Castaway Mountain

  Copyright © 2021 by Saumya Roy

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  Astra House

  A Division of Astra Publishing House

  astrahouse.com

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Roy, Saumya, author.

  Title: Castaway mountain : love and loss among the wastepickers of Mumbai / Saumya Roy.

  Description: Includes bibliographical references. | New York, NY: Astra House, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN: 2021909406 | ISBN: 9781662600951 (hardcover) | 9781662600968 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH Ragpickers—India—Mumbai—Economic conditions. | Ragpickers—India—Mumbai—Social conditions. | Plastic scrap—Economic aspects—India. | Refuse and refuse disposal—Social aspects—India—Mumbai. | Poor—India—Mumbai. | Slums—India—Mumbai. | Mumbai (India)—Social conditions. | Mumbai (India)—Economic conditions. | BISAC SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Asian Studies | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Environmental Policy

  Classification: LCC HD9975.I43 R69 2021 | DDC 363.728/209—dc23

  First edition

  Design by Richard Oriolo

  The text is set in Adobe Caslon Pro.

  The titles are set in Akzidenz Grotesk BQ.

  To,

  My grandmother, professor and poet, who wrote –

  have you seen, my friend?

  on the peaks of inky, dark, rain cloud topped-mountains,

  snowy white illuminating clouds appear sometimes?

  and Prashant Kant, my uncle,

  who could not see but showed me how to spot the

  illuminating clouds.

  CONTENTS

  MAP

  CAST OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  POSTSCRIPT

  ENDNOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CAST OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  AT THE MOUNTAINS

  Hyder Ali Shaikh: Wastepicker at the Deonar garbage mountains and father of Farzana and her eight siblings.

  Shakimun Ali Shaikh: Hyder Ali’s wife.

  Jehana Shaikh: Hyder Ali and Shakimun’s daughter and the eldest of the nine children.

  Jehangir Shaikh: Hyder Ali’s oldest son and the second oldest of the children.

  Rakila Shaikh: Jehangir’s wife. Mother of their three children.

  Alamgir Shaikh: Hyder Ali’s second oldest son, drives garbage trucks.

  Yasmeen Shaikh: Alamgir’s wife and mother of their two children.

  Sahani Shaikh: Second oldest of the Shaikh daughters.

  Ismail Shaikh: Sahani’s husband. Does odd jobs around the mountains.

  Afsana Shaikh: The third oldest sister and the only one who married and moved away from the mountains. Does tailoring work and is a mother of two.

  FARZANA SHAIKH: Hyder Ali and Shakimun’s daughter. Sixth of the nine children.

  Farha Shaikh: The sister after Farzana. The two often pick together.

  Jannat Shaikh: The youngest of the daughters.

  Ramzan Shaikh: Hyder Ali’s son and youngest child.

  Moharram Ali Siddiqui: Picker, known for working night shifts and finding treasures in mountain trash.

  Yasmin Siddiqui: Moharram Ali’s wife.

  Hera Siddiqui: Moharram Ali’s oldest child. Hera is beautiful, imperious, and of the few girls from these lanes to have made it to high school.

  Sharib Siddiqui: Older of Moharram Ali’s two sons. Often missing school to pick on the mountains.

  Sameer Siddiqui: Younger of Moharram Ali’s sons.

  Mehrun Siddiqui: Moharram Ali and Yasmin’s middle daughter.

  Ashra Siddiqui: The youngest of the Siddiqui children.

  Salma Shaikh: Picker who came to work on the mountains more than three decades ago with a toddler son and hundred-day-old baby son wrapped to her back, after her husband had died.

  Aslam Shaikh: Salma’s older son, married to Shiva, father of four sons and a daughter.

  Arif Shaikh: One of Aslam’s four sons.

  Vitabai Kamble: Said to be one of the oldest pickers on the mountains. She came to live at the mountains’ rim in the mid-seventies with her husband and children.

  Nagesh Kamble: Vitabai’s oldest son. Came to pick at the mountains as a ten-year-old and turned middle-aged and potbellied on them.

