Castaway Mountain Read online

  Months after his visit, the municipality’s lawyers announced that it had agreed on a plan. A few weeks later, they gave a presentation in the courtroom, which had been darkened for the occasion. The first air conditioners were just being installed in a few of the lofty, high-ceilinged court rooms, and the long-handled ceiling fans, which had whirred noisily and drowned out court proceedings, finally fell silent. Creaky slatted wooden windows closed, after years of standing open to catch a breeze.

  On a screen installed in the courtroom, a new Deonar township appeared. Officials showed tarred roads winding through mountains, vents jutting out of trash peaks to release the fires trapped within and a plant that would reduce their trash to compost. Half the hills would be shoveled to the side, freeing space for the compost plant that would feed Mumbai’s fading gardens, officials said. Dried trash would also burn to fuel machines at factories nearby. The plant would create municipal card-carrying jobs for pickers on the trash hills, allowing them an official employment, a pension, and some security. If it all worked, Mumbai’s waste would leave the mountains legally, as compost, for the first time in more than a century.

  Contempt proceedings circling closer, Phatak and his colleagues had relooked at the bids that the two short-listed companies had made more than two years before.

  In October 2009, the municipality gave United Phosphorus, one of the world’s largest seed and fertilizer companies and which had come close to meeting the terms, the Deonar contract. It quickly convened a company with two partners: they called it Tatva.

  * * *

  AT FIRST, THE municipality’s plans had not worried Hyder Ali. The pickers didn’t sell the food that rotted slowly on hills. Besides, he had only ever seen the mountains growing higher, stretching further into the creek. The city sent enough trash both for pickers and the municipality’s plans, he thought.

  He and the children chose from more than a thousand trucks that streamed in every day. Long, lurching garbage caravans, filled with the remains of desires that had flickered and been sated in the city, emptied on hilltops, so more could be accumulated in the apartment blocks and suburbs where they had begun their lives. Farzana and her sisters bent low on hilltops to read the alphabets stuck on the front windows of the khaki and orange trucks that passed below, indicating the city wards they came from. They raced to trucks that came from wealthy neighborhoods, loaded with saleable trash, gliding deep into whirls of muddy pickers that surrounded them.

  After she brought out everything she needed to sell, Farzana often emerged from the receding scrambles, dragging felled branches or cracked bamboo poles that came from tree-lined neighborhoods. She, and her sisters, dug them in to stand upright on quiet hilltops. They threw burlap, plastic, or long, dried-out palm leaves over them to make shelters from the beating sun, competing with the boys in making larger, better cabins.

  Teetering at teenage, Farzana had acquired a sudden taste for gossiping in the interiors of these cabins in the lull between truck arrivals. She and her friends chatted over rice or instant noodles, ferreted out of trucks and cooked painstakingly over small fires they lit. City trash yielded slender, long grains of rice that were never seen in markets around the mountains. Sometimes, they pooled their money to buy spices and minced meat and cooked it to go with the city rice and invited friends over. Younger security guards often joined them for parties or for shade from the scorching mountain sun. They told Farzana and her friends that they would leave soon and then new guards would replace them.

  In December 2009, Farzana did begin to see new officers, guards, and machinery settling on the mountains, while municipal staff retreated to their office at the entrance to Deonar’s trash township, from where they supervised the weighing of trash trucks that drove away deep into the township. Waste was shoveled into piles at the edge of the creek, clearing space for the plant. Rumors floated around the hills; it was hard to know which ones were true and which were not. Hyder Ali’s deep-set eyes lit up in surprise when he saw that their lives, which had stretched out in the fog of delays and snags in contracting their township, would change. But even as he watched, the hills started to shrink.

  A slim, empty strip opened between pickers’ homes and the trash. Then a wall began to rise on it. It would form the township’s boundary, marking the hills within as Tatva’s territory, no longer the pickers’. Tatva officials set up booths in the lanes around, offering jobs at the soon-to-be-built plant. Jehangir, and most other boys, signed up for them, hoping to have municipal employment that would make them legitimate on the mountains. Jehangir had gotten married to their cousin, Rakila, and had a baby girl soon after. Dreams of a card-carrying job settled in his eyes.

