Castaway Mountain Read online

  When she was five, Hyder Ali enrolled Farzana at the municipality’s Urdu primary school for girls nearby. Every morning, Farzana walked to school with her sisters, Afsana and Jannat. Every afternoon, the breeze began blowing inward from the creek, bringing a whiff of the mountains into their home, and drew her up the slopes. Standing on trash peaks, Farzana breathed in the sea and its unconstricted gusts as she looked out for her other sisters, Sahani, Jehana, and Farha, who worked there. Soon the balance fell in favor of the mountains, drawing her increasingly toward them. She and her sisters spent afternoons swimming in the creek and collecting cloth scraps to swell the pile their father made on a mountain edge.

  Even amid the frenzied scrambles around emptying garbage trucks, Hyder Ali walked as if he moved to mellow music playing in his ears through invisible earphones. “Khaadi mein koi bhooka nahi jaata,” he had heard older pickers say. No one ever goes hungry here. This reassurance intensified his laid-back air. When Hyder Ali came to deliver his day’s pickings on the pile he was accumulating on slopes, it always looked bigger than he had left it. The children helped keep their household afloat. He could not keep them away from the slopes.

  It was Jehangir, his oldest son, who had never been to school, who fought with Hyder Ali to keep his sisters away from the mountains and at school. Jehangir hungrily chased the forgotten fortunes that had eluded his father. The deeper he sank into this giddy mountain addiction, the more he wanted to keep his sisters away from it. He turned them back home from the slopes, or to the school whose four-floor building faced the mountains, a fading foil to their sickening allure. They were back the next afternoon, trailing trucks.

  Farzana was growing to be all arms and legs and what her sisters called aadha dimaag, or only half a brain. The rising mountains had leaked into it, they thought. As the peaks rose higher, rains gushed down harder every monsoon, bringing the trash into their home. Farzana fell asleep to the clatter of rain and woke up to see her slippers floating close to her, amid unknown objects that had flowed down the slopes. Blearily, she folded her salwar over her knees and waded through the water to retrieve her books and shoes drifting through neighboring homes.

  Then she walked up the squelching slopes, away from school. She and her sisters dragged reeking wooden planks that Jehangir and their brother Alamgir, the third of the nine children, nailed to the walls at home and piled their soaking household on. At night, they clambered on to sleep amid their belongings while trash-filled waters sloshed below. When the rains paused, Farzana helped Shakimun throw out the garbage and bring their damp provisions and trash they had stored, and that had turned to mush, out to catch the sun peeking in their slim lane. She brought out her water-stained notebooks. Everything she learned had blurred.

  Trying to catch up was futile. “Vaise bhi uske man mein gobar bhara tha,” her friend Yasmeen, who was a few years older and lived down the lane, would say. Her mind was filled with cow dung! Fragile looking and outspoken, Yasmeen, who would later marry Alamgir, was home only for the holidays. Her parents had enrolled her at a Madarsa in the neighboring state of Gujarat, to keep her away from the mountains and at school. Later, Hyder Ali enlisted her to teach Farzana to read the Koran, which had sunk without a trace in Farzana’s mind. The mountains filled her head, and her friend’s too. Their school was emptying out onto the hilltops.

  * * *

  MOHARRAM ALI’S DAUGHTER, Hera, was imperious, beautiful, and one of the few girls from Banjara Galli who had made it to middle school, farther into the city. She was just two years older than Farzana and hardly ever picked trash. When Farzana walked to work, in the afternoons, she saw Hera leave for the Arabic, computer, or tailoring classes her mother had enrolled her for. “Unke ghar mein safai kitni thi,” Farzana would recall. Their house was so clean.

  Mountain air had elevated the tall and rakish Moharram Ali more than most others in their community. Farzana had heard how the mountains had delivered their fortunes in his hands. Her father called Moharram Ali Shaitan Singh, or Mr. Troublemaker, for his gift for amassing high-quality trash. He was a part of the small band of nocturnal pickers, among the mountains’ most relentless treasure hunters. Garbage trucks arrived through the night but only the most fearless picked through their bounty, the slopes lit dimly, only with a few lights fixed on high masts. Jagged bits of glass and metal cut pickers as they walked up, and garbage rained on them in dark clumps from emptying trucks. Moharram Ali fixed a torch into the baseball cap that he wore backward and took his pick of the trash under the moonlight, freed of the scrambles that erupted during the day.