  Babita Kamble: Vitabai’s daughter.

  Rafique Khan: Garbage trader.

  Atique Khan: Rafique’s younger brother.

  IN THE COURT

  Dr. Sandip Rane: Doctor who lives in a genteel neighborhood near the mountains’ rim and runs a cardiology hospital. Filed for contempt in 2008 when the municipality did not close the mountains per court directions, following a case filed in 1996.

  Justice Dhananjaya Chandrachud: Adjudicated on Dr. Rane’s case in the Bombay High Court.

  Raj Kumar Sharma: Grew up and lives in a leafy area not far from the mountains. Filed a court case in December 2015 asking for the mountains to get mended.

  Justice Abhay Oka: Judge who heard Sharma’s case for several years.

  INTRODUCTION

  VITABAI KAMBLE FIRST ARRIVED at my office on a warm April afternoon in 2013. She worked on the garbage mountains at the edge of the city and needed a loan from the foundation I had set up with my father in 2010 to provide small, low-interest loans to grow the city’s poorest residents’ businesses. I had worked as a reporter for nearly a decade before that and wanted to do more than write about India’s rising economy and its lengthening shadow of slums and waste. While India’s economy was fueled by people buying, and even taking loans for, new gadgets, holiday travel, and weddings, I had written about how telemarketers from banks often hung up when they reached people in slums.

  We set up our office at the end of interminable, undrying clotheslines in a residential lane in the Sion area of the city. At first, the only sounds were of trains passing by on the tracks behind it, but, as word of our operation spread, the city’s fish, fruit, and street food sellers, lunch makers, cobblers, and tailors filled our office, drowning out the train sounds. As I met vendors who exchanged garlic for household waste that they then resold and others who made the city’s shoes, clothes, and toys, my brain slowly got rewired. I saw a city different from the one I had lived in for years. I asked about how they made a profit on their meager, and often several, businesses, eliciting blank stares. They were not sure.

  But hardly anyone I had met through the foundation had fascinated me as Vitabai did that summer afternoon. She huddled close to the thin mattress I sat on, revealing hands and feet covered in fading scars, which mapped memories of the nearly four decades she had spent on rising trash. The mountains had lightened her hair and I saw the thrill of chasing forgotten treasures dance in her silver-rimmed eyes. Her plucky energy and memories of her life on the growing mountains had lit up my languorous afternoon.

  I fretted about how she would repay ou
r loan, with her odd business. “If you can only sell what you collect with your hands, how will our loans help you grow?” I asked her in Marathi. “Kachra kadhi kami honar ka?” Vitabai quickly countered. Will trash ever reduce? She worked in one of Mumbai’s fastest-growing industries, she said, offering to show me the unending hills they mined. What she could not collect herself, she would use our loans to buy from others and sell to garbage traders. She quickly became my introduction to the world of the Deonar township, a place I knew nearly nothing about before her arrival, but would soon become addicted to.

  Soon after she took a loan, Vitabai brought her daughter, Babita, for one. Weeks later, I saw Hyder Ali Shaikh’s lean shoulders and deep eyes rising behind her diminutive frame, as they walked through the long waiting area I had fashioned out of a car garage. She had brought Hyder Ali, Moharram Ali Siddiqui, and Aftab Alam, who lived nearby, to form a group, which would take on a loan with her son, Nagesh. If one of them could not pay weekly installments, the others would.

  Hyder Ali stretched languidly on the thinly matted floor, across from me. With the sun streaming on his face, he began, saying, “Hamara gaon, Laluji ke bagal ka hai,” making a reference to the former chief minister of the eastern state of Bihar. He belonged to the village next to that of Lalu Yadav, who was known for his humor and easy laughter, often at himself. I looked up from reading his loan application form. “Aap jante the?” I asked. Did you know him? He nodded sideways to say no. “Mile The?” I tried again. Have you met him? He nodded sideways again, breaking into a bony grin. But I understood that this was what he wanted to say about himself, the thing that the lengthy form, filled with personal details, did not ask. I came to associate humor and unfettered laughter with Hyder Ali, too.