  * * *

  BUT ONCE TATVA staffers discovered the fetid and secret world that Farzana lived in, they knew it would be hard to manage. They wrote to municipal officials and asked for help. The mountains burned constantly, throwing up smoke, they wrote. Slopes were filled with the illicit army of pickers, overrun by cattle and their handlers, and their far edges were carved out between violent gangs. More than two hundred garbage trucks arrived every hour, during peak hours, delivering twice the amount of garbage Tatva had been asked to handle every day. Pickers and traders believed it belonged to them. How could they even begin to deal with a situation like this, they asked?

  Outside the mountains, a storm was gathering. Almost since its creation, Tatva had been embroiled in a controversy surrounding the circumstances of its winning bid. The uproar had made it to the state assembly. The chief minister ordered an inquiry.

  At Deonar, Tatva worked on, stretching the wall further, stranding the pickers outside. To begin with, Farzana walked along it and slipped through its cracks to get to work. Soon, the wall seemed unending and she could not make it in. Work stalled in their communities. Court orders and waste rules had finally arrived at the township.

  Stuck, Farzana hung outside the wall for weeks. She paced restlessly along the wall until she began seeing ropes fixed around the craggy stone edges. She pulled herself up and over, just as she had seen other pickers do, and got to work. Amid the shrinking mountains, she found a pair of blue jeans, lying stiffly against the unfiltered mountain sun, late one afternoon. She picked them up and held them against herself. She had seen actresses wear them in movie posters, while she sat in buses or rickshaws that inched slowly through the Lotus market. Filled over time with stores, handcarts, and stalls, it was the tunnel that delivered their township to the city and new things from the city to them. Like her sisters, Farzana mostly wore salwar kameezes, with long dupattas to cover her hair. But she brought the jeans home, washed them repeatedly and saved them for the occasional family trips Hyder Ali took them on. In the meantime, she kept scaling the wall to get in and work, watching the hills contract inside.

  Dr. Rane too had watched the wall stretch and the hills shrink. “Everything I had asked for was happening,” he would recall. “I saw sections of the ground getting closed for dumping.” In January 2011, he withdrew his court case.

  The inquiry report on awarding the contract to Tatva came out that September. It said the tender process had material flaws. Report in hand, municipal officials wrote to the commissioner to ask if the Tatva contract was now to be rethought or scrapped. No response came. Instead, a cloud settled over the mountain shrinking project, the recycling plant, and the municipal card-carrying jobs.

  SIX

  EARLY IN THE MONSOON of 2011, Jehangir was working on the mountains when someone came over to tell him that his plump boss, the garbage trader Javed Ansari, better known as Shanoo Bhai, was walking to his house with a sword in his hand. Jehangir ran home, followed by Farzana, Sahani, and their other siblings. They watched as Shanoo slashed the plastic sheets that made up the walls of their house. When the roof collapsed, Shanoo walked into the heap of ruined plastic that was once their home, pulled out stones they had brought back from the mountains and laid down as flooring, and threw them out into the lane.

  Sh
anoo and other garbage traders had always fought to amass trash at the township. But as Tatva struggled to make the plant at Deonar, the traders hacked cracks in the boundary wall, moved deeper in, coralled trash hills and clearings, accumulated all that trucks emptied, and then resold it. Where pickers worked on their stretch of the mountain, the traders’ lackeys also claimed the contents of their bags, paying them little or nothing, and reselling from their katas for a profit. Their presence was inescapable in the lanes around the mountains, where they offered illegal connections to the electricity, cable TV, and water supply—and charged a fee for it. Traders’ battles for control over the mountains, township, and the lanes around it grew increasingly vicious.

  Legend in Farzana’s lane had it that some years before, Shanoo had taken on a murder charge for a rival trader in exchange for rights over garbage that was left on the hills closest to them. When charges could not be proven against Shanoo in court, he returned and inducted Jehangir into his gang and claimed the mountain territory promised to him. Through a mixture of beatings and abuse, Shanoo had trained Jehangir to intimidate other pickers, and to fight other gangs with swords he provided. “Shanoo ne hamare liye kya kiya? Hamne uske liye kiya,” Jehangir would later say. What did Shanoo do for us? We made him.

