Castaway Mountain Read online

  The prime minister, Narendra Modi, was to inaugurate the event. At the opening, a lion would appear on the giant television screen, and then leap to life onstage, like the country it represented. The hologram would stride through the auditorium, filled with international investors, a symbol of the global economic powerhouse awakening.

  Instead, the garbage mountains and their smoke seeped in through the metallic screens, casting their fetid shadow in the half-made pavilions, just weeks before the conference. It was as if a primitive and discarded city drifted through the new, dogging the steps of the striding lion. The organizers worried about how they would sell the promise of new things amid the burning detritus of the old, and whether guests would pull out because of the toxic air quality.

  * * *

  AS THE DAYS went by, the smoke cloud seemed to cover much of the city except the mountains’ shadow. Hyder Ali sat at his doorstep, chatting with friends. He had seen fires since he started working on the mountains, nearly two decades ago. This was not new, he said. He had even sprinkled silver powder to quell them.

  Farzana was at a friend’s place, he told them, airily. It’s what she did these days, he added, going on about the fires he had seen. At that moment Farzana came walking home, a bag full of garbage in hand. Farha trailed behind. She must have made it to the mountains he said, looking unsurprised, lurching up to see what she had. She opened her bag to show him the still-warm, mangled metal she had collected.

  He and his friends went back to looking at the pictures of fires in the papers. “Ye to kahin bhi liya rahega,” Hyder Ali said. These photographs could have been taken anywhere. Another picker who had dropped in to chat pointed out that fires burned on the mountains all the time, that these had only made it to the news because sea breezes carried the smoke into wealthy homes. Some of it was true. Some of it, Hyder Ali and his friends told themselves so they could keep working, or taking their children’s earnings, collected from the burning mountains.

  Farzana, Sahani, and the other children walked the mountains all day. “Hawa jahaan daudti thi, vahaan dhuaan daudta tha, aur uske peeche peeche ham,” Sahani said. Where the wind blew, smoke followed, and we followed behind. As Farzana walked up slopes, they sent heat shocks through her slippers. They crumbled under her feet. The smoke that rose from them burned in her eyes, throat, and chest. She took to wearing black lace-up shoes she found. She waved burlap to clear the air, so she could see the unrelenting garbage caravans that continued to arrive. She followed their approaching headlights, searching for a way through the growing fog. She trailed them as they got to the far end of the township, to empty on hills where fires had not yet reached.

  Tatva’s guards had left and policemen had come to support the firemen. They tried keeping pickers away from the burning slopes and unloading trucks, but the pickers, long-practiced, evaded them. When trucks emptied tightly packed plastic bags on warm slopes, dead fires erupted again on the hilltops.

  Phugawalas, or Plastic People, such as Farzana, sifted through slopes with forks, trawling slowly for bits of the remaining plastic that had escaped the fire’s heat. “Itne tarah ka tha ki kuch na kuch to mil hi jata tha. Safed, kala, neela, paani,” Farzana said, speaking of how she became one, years ago. There were so many kinds that you always found something. White, black, blue, and water colored, or transparent. But now it was all melting away, and instead the fires brought up metal, the most elusive and expensive of mountain finds.

  She watched the Chumbakwalas, Magnet People, trace the slopes with magnets tied to sticks. This was their time and Farzana decided to join the Chumbakwalas. She bought magnets from the 90 Feet Road market, tied them on to long sticks that she waved over burning trash slopes. Bits of nails, coins, wire, and dismembered gadgets flew up through smoke and ash and stuck to her homemade metal detector. She prized the hot metal away with a thick, old scarf and stuffed it into her bag. Farzana bought water and vada pav from vendors who walked the slopes so she could stay out longer, tracing the mountains with her magnets all day. Did the flames and smoke scare her? No, she said. Did they make her sick? Why would it? she replied, not remembering how she coughed. She earned more than she had before the fires, she said.

