficiencies in our legal system that large sections of our population silently suffer injustice.” While the unending pile of pending cases clogging Indian courts had often been spoken about, Oka suggested, the bigger problem was that people like Farzana and the inhabitants of Karvale, remained invisible to the courts that decided their fates.

  As Mumbai’s warm winter settled in the city, the question of whether its trash would continue to arrive at Farzana’s mountain community or get sent to the hamlet in Karvale’s green valley remained. Municipal lawyers had asked for more time. At a hearing during the court’s Christmas break, municipal lawyers announced the city would need nearly five more years to reroute trash caravans away from Deonar. The municipality had extended the deadline for bids for the waste-to-energy plant at Deonar seven times, but none came. One of the reasons no company had bid to make the plant, a presentation by Tata Consulting Engineers showed, was that potential bidders had wanted Deonar’s trash township without its mountains of garbage. Moving them would be too expensive and arduous, they had said, making their plant unviable. The municipality had scrapped the plan for the plant and decided to make three smaller waste-to-energy plants at Deonar instead and needed an extension until the first plant was built. The court extended the Deonar township’s life until Justice Oka could hear the case, after the holidays.