  Most of all Jehangir and his skinny friend, Miya Khan, who was better known as Babu and had been in Shanoo’s gang nearly as long as him, clashed over trucks filled with hotel remnants. In the city, weddings, banquets, and conferences at hotels had begun stretching for days, bringing their growing remains to the mountains. Pickers resold bent forks, plastic packaging and kept the food and alcohol. The clashes to direct these trucks to their own clearings got so fierce, the municipality had tried diverting trucks arriving from hotels to the dumping grounds at Mulund from Deonar. On nights when Jehangir and Babu brought back a large stash, Shanoo sat with them on the dark trash peaks, passing the liquor bottles around and telling them stories of all he had seen on the mountains.

  For months, Shanoo had suspected that Jehangir was filling garbage trucks for his rival, Javed Qureshi, who was a rising man on the mountains. Shanoo had seen Qureshi’s hills inching closer to his own territory, and began to suspect that Farzana, Sahani, and Farha sold their trash to him too. That evening, Shanoo had slashed their house as punishment. After Shanoo left, the rain had fallen harder against the darkening light, turning their house into a muddy puddle. They ventured in, wading knee deep to find fresh plastic sheets from the trash they had saved up, strung them close around themselves, and slept within its fragile protection.

  Farzana’s sisters stayed away from Shanoo, picking surreptitiously. But she often stayed ahead of them, getting the boys who hung around the wall to push her over it on days it was freshly repaired and had no cracks to slip through. Inside, she chased trucks with them. If Jehangir found her playing marbles with boys, she would grin and show them her hand, tell them she’d be right back, and follow him home where Jehangir would lash her with his belt. She hung out with boys too much, was how she would explain his beatings later. “Mujhe to vo bahut chahta hai,” she would beam. He loves me a lot. It was a kind of love he had learned from Shanoo.

  The two years Tatva had been given to build the plant had expired in the winter of 2011 and the municipality had still not received permission from the state government to lease the grounds so construction could start. Payment was now due for the plant, which had not been built. Tatva officials said, payments were delayed. Negotiations continued. In May and July 2012, Tatva wrote to the municipality, reminding it to lease the vast township, so it could begin making the plant. The municipality in turn wrote again to the state government for permission to lease the Deonar township to Tatva. The state government did not reply to the municipality, which in turn, did not reply to Tatva.

  * * *

  IN NOVEMBER 2012, Shanoo, who had recently been exiled, and lived in Navi, or new, Mumbai, after a trader he had beaten brought a court case, died in a road accident. His family and gang members brought him back to be buried in the Deonar cemetery. The graveyard, which was not far from the mountains, had filled up with the poor Muslims who had moved into the area in the wake of the religious riots of 1992, looking for makeshift homes and endless work on the rising slopes of trash. “Chori ka paani, chori ki bijli, aur ek gareeb ko chahiye kya?” a gang boss, who had arrived in an earlier wave of migrants, once said. Stolen water, stolen power, what more does a poor man want? It was somewhere to live, and somewhere to die.

  The new arrivals at Deonar filled the thicket of lanes in the mountains’ growing shadow and ended their days in the graveyard at its edge. Gravediggers looked for empty slivers of earth to inter the dead who streamed in every day. They brought up half-consumed arms, legs, and long hair still growing from bodies, melded into the earth. The gravediggers quickly refilled the graves with mud sprinkled with salt or potassium and dug elsewhere, hoping that bodies that should have turned to dust in four months would disappear in two. Illness and violence, the twins that stalked the mountain slopes, meant the gravediggers filled not yet old graves with young, new bodies. “Yahaan boodha ho ke to koi marta hi nahi,” a cleric from the area once mused, thinking of the funerals he conducted. No one dies of old age here.