  Unlike Vitabai and her family, Hyder Ali said he did not want to stay in the trash business. He leaned back, resting his hand on the lime green floor mat, barely noticing the stripes it pressed into his reddened palm, and told me of his journey into the mountains’ shade and his dreams of stepping out. He wanted to use the money to set up an embroidery workshop, of the sort he had spent his youth in. He would bring embroiderers from his village to make bridal outfits to sell, in the city, for a commission. He hoped it would take him away from the hills, inching up his family’s fortunes.

  I followed Vitabai, Nagesh, Hyder Ali, and the others back to the garbage mountains, to see if their odd businesses would lead to unpaid loans for us. But I also went to see this strange place, which I had heard of but, like most Mumbaikars, never seen. I found a vast township of trash growing invisibly in plain sight, mountains that were more than 120 feet high, surrounded on one side by the Arabian Sea and on the other by a sequence of settlements.

  This began my more than eight-year entanglement with the Deonar mountains and its denizens. I watched the lives and businesses of four families unfold in their shadow. Most of all, I had watched Hyder Ali’s teenaged daughter, Farzana Shaikh, grow into a life that seemed as unlikely as the mountains that I also watched rising precipitously with desires that had flickered and died in the city. This book is Farzana’s story, her family’s and neighbors’ story, and I am grateful for their permission to write about it.

  I came to see the mountains as the pickers did: bringing the city’s used luck, depositing its fading wealth on the township’s tricky passes. I attended hundreds of hours of court proceedings that aimed to control the city’s waste, thinking every time that the mountains were about to move. I collected archival documents to unravel the rumors I heard from pickers. “Kachra train ni yaycha,” Vitabai had told me in one of my earlier walks on the mountains. Garbage once came here by train. It felt unreal, like many of the legends and lives around the tricky mountain slopes: a train service just for garbage? And yet, it was true: years later, I found myself at Oxford University’s storied Bodleian Library, reading colonial records of how Bombay’s garbage had indeed come to Deonar by a special train.

  * * *

  IN THE SUMMER of 2016, we had begun reducing and soon stopped our lending in the lanes around the mountains. I visited only to meet pickers, hear of their lives, and write about them. Some were uninterested in conversations that did not end in our low-interest loans, but most chatted endlessly, cried, or steamed up as they spoke. “Bolne se nahi samjhega ham khaadi pe kaise jiye, video le ke aao,” Salma Shaikh, who had worked there for nearly forty years, told me. Just speaking won’t explain how we lived on the dumping grounds. You’ll have to bring a video camera.

  My own affection, frustration, and bonds formed with these people over the course of eight years. But the world of the Deonar garbage mountains is a world of its own, where I was only passing through, even if as a long-term visitor. In these pages, I have stepped away in order to take readers into a world they created but never visited, so they can step into this mirror image of their own lives.

  Deonar’s mountainous township of trash has a unique history and yet, wherever I went in the world, the pull of desire was just as unyielding, and as transient, throwing up waste mountains much like Deonar. A journalist friend had written of the “waste Everest,” outside Moscow. The mountains in Delhi were said to be nearly as tall as the Taj Mahal, and had tumbled down in avalanches, as had others in Colombo, Addis Ababa, and Shenzhen, killing people, while I researched Deonar’s more stable ones. One of the great urban legends of New York, I heard, was of the barge that floated off its coast, filled with the city’s trash, no state willing to accept it for burial. Then I met the former city official who had cut short a vacation to help land the barge back in the city, the trash ending up at its own garbage city settled in Staten Island—Fresh Kills.

  My years of walking the mountains showed me that unlikely as the stories that emerged from Deonar’s township of trash felt, many were real. Parts of them unfolded in one way or another in most cities around the world. Waste masses even float in the sea, making islands. I came to see these mountains as an outpouring of our modern lives—of the endless chase for our desires to fill us. Our pursuit only grew the mountains, providing the raw material on which the wastepickers built their lives and left us unsated, searching for more, unseeing the world our castaway possessions made. The story that follows is of Deonar’s mountainous township of trash and the lives lived in its long shadow, but also, of elsewhere.

