Castaway Mountain Read online

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  WITH EVERY DELAY in the plant’s construction, the mountains were receding back into invisibility, while the gangs’ grip on them, and the lanes around them, extended. The brothers’ men began patrolling their territory, which was strung with cameras that beamed footage of any intruders back to their headquarters. Jehangir’s fortunes rose with Javed, who lent him money for his sister Afsana’s wedding. Jehangir took glass into the city to sell it to traders, who would in turn sell it to be melted into new shapes or refilled with new drinks. “Vo ek number ka aadmi hai,” Jehangir would gush about Javed later. He is a first-class person.

  Jehangir had named his baby daughter Shifa, meaning “healing.” He came to believe she had mended his luck. Business with Javed grew fast: the following year, Jehangir replaced the family’s plastic sheet walls, the ones that Shanoo had slashed, with a few feet of bricks, topped with long layers of tin sheet. He made a loft, where he and his wife, Rakila, lived, with their girls. “Iske aane se na unki kismet badal gayee,” Rakila would say about Shifa. She brought luck in his life. As business grew, Jehangir hired teenage pickers to clean his glass heaps. Every few weeks, he packed them into the drivers’ cabin with his sisters, broken shards jangling in the back to sell to city traders. He dropped them at Chowpatty beach, for an outing, after he sold his mountain treasures to traders.

  Away from the mountains, Farzana wore sunglasses, a sun hat, and long tunics with her jeans. She splashed in the sea, ringed by buildings nearly as tall as the mountains. While her sisters made castles out of the windblown sand, Farzana walked far ahead, along the gently curving shore, pressing her feet into the sand to leave footprints. She walked through the world she had known only through its detritus and turned back against the sun, every little while, to see how far she had come.

  When they got to the beach, in the midmornings, Farzana watched college students arrive, with their overfilled backpacks, to escape class or shield gently forming relationships from prying eyes. As the afternoon wore on, groups of women, in flowery burqa-like Ridaas or sarees and dangling handbags, came for a respite between the unbending mealtimes they labored to meet, in their claustrophobic kitchens. Farzana watched shifting, lacy shadows from the trees that lined the beach fall on bejeweled honeymooners and couples through the day. They all sought the busy beach, and its inadequate shadows, to escape Mumbai’s cramped family homes.

  Farzana felt, fleetingly, like she belonged in this world of people whose lives were filled with things and who discarded trash, not hoarded it. When Jehangir came to take them home, she inevitably begged him to stay a little longer. They watched a deepening pink sky frame the rising skyline, the sea turn molten, and the bronzed sun melt slowly into it, extinguishing its glow. Then they got back into his truck and drove through snaking traffic, almost following the same route the city’s trash took to reach them.

  * * *

  GARBAGE TRUCKS WERE often packed with the debris of stumpy old buildings, getting increasingly torn down to make place for shiny new skyscrapers. The detritus created by Mumbai’s never-ceasing construction industry was mostly supposed to be buried in far-flung quarries. The cement, asbestos, rusted metal, and chemicals they gave off could hang in the city air and settle in residents’ lungs, making them sick.

  But soon after Kadeer died, in 2009, Rafique, the older of the Khan brothers, was said to have begun offering a way around these long and expensive quarry trips, which delayed new construction, as rebuilding was usually permitted after the torn-down buildings were disposed of. Municipal officials working nights had seen trucks arrive in the dark at Deonar from the city, slipping through holes in the wall at the far end of the township’s official entrance. They saw a secret suburb of gray concrete hills rise above the wall. When the debris hills got too high and wobbly, fires burned on them, water tankers doused them, bulldozers flattened the burned remains. The debris hills rose again. It allowed the city’s instant reinvention, and was said to have lifted Atique and Rafique’s fortunes too.