  On moonlit nights, the creek, the rivulet, and salt pans formed a glassy rim around the mountains. When he got to the trash peaks, Moharram Ali felt like he was floating in the creek, along with the fishing boats he saw in the distance. The boats stayed out, all night, trawling through the creek, in good weather. He thought they gave him company. He moved his head slowly from side to side, baring treasures in torchlight. In the quiet and dark of the night, he had found a silver idol of a Hindu goddess and a pillowcase stuffed with banknotes, buried in the trash.

  When he left the mountains, he often ran into morning shift pickers, coming in to work. Hyder Ali and the others ribbed him, asking him to leave something for them. As the sun rose overhead, Moharram Ali often returned to chase the endlessly arriving trucks. That’s how the mountains grew on him, he would say. “Ek insaan ke jaisa lagaav tha. Khaadi hum logon ko bulati thi.” I became attached to them like you would to a person. They called out to me.

  He had told Hyder Ali that his father was the Mujawar, or caretaker, of a saint’s mausoleum in their village in North India. Their house was filled with musty books, bound in deep but fading colors. Moharram Ali and his father could not read anything in them except their faint prices, a few pennies. His father practiced rituals passed down from his own father and, probably, the books in their house. He chanted prayers that rose to fill up rooms with heady smells and wafting smoke that took supplicants into a trance. When it all ebbed, the devotees, who came long distances to pray for miracles, often found their ailments cured. Moharram Ali had learned his father’s courtly manners and enduring rituals. He told Hyder Ali that the prayers kept spirits away from him and brought mountain treasures in his hands. It fueled the legend of Shaitan Singh in their lanes.

  Jehangir had tried working night shifts too, in search of Moharram Ali’s luck. He was ten years old at the time, and, instead of mountain treasures, Jehangir had encountered only a chudail, a female spirit, who had died unfulfilled. He saw her floating a little above the dark and mostly empty slopes, draped in white clothes with her feet turned back. He had retreated to working in the day and begun to hang around with older boys, bullies, instead. He learned to smoke and hurl the abuses he had heard them spout.

  He began ferreting out the currency notes that Hyder Ali never seemed to have quite enough of to run the house. Their father found ways not to ask how he got them. Farzana heard, around the hills, that Jehangir had been drawn into the gangs’ fierce fights for territory and the trash that came with it. At home, Jehangir thought his money gave him a voice in household decisions. Hyder Ali did not.

  The two clashed over nearly everything, but most of all, over Farzana. After her older sister Sahani dropped out of school to work on the mountains, Farzana, nine, and Afsana, who was two years older, became the two oldest children at school. The boys had never been to one. While Afsana wanted to stay, Jehangir fought with Hyder Ali, to keep Farzana at school though she didn’t want to, to give her a life away from the mountains. “Paak saaf rahein,” he told Hyder Ali, repeating what he had heard from clerics. They should stay pure and clean. And yet, Farzana was on the slopes, after school, every afternoon.

  * * *

  MOHARRAM ALI’S WIFE, Yasmin, and their children hardly ever worked on the mountains. Yasmin spent afternoons at home, watching cooking shows on the used television set they had bought at a kata shop. She got friends to pass on batter m
ixes that came in the trash, post expiry, to try the recipes she saw. She tossed frozen peas into rice to make pulaos. Hera and Yasmin practiced dropping spoons full of rice and lentil batter mixed with yogurt into a pan and spreading it in slow, circular motions to make dosas, crisp like paper. They borrowed molds to steam it into fluffy idlis.

  For dessert, Hera got her friends to collect packets of semolina mix for Gulab Jamun, when they saw it fall out of garbage trucks. Over long, slow afternoons, they rolled the moistened batter into dough balls that they fried and then dipped in warm sugar syrup they made. They plopped the golden, hot Gulab Jamuns into their mouths, spurting sugar syrup amid giggling and gossip. She saved leftovers for the elaborate dinners she helped Yasmin cook sometimes and that Moharram Ali barely made it home for.

