Sathya Saran

MY REVIEW.
Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings

This is the tale that every Indian city faces, dealing with municipal waste and how the deprived make a living

In the bustling city of Mumbai, lives a mountain. Eighteen or more storeys high, invisible to the city’s inhabitants but very much a part of their lives. It stands a witness to social change. Politicians discuss it and push the discussion into some dusty corner, families live off its hidden treasures, and regardless of their station in life, be they industrialists, government officials or rag pickers, everyone chokes on poisonous smoke from its fires.

Mountain Tales, despite its pleasant-sounding title, is more about the sub-title that follows it. A difficult book, not because of the writing style, or even the tortuous ten-year-long story the author narrates, but because it brings us face to face with what we would prefer to ignore: Official apathy and helplessness, our own increasingly use and throw lifestyle, the tattered lives of the homeless living on the edge of civilisation in a city where ‘no one starves’, and the increasing hazard to health that heedless waste disposal continues to create.

Of course, it is not a story only native to Mumbai, every city in the world, boasts of mountains of filth and waste that grow with every passing year. But the author has trained her gaze on Mumbai’s Deonar dumping ground to tell us the story of its history, and the stories of those who live off its pickings.

Roy traces the history of the mountain, starting at its base, which was laid out in 1897, as a way to clear the city of the plague that was killing thousands.

An 823-acre marsh in the distant seaside village of Deonar, where the city’s waste would be sent to clean the narrow lanes and tightly packed homes of the poor of the filth that bred rats and disease.

The ‘kuchra’ was sent by trains to the marshland, dumped every night, and the officials sat back sanguine they had done a good deed.

They opined that the waste marshes dumping ”turn into a ‘valuable Municipal estate’ yielding more than 1,00,000 rupees as rent from the farmers, who would cultivate the grounds enriched with rotting garbage, and form the new edge of the extending city.”

They were wrong. As the years rolled and an independent India carved out States, and Bombay’s reputation as the city of gold grew, its numbers swelled and its areas stretched, and marginalised poor with nowhere to go set up makeshift, flimsy homes of plastic and bamboo or discarded slats, along the borders of the rubbish heap that had assumed the contours of a mountain.

With little hope of jobs, they turned to the mountain to feed and clothe them; trawling through its stinking masses to unearth discards to sell, use or consume as the need dictated. Communities grew, with their share of the helpless and those who wrested power over them by sheer might.

Through the ten years of her journey understanding the story of the Deonar mountain, Roy also followed the legal trail that time and again brought in rulings to stop the mountain from growing, to change the scenario that was causing toxic fumes to endanger the health of a city, and especially those living in the mountain’s shadow, be they rag pickers or residents of the high rises that dotted the skyline.

It’s a long tale of strong actions taken for the city’s betterment by judges and activists that fall by the wayside in the face of the utter helplessness of the successive municipalities to find solutions and alternatives to things as they are.

Roy brings to this tale that could have been a dry and harsh reading, a human twist. She takes us along as she traces the story of the young, lissom, bright as buttons, Farzana, whose fast legs and alert eyes miss nothing, as she runs behind the trucks after release from her school, and digs through the rubbish for treasures her father can use or sell.

Graduating from crushed plastic bottles to glass and wires, her eyes and hands miss nothing. Often, like others, she steps on broken tube light edges, cutting deep fissures in her feet, or falls and hurts herself. Later, she will watch helplessly as her younger sister falls backward on an upright sliver of glass that will cut a deep z across her back. To***co and pieces of cloth are the only remedies at such times, and their indomitable spirit. Which is spurred by the fact that there could be another bag with notes and a gold necklace as the one found by one of her father’s neighbours.

The years pass. The mountain continues to grow, and the yields too get richer. Copper and silver from discarded cell phones, glass bottles and syringes from medical waste. In one horrifying incident, Farzana picks up a bottle to find three new born dead foetuses inside, joined together at the waist. Her humane act of giving them a burial only gets her and her companions a sound thrashing.