  Further along the mountains’ broken boundary wall was a rambling estate where waste came from some of Mumbai’s largest hospitals and was said to be Atique and his partner Javed’s turf. Pickers the lackeys let in collected the thick plastic gloves, saline bags, and bottles that their landlord resold. Across both Atique and Rafique’s territories, thin plastic sheets, shopping bags, and the garbage bags that did not fetch much money, were collected and piled into trucks. Pickers had heard they went to factories in distant towns where they were pressed into little plastic pellets and sold across the country and abroad.

  Jehangir’s business was growing with the traders’ gangs on the mountains. He and Babu had appropriated a mountain clearing where trucks emptied only for them. He, Alamgir, and Farzana, the oldest of the sisters still at home, kept their house going while Hyder Ali’s workshop sputtered as he made repayments for the loans he had taken to build it. Hyder Ali had thought the loans and the workshop would get him out of the hold of trash, but its grip on his children was only growing. Farzana often went along when he went to apply for loans, wanting to accompany her father for the trip into the city, then nudging him to say it was time to get back. She could not stay away from the mountains for too long.

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  BETWEEN THE ESTATES of debris and medical waste was an empty space where the municipality planned to make a new graveyard. It had stayed vacant for years, officials worrying rains and trash could come gushing down mountain slopes, bringing up newly buried bodies. They began seeing it fill with debris from dead buildings instead, the gangs said to be inching their way across it at night.

  In July 2013, Tatva wrote to the municipality again, asking for the lease to the township so it could mortgage it and begin making the plant, which would lead to the mountains’ closure. The chief minister of Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chavan, announced the formation of another committee to probe the terms of the municipality’s contract with Tatva. While it investigated whether permission could be given to lease out municipal trash townships to private companies, the township stayed in limbo.

  In September 2013, Tatva wrote to the municipality asking it to form a dispute resolution committee, to hand over the township’s lease and pay its dues. Copies of the letter began arriving at a range of municipal offices. The following month, the municipality wrote back saying it would form a committee. More letters from Tatva arrived at municipal offices, attempting to set it up. No responses came. In December, Tatva filed a court case to get the municipality to pay its dues for their work clearing the site, as well as their failure to provide the lease to make the plant that still hung unmade over the mountain air.

  Late one afternoon that winter, Jehangir was buying trash on the hills when another picker called him to the creek. He ran down the burning slopes to find a small crowd collecting near the mangroves. As he got closer, he saw Farzana and Farha already standing around a boat that had run ashore in the sand. He craned through the crowd and saw the fading, yellow sunlight glowing on gold. A middle-aged woman was sprawled across the boat, dressed as a bride. She was dead.

  He asked Farzana to turn away but she remembered staring, transfixed, at the gold bracelets that lined the woman’s arms. They shone against her lifeless skin. They could hear police sirens in the distance, and finally the policemen arrived, walking the final stretch over the garbage-strewn tracks. Jehangir saw them cover the luminous woman with a white sheet and take her away.

  For weeks, Farzana asked him if he had heard anything about the woman who had floated into the city’s graveyard of possessions. How did she get there? she asked Jehangir, most evenings. Who sent her? All the woman’s prized belongings had not been enough to fill the emptiness in her life, Farzana thought. Someone must have killed the woman and put her into the boat that had drifted into their town, Jehangir had said. Like everything else on the mountains, he told her, the dead woman in her bridal jewelry had probably floated into their lives in the hopes that she would be forgot
ten—even in plain sight.

  SEVEN

  LEGEND AMONG PICKERS HAD it that expensive belongings could only have arrived at the mountains because they brought their owners ill luck. Surely, they could not have forgotten about such things, or thrown them away, pickers figured. This misfortune would follow pickers if they kept any of these thrown-away treasures, they believed. Instead, pawn brokers walked their lanes to rid pickers of their fortune-draining finds.

  It was only in its infancy, but 2015 was turning out to be the year of dwindling fortunes at Deonar. The sparring between the municipality and Tatva dragged on in court, and outside. In late January 2015, a state government inquiry concluded, predictably, that the contract with Tatva should not have been signed before permission was obtained to lease the township from the state government, and that there had been irregularities with the tender process. Soon after the report was submitted, the recently reelected state government denied permission to lease out the sprawling trash township, drying up the plans to fund the compost plant and shrivel the mountains. The pickers would have to look elsewhere for better work and the elusive municipal identity cards. Hardly anyone fell, in these attempts, faster than Moharram Ali, once the luckiest of mountain denizens. Somewhere in the middle of Tatva’s slow fade away from the mountains, he disappeared too.