  One morning, Farzana was leaving for school when a friend dropped in to say that Moharram Ali had found a gold necklace in the trash. Hyder Ali looked surprised. He hadn’t seen Moharram Ali in days. Hyder Ali walked over to his house to ask if he really had dug gold out from the mountains.

  Moharram Ali said he had been home, sick for a week. His fever had ebbed only the previous evening. The soft, sweet smell of steaming rice filled the house but Yasmin would not serve dinner unless he brought home trash to sell. She had cooked with the last of her supplies.

  “Gaali de ke gaya to kuch to lana hi tha,” Moharram Ali said with a grin. I’d left the house with an insult, I had to bring something back! He had walked up the slopes, hoping to find something easily, a bag stuffed with cloth scraps perhaps, and return home to eat. He switched on his flashlight, swung his garbage fork lazily into the slope, and hit something soft and creamy. He dug around it and pulled out a tawny leather ladies’ handbag.

  He unzipped the pockets, rummaging inside to discover worlds so secret that women sometimes forgot to clear them out even while throwing bags away. Moharram Ali had found letters written in curly handwriting, delicate miniature bottles of perfume, monogrammed handkerchiefs that could be washed and sold as white scraps, and sometimes even crumpled currency notes, saved too safely from tight household budgets.

  As Moharram Ali felt for zippers and opened inner pockets, that night, something flashed in the light. A gold necklace, with flowery patterns engraved on it. It was strung with black beads, the sign of a married Hindu woman. He stuffed it into his pocket and looked up to check if anyone had seen his glowing find. Pickers’ lights moved around him. They were immersed in their own search for overlooked treasures. He left, hand in his pocket.

  When Moharram Ali got home, Yasmin and their five children were wilting with hunger. He pushed aside their cold dinner and brought his hand out of his pocket, asking Yasmin to see if his necklace really was gold or the cheap metal women wore in their lanes. Since she had no way to tell, excitement and imagination sustained them through the night.

  Weeks later, Hyder Ali heard Moharram Ali had opened his own kata shop, striking gold in the pickers’ constant ambition: of becoming a small trader or, with some luck, even setting themselves up in work away from the trash business. Others took loans to open overfull kata shops, while some pickers made tin-sheet attics over their homes. Vertical, metal staircases climbed into these sun-filled lofts that they hoped would be the starting point of their journey out of garbage. These rooms hung over the hills and offered panoramic views of the city’s refuse. Sun-dried paper and plastic wafted on the breezy slopes outside. They were filled with half-manned rows of tailoring machines pickers bought to stitch stacks of precut shirts or jeans, while others were piled with shoe soles to be sewn onto glittery uppers. These were mostly sold in Mumbai’s dizzyingly busy street markets. Piles of gauzy, brightly colored fabric lined Hyder Ali’s windowless and often unmanned loft. The fabric would get covered with sequins soon, he would say.

  Unlike the unending garbage that rose behind him, and filled his home, embroidery commissions were hard to get and harder to deliver. Embroiderers would often leave Hyder Ali’s workshop for better paying ones. They’ll be back right after the next festival, he would say, for months, as the festivals passed by, one by one. He had struggled to teach Jehangir and his second son, Alamgir, the patient art of embroidery and make them his only assistants.

  In those years, Alamgir kept Hyder Ali’s embroidery business stuttering along, while Jehangir rose with the mountains’ gangs. “Naak ka baal to bachpan mein hi jal gaya tha”—The mountains’ stink had burned the hair in my nostrils right in childhood—he would say. There was nowhere else he could be. Farzana spent long afternoons walking the slopes. The municipality, with its guards and police, hung lightly over their township of trash, leaving pickers to their forgotten world and their unremitting chase. The year she turned ten and graduated from fourth grade, Farzana spent every day of the long summer on the mountains.