  The Chindiwalas, or Cloth Scrap People, whom Hyder Ali belonged to, were mostly out of work on the slopes. Instead, they collected scrap bundles from tailors in the city and sifted through them at home. Like them, Hyder Ali stayed home. Unlike them, he hardly worked, worry debilitating him.

  From the mountaintops, Farzana watched the municipal and police convoys stream in. Tatva’s contract had ended while the fires raged, and it had left the township, sending the municipality ₹36.19 crore in unpaid bills, the day the fires began. Municipal staff were returning to manage the mountains. From up high Farzana watched bulldozers demolish the homes and shops that crowded the mountain’s entrance, so fire engines could enter more easily. She turned back down to wave her homemade metal detector over the mountains and fill bags with metal to sell.

  The municipality had called experts and scientists who suggested a range of chemicals to be thrown over the burning township. But trash burned in layers buried far below the chemicals’ reach. The fire department fielded frantic calls from residents of distant and varying neighborhoods every day, as the breezes blew the smoke in their direction, making them sick. Fire engines splashed water from new angles to change the direction of the smoke clouds that Farzana felt rose in shapes like people floating in the air.

  Yasmin had not seen the smoke that rose on hills behind her house. She didn’t think Ashra’s wracking cough had anything to do with it. When he was home, Sharib sprawled facedown on the floor, turning just when he seemed to be asleep. The soles of his feet turned red, purple, and then puffy black from the burns accumulated on the slopes. Fluid oozed out of these blisters. Yasmin knew he could barely stand or walk. But when she nagged, he would lift himself up and limp out of the door to work, blister fluid sticking on his slippers. In the last few months, Yasmin had become caught in a tangled mess of debt and despair. Sharib provided their only steady income, even if it was meager. She could not let a fire disrupt it. So, Yasmin warmed castor oil and rubbed it on his soles or applied potions whose recipes were passed around their lanes, at night. It was all he needed, she said.

  “Uparwale ne mere bachon ko bahut taakat di hai,” she said, when asked if the fires had caused the wracking coughs in her home. God made my children very strong. At first, she had procured for Ashra cough syrup that doctors prescribed. But when Ashra began running through bottles without getting better, Yasmin stopped buying them. It only drained her household budget. She didn’t see the fires. She didn’t feel them. Others in their lane, too, worked so hard through the fog, they didn’t see it at all. They did not feel it burn in them.

  Desperate, municipal and fire officials hitched water hoses onto the forklifts, which usually shoveled mud and garbage, to extend their reach deeper through the fog, to the burning hills. Alamgir and other pickers sat atop the swinging forklifts as they drove into blinding smoke, directing drivers deeper into glowing mountain recesses. They would jump off just as the forklifts dived in, shoveling aside trash to unearth blazes, burning deep within. Water tankers moved in to spray water and coolant to douse these fires. Then the forklifts blanketed the uncovered fires with gravel and debris from unburned hills. Alamgir said that the forklifts he was on were a little above the toxic smoke clouds, rather than within them.

  * * *

  AVIATION AUTHORITIES WORRIED that the smoke would prevent planes coming into land at Mumbai Airport. Then, on February 5, little over a week before the Make in India conference, the fires were doused and the smoke began retreating from the city. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the conference, Maharashtra’s chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, made a pitch for the state as the most developed, industrialized, and investor-friendly one in the country.

  Thousands of foreign investors and Indian business heads drove through the lac
y pavilions in golf carts, exploring investment opportunities. India was one of the world’s greatest consumer markets, officials told them. Months before the conference, $5 billion had been committed to making iPhones in the state, as India was soon to have the world’s second-largest number of cell phone users. Cool February evenings were filled with Bollywood galas on Mumbai’s beaches, walks through its colonial-era naval dockyard, lit with fairy lights, and fashion shows that showcased the state’s handwoven textiles.

  Hyder Ali spent his days after the fires sitting outside his house, chatting with the friends still left in the lane. Some pickers had moved out to the homes of friends or relatives outside the city, to exorcise the smoke that itched in them, fogged their minds, and trickled down from their eyes as tears. Others ran through expensive medicines that did not soothe their burning chests.