  Municipal officials had already been planning for a new waste-to-power plant, replacing Tatva and its plans for a plant that had stayed grounded. They were staring at court orders that had said the township was to be closed that year. As the municipality began looking for funds, and a new company to build a waste processing plant, warm winds blew over the mountains, aggravating the season of fires. The monsoon, which usually calmed the fires for a few months, wouldn’t arrive until June.

  Fires burned for over a week in February while municipal officials helplessly looked on. Official correspondence also showed that around then the municipal commissioner had said there were several complications and risks involved in making a waste-to-energy plant, especially one the municipality would own only jointly with a private company. It took back the plans for the plant.

  The garbage caravans continued to arrive and Tatva shoveled their contents onto hills, as it had for more than five years. Meanwhile, in court, the company pushed for the appointment of an arbitrator to award its unpaid bills and damages for being unable to make the plant. Municipal lawyers countered by saying Tatva had worked for years, awaiting permissions: it was content, they suggested, with piling trash on hilltops rather than making the plant. The municipality had paid Tatva for the work it did do, its lawyers said. Mediation was not written into their contract. At the township, broken fragments of the wall stood stranded, a reminder of the future that had so nearly arrived before it sank into the trash that the pickers had waded through their whole lives. On March 19, 2015, Justice Shahrukh Kathawalla granted Tatva’s plea for mediation with the municipality. That winter, arbitration proceedings would begin.

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  WITH PROSPECTS OF the job he had signed up for at the plant fading, Moharram Ali decided to take more loans for new businesses to supplement his trash-picking. As well as the kata shop he had started after finding the necklace on the slopes, he rented out rooms for a commission, and took masonry jobs. It was the best time to be a masonry artisan, or karigar, he claimed.

  Just as the mountains were said to add a few feet of trash every day, the straggling communities at their rim were always growing too. Mosque towers were rising above tin sheet dwellings; corner shops in the Lotus market were turning into internet cafés, cake shops, and clinics. Farzana raved about a new sweet shop that made a dessert that melted in the mouth like soft cotton, soaked in sweet milk.

  But years of treasures falling in Moharram Ali’s hands had made him unused to the slow grind of masonry. Struggling to deliver commissions in time, he returned to his village often, bought a small plot of land there, took loans and spent months building a house on it. Stretched too thin, his glow began to fade. When he returned to Deonar, the pickers who had sold him trash for his kata now sold it to others instead. His fragile fortune was slipping out of his hands, replaced by growing debt. He took larger loans, repaying them unfailingly by secretly taking fresh loans to repay overdue ones, always coming up with a new plan to earn back enough to repay them all.

  Yasmin, his wife, struggled to run the house while he was away and ran up her own debts. The necklace Moharram Ali had found often floated in her eyes. She thought about the night she held it in her hands and thought her life was about to get better. She now came to believe the necklace had brought ill luck to its original owners and had followed her family too.

  Hera, who had inherited her father’s long nose and good looks, dropped out of high school. Months after she turned eighteen, she took a loan to buy a used sewing machine and began to stitch curtains. Sharib, their oldest son, whom Moharram Ali had wanted to learn to drive so he could work at the plant, picked trash all day. At fifteen, he was still baby-faced but seemed suddenly taller, his eyes blurred under his floppy hair. For years, Yasmin had berated him for picking at the slopes and dispatched him to school. But with Moharram Ali away, she began keeping his money, settling Sharib in the grip of the mountains she had wanted to keep her children away from.