  “Padhne mein man nahi hai. Ghar mein reh ke kya karegi?” Hyder Ali mumbled to Shakimun, one afternoon, when they were alone, in their dark, crammed home. What’s she going to do at home? She doesn’t want to study! Shakimun grunted to say she was listening to him even as she carefully piled the slim edges of the gleaming steel dishes she had just finished washing on top of each other, in the cooking area.

  “Apni galli koi theek hai kya?” Hyder Ali said, his voice rising. You think our lanes are safe? Nahi, Shakimun said, so softly, he could barely hear it over the din of falling dishes. No. The dishes flashed reflections in the room as she began stacking them up carefully again, until they rose high against the wall. “Kharche mein madad kar sakti hai,” Hyder Ali went on. There are expenses she could help with. His workshop was fumbling, he said. Jehangir walked in to collect something. Seeing him made Hyder Ali’s mercurial temper boil over, shouting that if he didn’t want Farzana to work, he’d have to make up the money himself. At eighteen, Jehangir retreated from the fight with his father. Soon to be ten, Farzana joined the illicit army that hoarded the slopes all day.

  FOUR

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2008, when Farzana dropped out of school and came to work on the mountains through the day, a simmering battle to shrink the mountains and their halo reached a boiling point. Dr. Sandip Rane, a doctor who lived in a genteel neighborhood near the township’s edge, had filed for contempt against the municipality for failing to shrivel the Deonar township. It came more than a decade after residents of a neighboring building filed a case to shrink the mountains, their smoke and stink. But the mountains had only grown in the face of court orders to fix them, he said, submitting photographs “which show a film of gas over the waste,” later court observations said.

  A decade and a half before, when Rane had set up his cardiology practice in the mountains’ shadow, he had expected to see older patients with coronary disease. His waiting room had filled with asthmatic children instead. He suspected their lungs were filled with the smoke he woke up to see rising from the trash hills nearby. Rane knew, the residents of a neighboring building had filed a petition in the Bombay High Court asking to fix the trash hills and their toxic smoke, in August 1996.

  They watched the mountains light up with fires at nightfall, the residents had said, in their plea to the court. Dark smoke clouds drifted through the night, into their homes, constricting their breath. Fires rose and smoke traveled until sunrise. They had heard garbage traders got ragpickers to light these fires so lighter trash—plastic, paper, cloth—would melt away, leaving copper, silver, lead, and other metals, the most expensive of mountain finds, for them to sell. Fine particles of toxic chemicals, or “suspended particulate matter,” left over from these fires hung thick in the mountain air, the level up to seven times more than the rules allowed. They entered the lungs and bloodstreams of pickers and residents nearby, making it hard to breathe and rooting themselves deep in their internal organs. The fires left more than twice the amount of lead allowed in mountain air, and could cause brain damage in the children who breathed it in.

  The municipality’s response at the time declared the mountains lit up in “spontaneous combu
stion.” The slowly decomposing garbage let off methane, which erupted in flames when it met the burning mountain sun. These self-ignited fires burned even on mountains where no new garbage had been dumped, officials wrote, suggesting fires were bound to erupt from the dizzying accumulation of things packed together, and were not their fault. The nightly smoke and smog in the petitioners’ homes came also from fires pickers lit for metal, officials said, and the growing traffic from the highway that ran by their homes.

  Since the 1996 petition, successive judges had asked the municipality to settle a modern trash township elsewhere. Until it could, the judges had tried to make Deonar’s aging and sprawling township follow the waste rules. They had asked for its mess to get topped and pressed down with mud to hold it all in place and make evenly spaced hills. They had set timelines to tar the dirt tracks that wound through hills, fix streetlights, and tighten security along their faint edges so pickers could not get in and light fires. They had asked for fire engines and water tankers to patrol, curbing these nearly continually burning fires and their rising smoke. They pushed for the trash township to change, to mirror the modern city whose desires fed it and whose dark reflection it was.

  * * *

  APPOINTED TO A court committee around then, the tall and unbending Rane sat, every Wednesday, in a portable cabin at the dumping grounds, watching over the project to bring the mountains in line with the rules—for years. He watched the illicit army that Hyder Ali and his family belonged to filling the slopes.