Castaway Mountain

by Saumya Roy

  On April 9, 2019, Oka passed an order: this would be the last year for the township of trash. No new garbage could be dumped there after December 31, 2019. The old hills would slowly begin flattening or turn to something else. The following day, Oka was transferred to become the chief justice of the high court in the neighboring state of Karnataka.

  I continued to visit the mountains and the lanes around them, waiting for garbage caravans to stop arriving at Deonar’s hills, for the contract for waste plants to be given out, for new trash townships to begin. Caravans had dwindled but not stopped. It was all about to happen, municipal engineers had told me. They had put out ads for the first of the three smaller waste-to-energy plants at Deonar they planned to make over the next few years.

  At the mountains, I ran into Jehana. Had she heard about the township’s final closure? In return, she asked if I had heard about Asif. Surely, I knew him, she said and I nodded, although I was in fact unsure whether I had met him. He went to school and worked on the mountains in the afternoons, pickers told me. He was fourteen. A little over a week ago he had been chased by a guard patrol. His friends had slipped away toward their homes but Asif had kept running, straight ahead toward the creek. The guards stayed behind, following him. Then he vanished from sight.

  When his friends returned to Rafiq Nagar, Afsana, his mother, had asked where he was. He must be coming, they told her. Maybe the guards had detained him or he was hiding until they left. When dusk fell, she went looking for him, staying out all night. She asked at a guard post but they had not seen him. The next day, she complained at the police station. She had accompanied police officers to the slopes but they could not find Asif. The guards and police had looked for him, for days, but they had not found him. Did he escape on a raft, they asked. He didn’t have one, she said. Soon after that, Asif began coming in her dreams. He smiled, he spoke to her, saying he was close by. She had to find him, she told me, when I went to meet her.

  Every morning Afsana left for the mountains with the day shift pickers. She looked in the thorny bushes, leafless in the summer heat. She walked to older clearings where trash no longer emptied, she waded chest deep into the plastic-filled mangroves. She returned after the night shift pickers began working, having seen no sign of him.

  Afsana borrowed money, hired a boat, and floated around the edges of the township to see if he had got stuck in the soft mud at the creek’s edge, entangled in the plastic or the tree roots that swam in the water, or been washed farther away with the effluent that gushed into the creek.

  Pickers had begun to say that he must have jumped into the creek to avoid the guards. But he would have washed ashore somewhere by now, Afsana thought. He might have been kidnapped by organ traffickers so they could harvest his kidneys, they said, as rumors about him floated around the mountains. But time and again Asif came in her dreams. She felt he was close. Afsana had to find him. For months, she left every morning, with his photograph, and returned only after dark. She showed me the picture of Asif in a beige salwar suit, his baby face, his still pudgy cheeks, his unrelenting smile.

  * * *

  IN MY YEARS of walking the mountains, I had found children’s sandals with plastic sunflowers blooming on them, hand-painted canvas paintings and half-empty bottles of perfume that felt like gifts people had tired of. I wondered what part they had played in the lives of their owners, whether they had made the relationships far from the mountains deeper, the people who received the gifts more precious. But then I saw Afsana who had nothing, cling to her son. She walked the mountains with Asif’s photo. He came in her dreams. He stayed close to her. She had to find him.

  On one of my visits, I met Atique Khan, the younger of the Khan brothers, released on bail after three years in jail. He had nothing to do with the mountains or the fires he said. His acolytes had misused his name. The wall had always been broken, fires occurred often. “Ham jhukte nahi na, to hame mohra banaya gaya,” he said, speaking of himself and his brother, Rafique. We don’t bend to anyone, so we were made into pawns.

  Farzana was pregnant again. Sometimes, when her dupatta slid her swollen neck emerged. At other times, it stayed hidden, or perhaps had even deflated. Her doctors had seen the swelling at prenatal checkups: they told her to take a test for tuberculosis. She returned only to deliver a baby boy.