  For Shanoo’s funeral, gang bosses from around the mountains’ rim set their rivalry aside for a day and streamed into the unkempt Deonar graveyard. They watched his teenaged underlings make their way around the overgrown shrubs, tombstones, and broken benches, organizing proceedings. While leaving, several of the gang bosses asked Jehangir to stay in touch. “Collar upar,” Babu remembered hearing, as he wilted in the sultry, midafternoon heat and the uncertainty that lay ahead. Keep your shirt collars—spirits—up, one of them told Babu, who was a year younger than Jehangir. He had worked on the mountains in his school uniform, escaping class, until he dropped out and began working with Shanoo all day and late into the night. That afternoon, the hair Babu had carefully piled into shiny seeng, or spikey horns, to elongate his frame, flopped limply on his face. Sweat soaked his shirt, sticking it to his back.

  In the wake of Shanoo’s death, Jehangir needed a new job: he became a father, on December 9, for the second time. As the legitimate job he had signed up for at the plant hovered forever on the horizon, delayed by Tatva’s negotiations with the municipality, his expenses were growing. The gang, already sputtering out in Shanoo’s exile, had dissolved completely after his death. So, Jehangir struck out on his own. He bought glass from pickers on slopes, bribing or befriending guards to let him take heaps of glass out through the walls’ widening gaps. Farzana and his other sisters washed and cleaned broken shards so he could get a better price for them. Jehangir had watched Javed, and his bosses Atique and Rafique Khan, take over more territory on the mountains. He sold his findings at Javed Qureshi’s kata, for more than Shanoo had ever paid him.

  * * *

  THE BROTHERS RAFIQUE and Atique Khan had arrived at the mountains, in 1975 as children, when it was still a watery forest between the dumping grounds and the creek. Atique, younger of the brothers, remembered worrying about falling into the swamp, when he first moved as a ten-year-old. “Log daldal mein gir ke mar jaate the,” he recalled. People fell into the swamp and died. Regardless, his father and others had put down rubber tires, plastic sheets, cardboard, and settled Rafiq Nagar on Deonar’s marsh and the edges of trash slopes. Police and municipal officials demolished their homes, but they kept resettling them until the municipality finally acknowledged the settlement, making skinny roads and building a nursery school, tilting on the slopes.

  The Khan brothers’ father had opened a restaurant in the Lotus market where the brothers had started out waiting tables. They had filled mangroves with mountain mud and made plastic sheet homes over them that they rented or sold. But they knew, any fortune around here would have to come from trash. Around 2005, Atique cajoled their father into opening a kata shop in the mountain-facing stretch of road, which was already filling up
with them. Shop owners competed for pickers as they descended the slopes, carrying back bits of the mountains on their heads. The traders stopped at nothing to beat out rivals and redirect their trash, but Atique and Rafique had brought a fierceness that had never been seen before.

  In October 2009, Kadeer Shaikh, a rival of the Khan brothers, had died from stab wounds on the slim dirt strip between the mountains and their kata shop, even as a small crowd watched, immobilized. His mother had refused to collect the body until Atique and Rafique were charged with her son’s murder, Atique recalled. But when police looked for witnesses to build their case, Kadeer’s murder became unseen and unheard. Atique was kept in custody for a month, while investigations went on and then let off, burnishing the Khan brothers’ image as one of the mountains’ bosses. More accusations of threats and violence piled up, but remained mostly unproven and the two brothers unconvicted.

  Soon after Kadeer’s death, Javed Qureshi, the Khans’ acolyte, began appearing on their mountain clearings, while the brothers worked from their offices at the mountains’ edge. The Khans’ name and their writ controlled life in the lanes of Rafiq Nagar and the mountains around them. Rooms in the skinny lanes opened out to damp, sunless alleys or rambling, sun-soaked trash slopes that petered into waves. Walking through the lanes could yield roosters collected for prize fights, retrieved couches spilling foam, and aging gangsters crouched against shrunken doorframes that blocked the sun. Cable television, water, trash, jobs: everything that made up life in the lanes was ultimately said to be controlled by the Khans and other gangs, as their cavernous sheds at the mountains’ edge expanded.