  Although Hyder Ali would not admit it, the fires were unlike any he had seen before. The city’s discarded desires had burned like the fires in hell that clerics had told him about. Jinns and Shaitans arose from them, they had told him. In the evenings, he waited for Farzana, and the other children, to return with warm trash and new stories that swirled about the mountains.

  He heard that they would be shut down forever now, that cameras, like blinking, black eyes, would hover over their peaks and that the garbage would be dumped outside the city. Some of the stories he heard were true and others were hazy as the smoke that floated above him in those days. Within weeks, he turned bonier, his eyes sank deeper into his face, and his hair turned gray and then startlingly orange. He had applied cheap, chemical-infused henna to hide his sudden crop of grays.

  NINE

  THE FIRES HAD RELENTED just enough for the conference to get underway, but within days, the distant, simmering hills erupted again. Flames spread across five acres near the creek, which the fire engines struggled to reach. Engineers at Deonar’s municipal office looked up with dread as the night sky glowed amber. Then, surprisingly for a February night, it rained, spoiling outdoor events at the conference that evening and soaking into submission the fires that could have raged for days.

  Weeks before the fires first broke out, and officials, politicians, television, and camera crews came to swarm the mountains, the diminutive and graying Raj Kumar Sharma had walked around the township’s broken wall in his puffy, high-waist pants, with a camera slung around his neck. He had slipped through its gaps to photograph the mountains, filled with wastepickers and nearly emptied of security guards. He took pictures of the municipality’s security cameras that did not work and was captured on the gangs’ cameras that did. He photographed the empty guard posts taken over by drug addicts, assiduously cataloging the township’s brokenness. He had gotten a lawyer to present his photographs with a petition in court to show that its orders to mend the mountains had not reached them and to ask that the court to reopen the case to fix them.

  Sharma had lived in an airy, terraced apartment, minutes from Deonar’s trash township, since his childhood, in the 1950s. It was in a leafy lane in Chembur, a neighborhood with a gentle, fraying charm. Down the street was RK Studios, where some of the Hindi film industry’s greatest dreams had been made. Sharma’s home had once belonged to Lalita Pawar, one of RK’s favorite vamps. She was best known for having a glass eye and tough demeanor that occasionally yielded to reveal a golden heart.

  Sharma’s family had rented the house and when her movie career waned, the trips to RK Studios fading away, they had bought it from her. The Chembur, in Sharma’s childhood memories, was full of fruit orchards and picnics sprinkled with the stars. He had heard and smelled the open-topped cuchra trains pass by, at night, to reach the Deonar township. He had watched the mountains grow precipitously, and now, graying, was full of ingenious ideas to mend them, to address the municipality’s disregard for them. He walked the mountains and traveled the country in search of solutions and returned to push them with the municipality and in court.

  His photographs and petition to restart the closed case on fixing the mountains and processing the city’s waste arrived at the desks of Justices Abhay Oka and C. V. Bhadang, of the Bombay High Court. Along with fires and the news headlines that followed, it had forced them to reopen the case. In Justice Oka’s outsized, wood beamed courtroom, along the court’s angular and winding ground floor corridor, Sharma asked to set a new date to close the mountains. The municipality’s lawyer argued to keep the Deonar township going for a little longer. Restricting garbage flows, as Sharma had asked for, would mean trash hills being built in the city, sickening residents, he said.

  Oka was the fourth most senior of the court’s seventy judges. He had shiny black hair, neatly pressed down in a side parting, a toothbrush mustache, and a commanding presence in his stately and always-packed courtroom. He often heard more than sixty cases a day, with a break for lunch, a rate of work that meant he could cut through the obfuscation lawyers indulged in to buy time and avoid commitment. An impish smile often played under his mustache, as he perched his face on his palm and asked lawyers to turn to page numbers and paragraph numbers, in their written petitions, that contradicted their own arguments. That afternoon, Oka bore down on the municipality’s lawyer.