  She tried enrolling him at night school instead. He returned home, soaked in mountain mud, only after class had already begun, fell on the food Yasmin could rustle up and then stretched on the floor, hardly ever making it to class. Later, Yasmin would say that with Moharram Ali away and creditors at her door, she had become addicted to Sharib’s earnings. She watched his smile turn scarce and brown. She turned away when she saw him chew the tobacco that stained his teeth. She knew it kept him working through long, hungry days.

  When she came to drop garbage bags or refill water bottles, Farzana began seeing Yasmin in her house, collecting the fabric strips that Jehangir’s wife, Rakila, gave women to stick beads on, in pencil-marked flower patterns. They would get stitched on and shimmer on the edges of kurtas, burqas, and sarees in the city. Neighbors streamed in after the mountain pickers left for work, collected these pieces, and exchanged gossip, children in tow. Farzana wondered why Yasmin took work that fetched just a few rupees for pieces longer than herself: her family had always floated a little above the others in their lanes. And yet, here she was on most afternoons, telling them she needed to stay busy while Moharram Ali was away.

  By the time he got back, Yasmin was desperate. Moharram Ali returned to stalk the mountains’ overlooked riches and waited restlessly for his luck to turn again, bringing treasures back in his hands. Then his father called to say he had fixed his youngest daughter’s wedding, Moharram Ali’s favorite sister. He left to sell the village house in order to fund it, returning to struggle with his dwindling fortune and growing debt. He took loans to repay previous ones, to run his string of failing businesses and moved secretly to avoid creditors. Yasmin struggled to send him to work as she once had struggled to send her sons to school.

  She decided to step in, taking a loan herself, to start a Vada Pav stall at the market on 90 Feet Road, which was named for its width and followed the mountains’ curve. Yasmin, Hera, and Mehrun, her middle daughter, fried potato patties and green chilies that sputtered in the pan and brought tears in their eyes, through the afternoons. She handed them to Moharram Ali, in oil-stained newspaper, to slice into fluffy buns and sell as the market came to life at dusk. Reluctantly, he set up the kind of stall he had kept in business for years. Then friends dropped by. Yasmin heard he gave them free food. The stall folded, adding to their string of failed businesses and swirling loans.

  Yasmin faltered on repayments, making new loans unavailable and handed her nose pin to Rakila asking her to pawn it to start a new business. She bought groceries for a meal service for the artisans who made shoes or clothes or filled them with embroidery at the many workshops sprouting in the lanes. An embroiderer began taking a lunch box, eating dinner at hom
e with Moharram Ali and retreating into the dark lane with him to giggle over their glowing phones. His payments got sucked into buying the family’s food supplies, Yasmin could not add new clients, the business shut down and Rakila wore the nose pin for months, while she looked for loans to retrieve it.

  At home, Moharram Ali raged at Yasmin for his stained clothes, for not pressing his feet until he fell asleep and for her steadily growing quagmire of debt. Amid it all, Hera had turned nineteen, a year over the sanctioned age for girls in their lane to marry. At Rakila’s house, the women told Yasmin to find the striking and fiery Hera a match before she got too old.

  One of the neighbors told her about a relative in the upscale Mumbai suburb of Bandra who had a son with decent job prospects. Yasmin borrowed jewelry for herself and Hera and took Moharram Ali, who she said was a successful trader, to meet the family. He smiled and looked the part, helping settle the wedding. Hera would finally slip out of the mountains’ grasp, as Yasmin had always wanted. And yet, pulling it off needed more money than they had.

  Yasmin went to Rakila’s house and enrolled her and Hyder Ali to start a Bishi. An underground Mumbai system for raising larger sums for desperate times, the Bishi’s members contribute fixed installments into a shared pot every month. Each month, one of the subscribers is able to withdraw the pooled sum, minus a commission for the organizer, the payout rotating until everyone has been able to withdraw from the pot. Yasmin’s offer was even better. She would collect the installments and return double the amount, including interest, every month, she told them. Hyder Ali joined so he could grow his embroidery workshop when he got the increased amount and Rakila planned to take on more bead work. Moharram Ali often asked for these installments, to make his own repayments. Yasmin resisted. They argued.