  ONE

  FARZANA ALI SHAIKH RUMMAGED on a mountain clearing on a hot April afternoon. The sun warmed her head and made lurid colors swim in her eyes. The smell of rotting prawns wafted up from the mountain. She jabbed her long garbage fork to push aside translucent fish scales, crackling prawn shells, entrails, and animal dung, and scooped up the broken glass jars that had just poured out on the clearing.

  Smoke and heat rose up as forklifts shoveled glass away. It blurred Farzana’s view of the trash strewn around her and brought up burning smells that mingled with the stench of decaying flesh. Scavenging birds swooped low beside her, searching for entrails. Farzana kept her eye on the glass and hacked her fork into the mess, keen to retrieve it. She didn’t usually work on the jhinga, or prawn loop, as this mountain was known. It was made mostly of animal remains from the city’s municipal slaughterhouse, its vast port lands, and elsewhere. But that afternoon they had waited long for trucks before she and her younger sister, Farha, who was fifteen, had chased one winding up the unsteady slope of the jhinga loop, also known as the gobar, or cow dung loop.

  Farzana worked quickly, shoveling glass jars, shards, and saline bags that had fallen out of the truck into the large plastic bag she dragged along. The truck had probably come from a hospital, and its contents would fetch good money. A straggly crowd of ragpickers grew around her, also eager for the glass. But at seventeen, Farzana was tall, athletic, and fearless. Her eyes were trained to spot plastic bottles, wire, glass, German silver, a metal alloy used to make appliances and machinery, and cloth scraps. She snapped up her pickings before others could get to them.

  Farzana looked up to make sure Farha was picking clo
se by. It must nearly be time for their father to arrive with lunch, she thought. She clanked her fork into the glass heap again and, this time, brought out a heavy blue plastic bag. Farzana thought it must be filled with smaller glass bottles, which usually fetched a good price. She squatted on the warm slope, with flies hanging close, untied the string, and gently upturned the bag, expecting delicate glass vials to fall out, clinking and glinting in the sun. Instead, a single large glass jar plopped onto the clearing. As she bent low to see what was inside the jar, she could see arms, legs, toes, and tiny, bald heads swimming inside it. She squinted, looked again, and screamed. A few friends gathered to examine the jar crammed with floating limbs.

  Farzana opened the lid and nearly brought out a baby girl, a little bigger than her large bony palm. The city sent a steady supply of dead babies, often girls, to the mountains, along with its other expendables. Mothers who couldn’t bear to tell their families they had delivered a girl sometimes threw the baby in the trash instead. Farzana had occasionally unearthed them while rifling through rubbish. But as she tugged the baby girl out of the jar, two baby boys came up too; their stomachs were fused to hers. The three had probably died because they were unable to survive with or without each other, she thought. Farha said she had heard lunar eclipses caused unborn babies to split or deform within wombs. A baby must have been born as three, bringing it here, she told the group that had gathered.

  Farzana stretched her arms out, to cradle the lifeless babies. She began to make her way carefully down the wobbly slope, holding them gently. Behind her, the mountain rose like a teetering hulk, made up of Mumbai’s detritus held in place with a topping of mud.

  She waited for her friends to catch up. From high up on the next peak, they could see the vertiginous trash mountains curve around them and stretch out into the distance. Together, the hills curled like a long sliver of crescent moon. Across a broken wall, and dug into the mountains, were shrunken homes made of cloth scraps, plastic sheets, torn sarees, soggy bamboo poles, and metal sheets full of holes. On the outer edge, a shimmering creek arched around the mountains. The creek ran into the Arabian Sea, which rimmed the island city of Mumbai. Ragpickers such as Farzana called the garbage mountains khaadi, the Hindi word for creek. Nobody quite knew where the name came from, but standing high on a mountain clearing, you did feel as if you were floating in an undulating and smelly sea of garbage that faded into an unending expanse of glimmering blue sea in the distance. Farzana continued her walk through the rising and ebbing trash.