  I saw Jehangir only in court, where his children arrived in makeup and puffy clothes, as if visiting him were a festive occasion. “Maine phone to kiya hi nahi tha to phirauti kaise hua?” he would tell me, always looking for loopholes to get through. I had not made the phone call, so how can they charge me with asking for a ransom?

  By then I only walked Banjara Galli to meet with the pickers—we had stopped giving loans there in 2016, once we observed our clients lurch from one crisis only to land into another. Illnesses, guards, weddings, or retribution from gang bosses could take away any cushion they created with loans and their earnings. Slowly we retreated from the rest of the city too, working in a rural part of the state where our easily consumable loans supplemented more lasting skills training.

  When I walked through Banjara Galli, I sometimes heard my name and turned sharply to see a golden head peeking out sideways, grinning at me. Standing in the lane, blocking the sun, Sameer, Yasmin’s younger son, dropped his head down to his shoulder to greet me in a characteristic gesture. He had kept working in the area’s overfull dustbins, pulling much-needed money out of their depths. Moharram Ali had mostly disappeared for good. Yasmin had fallen at the railway station on the way to a medical trial, losing her front teeth and any remnants of youth. Then she developed tuberculosis, barring her from medical trials, and so had Hera. Mehrun had stayed out of school getting engaged, at seventeen.

  One afternoon, I had turned a corner into the lane to find the fragrance of jasmines filling it. Salma stood in a huddle, collecting the blossoms from a woman who was giving them out to be strung into garlands that she would sell. We walked up to her house, matching her slow shuffling walk. Since her eye surgery, soon after the fires, bumps appeared in her eyes, every winter, she told me. Everything became hazy. How was Aslam, I asked. “Vo to do hafte pehle off ho gaya,” she said, softly. He went off two weeks ago, she said, using the Mumbai expression for having died. For years, tuberculosis, alcohol, and other mountain addictions had swirled through him, never completely draining until they had consumed him. Soon after, Salma had moved far from the mountains but died weeks later. Her younger son could only describe the cause as Gabrahat, or mortal fear.

  Vitabai had taken up several cleaning jobs in the city, taking loans from bosses to treat her children’s illnesses, to get a grandchild operated on after he fell off the roof, and to fix the house when it collapsed. She had to keep working, keep repaying, keep borrowing more. It kept her movement frenetic, her eyes dancing, as they were when I first met her, although I watched her arms sag, her rolling walk slow down even further.

  I often ended my walks at Hyder Ali’s house, where he told me of his plans to raise money and post Jehangir’s bail, hosting me with mountain finds. Once, he tried to get me to sit on a pillowy soft black leather couch that I imagined had come from the house of a wealthy young couple. Instead, I sat on the ground across from him, as always. He told me he was planning to sell the house to hire a lawyer for Jehangir. Where would they all live, I asked, thinking about the cast of generations that filled their home. At that moment, Jehana’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Muskaan, walked in, bent over and halting. Like Farzana, Muskaan had shuffled between school and working on the mountains until they had drawn her into their grasp. She lay down on the floor and curled up beside me. “Dekhenge,” he replied. We’ll see. Muskaan was recovering from tuberculosis, he told me. I remembered her, tall, feline, and glowing, from Farzana’s wedding photographs.

  The next time I visited, Muskaan was half asleep on the floor, where the couch had been. Where did it go? I asked. Hyder Ali laughed. Bedbugs from it had infested the house and bit everyone, and he
had had to throw it out. First he asked for tea in a porcelain tea set, then for water from a crystal glass: both mountain finds. Yasmeen often stepped over Muskaan on the floor, as she lay there never fully awake nor asleep, to serve the tea.

  The next time I went to their house, tea and water came in steel tumblers. The front section of the house had collapsed in the rain, delaying Hyder Ali’s plans to sell it. Had I heard, he asked, that Muskaan had died three days ago. She had lost even the energy to get to his house, by then, and lay in Jehana’s house at the mountains’ edge, too drained to flick away the flies that buzzed on her. The late afternoon sun streamed in, drying her mouth. Jehana went to get Muskaan water to drink and when she turned back, her daughter was gone, Jehana said.

