Farzana had heard that not everyone ate vegetables grown in trash. Some rubbed overgrown leaves, from plants she did not recognise, onto wounds to heal them, or chewed them to stay intoxicated and work longer on slopes. When the rains receded, Farzana and her sisters began their wait for Diwali. They were Muslims, like most others in the mountain communities. But on the slopes Diwali brought breezy winters and creamy candy-coloured sweets sprinkled with saffron strands, crushed cardamom, sliced pistachios or silver slivers that tumbled out of garbage trucks for days. City confectioners made hundreds of pounds of sweets, with disclaimers to consume them within a day or the fresh cream they were made with would sour. What didn’t sell at the stores made it to Deonar for hilltop Diwali parties. Hamara har shauk poora hua khaadi mein, Hera—who came only to collect treats—would tell me later. The mountains fulfilled our every desire. Balmy, fleeting winters gave way to unending summers. The township turned gold under the blazing sun, and Farzana watched trash shine or fade on the sun-baked slopes that rippled around her, edged by the glimmering creek. Plants withered quickly, leaving an expanse of dried mud and trash. Long, hot days were redeemed only by extended swims or by discovering puffy white boxes stuffed with ice-cream cups, long past their expiry date, in the trash. Farzana knew the end of summer was near when thick bunches of blotchy red lychees began falling out of the emptying trucks. She bit through their scaly skin and pulled it away with her teeth. The juice within dribbled down her chin. She spun the fruit in her mouth, spat out the long black seed and swallowed the translucent white pulp, which cooled her as it went down, swirling the sweaty last dregs of summer with sweetness.

Farzana was suddenly growing to be tall, like both her parents, and athletic, like her mother. She poured her coltish energy into chasing the city’s unending trash caravans. She watched garbage trucks lurch slowly up the rubble- and trash-filled slopes. As they got to hill clearings, she raced other pickers to reach them, clambering onto the trucks’ side rails before they halted and began emptying. She leaned onto the trucks’ edge so she didn’t fall off, dipped both her hands in and skimmed the cream of the junk before anyone else could. She held onto the railing, turning and twisting aside when burning trash fell out of the trucks, ignited when thin plastic bags were jammed too tightly with garbage and still-simmering cigarette butts. She brought out hard-boiled eggs, or bags of crisps that she sat in a circle and snacked on with her sisters and friends. What they could not eat, Farzana enveloped in her outstretched arms and carried downhill for her younger sisters and brother. 

Unlike his daughter, Hyder Ali worried about the remains of city people, their melted desires—the spirits that arose from them and were marooned on the mountains. To him they were an ever-present danger, hanging around the slopes, unobserved, only to ensnare his daughters.