Farzana cannot stay away from the mountain, she finds love, and disaster, when trapped by a wire coiled around her feet, she falls in the track of a reversing bulldozer, and is run over, once and then again when it is moved off her. A small miracle must have occurred to save her. Broken in every bone, face puffed out of recognition, lung punctured, stomach sloshing with leaking blood, she survives, and marries and bears a child. The mountain and the shaitan that her father felt had tried to suck her into it, had left her, but she could not get rid of the tuberculosis that now had taken hold of her lungs.

Through Farzana and the families around hers, Roy tells the stories of deprivation, sickness, courage and despair that the mountain wrote into their lives.

It’s a harsh book; and a book that must be read. The lessons it has for us are manifold. Meanwhile Farzana grows sicker. And the mountain, despite new diktats, stands.

(The reviewer was the editor of Femina for 12 years and is the author of Hariprasad Chaurasia: Breath of Gold, among others)

Check out the book on Amazon

About the book

Title: Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings

Author: Saumya Roy

Published in Great Britain by Profile books , London & available in India through Hachette India.

My column today

How often have you heard that someone you know has passed away, and the body is waiting, either in the morgue or on ice for the family to get a last glimpse and proceed with the formalities of the funeral.
Chances are, such a person is quite old. Definitely in the eighties. Chances are that the children of said person are living overseas, having set up their homes and built their careers there. Chances are the grandchildren of the dead person hold foreign passports, and have seen their grandparents once, maybe up to four times in their lives, if they are pre-teens.

Ads by
Nothing wrong in this. Everyone is entitled to seeking a better life. And pastures beyond the known are often green, not merely in perception, but in reality too.

Such moves to fresh pastures usually happen around the start of a career. Or the preparation for it, with a seat in a college that will bring with its degree, guaranteed privileges. But even as fond parents, beaming with pride, wave their wards off at the airport gate on the first step of a new journey, the thought might whisper in the subconscious that as parents, they might be embarking on a new journey themselves.

Especially if, tasting the heady brew of financial success and job satisfaction, and sinking into the ease of a life with assured amenities, the ward chooses to follow up the degree with a job, and then another and finally settles down to seek a green card, an NRI card, a PIO card, whatever it is that gives them the comfort of knowing they are Indian at heart, but have chosen to live beyond the borders of their country. And chances are, with their children growing up with foreign passports, they may never be able to return.

ADVERTISEMENT

What a dilemma it is for the two generations caught on a see-saw they cannot get off from. For the younger adventurer, the placebo of knowing that the parents are well cared for with the monthly remittances grows less effective as the parents age. And now their subconscious is asking them, if they want to die in a foreign land, but can they return to their country leaving behind the children and their children?

For the ones who got left behind, the advancing years reach out with tentacles of fear—of illness, loneliness, of dying alone. Old couples tend to each other, wondering as each struggles with the benedictions of old-age debilitations, which of them will go first, and who will be left alone.

Widows and widowers live each day, one day at a time, their lives strung between FaceTime and video calls with their progeny; the house they built echoing with their coughing or the voices of caretakers. Many live comfortable lives, but comfort is no balm for loneliness; in fact it sharpens its edge further.

Waiting becomes a given. For the phone call, for a glimpse of the grandchildren, for the yearly visit; small joys that deny momentarily the fear of dying alone.

Then, when the inevitable happens, and the illness is unremediable, and tickets are hastily purchased, life and career put on hold as children take up the threads of filial duties, often it is too late.

The person in ICU attached by tubes to machines is not the parent who was left behind. And there is no way of understanding the look in the eyes that look back from the bed. It's worse still, if the only duty left is to claim the body and send it on its last journey.

A journey still heavy with the loneliness of past years.

It’s really nobody’s fault. This dilemma. Just a state of how things are. In homes across India. Nay, across the world.

So thrilled to be doing this. And with Kishwar! Do log in friends.

My review of a book worth reading.

'A country called childhood' book review: A portrait of the artiste Deepti Naval as a child A simple yet eloquent account of the formative years of actor Deepti Naval, who is as versatile as she is elegant