  With work erratic, Hyder Ali had gone to his village. He returned with instructions: everyone needed to remember his grandfather’s name. In December, the Indian government had passed the Citizenship Amendment Act that made it legal for Muslims who could not provide paperwork and proof of citizenship to be held in detention camps or deported. Muslims coming in from other countries were not to be fast-tracked to Indian citizenship, the new law outlined, and so they had to establish Indian citizenship. Outside Farzana’s lane, I saw a banner: “Vo kehte hain, Hindustan chhod dein ham. Batao, bhoot ke dar se makaan chhod dein ham?” They want us to leave India. Tell us, should we abandon our homeland because it is haunted by a ghost?

  At Hyder Ali’s house, the front of the house had gone back up, the plan to sell and post Jehangir’s bail revived. In her house, Farzana repeated her great-grandfather’s name. No one was sure what was the information they needed to tell officials when they came asking, information that would turn them into legal citizens, since they were not sure they had the right papers for it. They learned what they could and prepared for an interrogation that might, in a single movement, make them illegal occupants in their own country.

  * * *

  AS THE YEAR wore on, Sharma worried that the court hearings to ensure the closure of the township had not yet begun. The case was never listed for hearing at the Supreme Court again. The six-month window for fresh construction in the city carried on without end.

  In December 2019, hearings restarted in the Bombay High Court, with Justice S. C. Dharmadhikari presiding over Deonar’s fate. It was not the job of the court to set deadlines, he said. The municipality was working on closing the township of trash. Projects such as the waste plant do take time, he said, as he stretched the life of the township of trash on. On November 6, 2020, the municipality passed a plan to make the first of three waste-to-energy plants that would consume 600 metric tons of waste at the Deonar township, a little less than half of what arrived there every day. The first one would take three years to build, they estimated. In February 2021, the Indian government announced a $40 billion plan to reduce the country’s worsening air pollution by shrinking its garbage mountains or “legacy waste,” managing its construction debris among other measures. The case against Hashim Khan (known as Nanhe), for negligent driving and causing grievous injury by accident to Farzana never came up for hearing. He remains out on bail.

  ENDNOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  telemarketers from banks often hung up when they reached people in slums—Saumya Roy and Gargi Banerjee, “Loan Approvals Depend on Borrowers’ Address,” Mint, April 8, 2008, https://www.livemint.com/Money/f0Rtetble3Chhd5PoAZ2KJ/Loan-approvals-depend-on-borrowers8217-address.html.

  mountains that were more than 120 feet high—The height of the highest mountains was said to be 120 feet in the project report made by the municipality-appointed Tata Consulting Engineers. They did drone surveys to arrive at these measurements. Tata Consulting Engineers, Development of Waste-To-Energy (WTE) Project at Deonar, Mumbai: Feasibility and Detailed Project Report (Mumbai, India: Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, October 2016).

  written of the “waste Everest,” outside Moscow—Alec Luhn, “Moscow Region Protests against ‘Rubbish Collapse’ as Putin’s Friends Look to Profit,” The Telegraph, May 8, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/08/moscow-region-protests-against-rubbish-collapse-putins-friends/.

  The mountains in Delhi were said to be nearly as tall as the Taj Mahal—AFP, “Delhi’s Ghazipur landfill site to rise higher than Taj Mahal,” Mint, June 4, 2019, https://www.livemint.com/news/india/delhi-s-ghazipur-landfill-site-to-rise-higher-than-taj-mahal-1559643893169.html.

  no state willing to accept it for burial—Interview with Carol Ash Friedman, regional director New York City Region, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, at the time. Also, Emily C. Dooley and Carl MacGowan, “Long Island’s Infamous Garbage Barge of 1987 Still Influences Laws,” Newsday, March 22, 2017, https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/long-island-garbage-barge-left-islip-30-years-ago/.