  He pointed out that the municipality could not start redirecting its garbage caravans, across the creek, to the village of Karvale in Navi Mumbai that had been selected nearly a decade ago for a modern landfill to replace the Deonar township. It turned out the land was dotted with private homes and tribal settlements. Their owners had resisted selling and moving out. They had attacked municipal officers when they went to measure the land to settle a purchase price. Even when officers returned with police protection, they had not been able to survey the sprawling plot. The municipality had to keep the Deonar township going a little longer, its lawyer said.

  In the busy courtroom, Oka’s impatience was palpable. He confronted the municipality’s lawyer with the more than a decade-and-a-half-long failure to meet regulations and previous court orders. Oka reminded him that the municipality had a legal obligation to manage its waste responsibly. In the orders he later passed, Oka noted caustically that the rules “are being observed only in breach.” It all made the dumping of garbage at Deonar illegal, Oka said.

  From Sharma’s petition, Oka drew out the lawless bubble that had grown on the mountains for display in the courtroom. When the fires erupted, there were too few cameras installed and none of them worked. The boundary wall was broken, the township carved up by gangs. Security guards were nowhere to be found on the site. The mountains burned even as lawyers argued, Oka pointed out. He seemed incredulous when the municipality’s lawyer suggested that the city’s waste could fill Deonar’s rising hills for longer. How could the city’s shadow have space when Mumbai was sprawling out and growing upward, Oka’s look suggested.

  On February 29, 2016, Oka passed orders saying the municipality had allowed reckless construction and development in Mumbai, without thinking of its mounting flow of trash and the reeking township it emptied into. In fueling the growth of the city and its township of trash, the municipality had violated its residents’ right to life, protected by the constitution, which included the right to live in a pollution-free environment, Oka wrote. He stopped fresh construction until the municipality came up with a plan to manage its waste and shut the Deonar mountains down, although the tearing down and rebuilding of old buildings, which made for most construction in the space-starved city anyway, could continue.

  Oka set a deadline of June 30, 2017, a year and a half later, to stop dumping garbage at Deonar. He set up a committee, made up of a former administrator, a police officer, two environmental scientists, and Sharma, to ensure his orders reached the mountains. A new committee to oversee the municipality of castaway belongings.

  * * *

  ON THE MOUNTAINS, pickers had heard there was a court case to stop growing the constantly filling trash mountains. But they had only seen the mountains grow, their lives and work stretching on in the
face of delays. In a city where wealth and aspiration were reflected in dizzying real estate growth and its greatest fortunes were made through its skyscrapers, stopping fresh construction would send tremors. The court order had finally brought the mountains into the city, connecting residents and their detritus with the distant mountains that had exploded in flames and smoke.

  On March 20, 2016, the mountains were bathed in the glow of fires that belched dense smoke into the city once again. Flames traveled across hills and the city woke up to the now familiar smoke and sharp smell of burning from Deonar. A television news channel’s headline described it as a “smog shroud” that had fallen over the city again. In the mountains’ shadow, doctors struggled to cope with snaking lines of breathless patients, to find ventilators for their sickest patients. They tried to revive a breathless baby who, newspapers later reported, died.

  While fire engines tried to subdue the fires, schools around the mountains, which had remained closed for more than a week in January, closed again. At others, farther away, students were not allowed to play in the playground or were asked to wear face masks, flimsy shields between them and Mumbai’s deadly air.

  This time, tired authorities were full of conspiracy theories. Such raging and uncontrolled fires could not possibly be accidental, they said. Maharashtra’s environment minister blamed his alliance partner in the government and thought it suspicious that the fires had first erupted days before Tatva’s waste processing contract had ended prematurely. Much of what Justice Oka’s judgment identified as the municipality’s failings, its officials thought should have been laid at Tatva’s doorstep. After all, it had managed the mountains when the fires broke out.