  ONE

  They stretched over 326 acres—The township’s area varied from 270 to 326 acres in various official documents. After the fires the municipality was said to have dumped earth, extending the township further into the sea. Sudhir Suryawanshi, “Soon, City Will Have No Place to Dump Trash,” Mumbai Mirror, November 30, 2010, and from multiple sources cited in Wikipedia’s article “Deonar Dumping Ground,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deonar_dumping_ground.

  TWO

  wrote in the assiduously compiled administration report the municipal commissioner sent to London every year—“Other Phenomena” section in the health officer’s account in the annual administration report of the municipal commissioner of Bombay for the year 1896–97 (P. C. H. Snow, William Forbes Gatacre, Sir., Bombay (India). Municipal Commissioner’s Office, Annual Report of the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the Year 1896–97 (Bombay, India: Times of India Steam Press, 1897)).

  other than a small red welt—Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables (Noida, India: HarperCollins, 2011). Prakash goes on to record the exodus of residents from Bombay over the next few months due to the plague and plague removal measures making it a “City of Dead.”

  France imposed restrictions on Indian passengers and trade.—Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague 1894–1901 (New York: NYU Press, 2007).

  Officials believed the disease had arrived in the city with pilgrims returning from a religious fair in North India.—In his report (Snow, Annual Report of the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the Year 1896–97), Bombay’s municipal commissioner P. C. H. Snow stated, “Dr Weir in trying to arrive at the probable causes of the epidemic lights on the theory of migration of people from plague stricken districts.”

  rats moving through the overflowing filth—Malini Roy, “Bombay Plague Visitation, 1896–97,” Asian and African Studies (blog), British Library, July 22, 2020, https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2020/07/bombay-plague-visitation-1896-97.html.

  “There is only one measure from which any effect can be expected and that is quarantine,” he wrote.—Snow (Annual Report of the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the Year 1896–97) quotes Weir recommending quarantine “or any other name by which inspection of traffic and restriction of communication may be called, stringent and careful examination of everyone entering Bombay and careful disinfection of every article, but the result to be expected from that measure is very uncertain.”

  kept their families in the hospital for weeks—Municipal commissioner’s report for 1896–97 (Snow, Annual Report of the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the Year 1896–97).

  afraid that they were being taken there only to die, alone—Health officer’s account in the municipal commissioner’s report (Snow, Annual Report of the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the Year 1896–97). Parsi women surrounded a Hindu boy to prevent officer’s from taking him to hospital.

  having walked a long way—Escape from ambulance. A pitiful case, in the municipal commissioner’s report for 1896 (Snow, Annual Report of the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the Year 1896–97).

  “You think we are like mad dogs, and you want to kill us as if we ar
e.”—Snow in the municipal commissioner’s report (Annual Report of the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the Year 1896–97). Officers of the health department were charged with a brutal pleasure in dragging the sick from the homes and in killing them, and it was stated that our Sovereign Lady the Queen had demanded five hundred livers of the people of Bombay to appease the wrath aroused at the insult offered to her statue. Men have said to me, “You think we are like mad dogs and you want to kill us, as if we were.”

  “What can anything done outside this room, do for the people in their misery inside?” he wrote—From Snow’s report (Annual Report of the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the Year 1896–97). The room, in Khara Talao, that held fifty-seven people was 111 feet in length and 18½ feet in width, with no ventilation.

  patients walking city streets in delirium and lying beside the road—From Snow’s report (Annual Report of the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the Year 1896–97), in the section Desire to Wander in Delirium.

  Enforcing them would only accelerate the surge of leaving residents, they wrote.—From the municipal commissioner’s report (Snow, Annual Report of the Municipal Commissioner of Bombay for the Year 1896–97), which states that “a number of influential citizens” wrote to him, on October 14, a week after the plague measures had been imposed. They said that if the measures were enforced, a “much larger number of inhabitants would fly from Bombay.”