A teacher who takes Catechism class on Sundays took her students to the landfill sites in Ghazipur and Burari to give them an idea of how the hell fires burn as per common belief. Dante Alighieri had in his “Inferno” described the biblical Gehenna where Lucifer and his band of fallen angels had been thrown after they had revolted against God. John Milton in his “Paradise Lost” had also depicted the scene of eternal torture where the souls of the damned undergo punishment. Mrs. Barboza (not her real name) showed class boys and girls the dumps where refuse burns night and day and those who toil at the landfill sites are almost like hell’s angles. In the olden days when the population of Delhi was only two lakhs, dumping refuse was not a problem as it was not much considering the fact that there were no plastic bags and other containers of packaged goods. Wholesalers brought them in gunny bags and the retailers sold the stuff to customers who came with “thaila” cotton bags or gamchas and other cloth pieces to carry their purchase back home.
Now with so much waste generated because of paper-wraps for both condiments and eats in a generation addicted to fast food and the amount of vegetables and meat consumed and wasted, along with dried up bouquets, loose flowers and garlands offered at the mushrooming temples or shrines and a lot of other rubbish, it becomes difficult to dispose of it in a very congested environment. No wonder the civic authorities are running short of landfill sites. The vans that come every morning to the colonies and mohallas with a recorded voice asking residents not to litter public places (to what effect?) give an idea of the tricky problem of waste removal. These vans dump the trash at the municipal “dalaos” from where huge trolley-trucks carry it away amid an unbearable smell. Imagine how it must be at the landfill sites?
And yet there are people who earn a livelihood by burning the refuse there, unmindful of the nauseating smoke which is emitted 24 hours a day. During the Mughal days and also in the time of the Delhi Sultanate, Delhi’s outer spaces were not congested and dumping refuse was no problem. First at Mehrauli and then in what is now Nizamuddin and Old Delhi, the inhabitants just waited for the mehtar to come in the morning and take away the trash on a huge basket, along with the rubbish from the sandas or house lavatory (in the Red Fort and Agra Fort Mughal lavatories were built on tunnels in which sweepers toiled daylong). He dumped the basket at an open space, away from the mohallas from where it was taken away in bullock carts, horse and donkey carts to the outskirts where the whole lot was downloaded and in course of time became manure. In the villages without toilets, it was defecation in the fields which generated manure. At a time when the people of Western countries (where there were no mehtars or mehatrains) were throwing their night soil on to the streets unmindful of passers-by, or in the medieval Elizabethan house tanks dumped with perfume, sanitation facilities in Delhi and elsewhere where more systematic and one did not find so much night soil on the streets as emphasized by Dr Bindeshwar Pathak of Sulabh who has made a historical study of the subject. The mehtars worked under “Chungi-ka-jamadar” and “Bum Police” of Shahjahanabad. Despite the kind of work they did Sheikh Mehtars were not ostracized in the sense that after a bath they could even join in the namaz at the mosque, since most of them were Muslims. The others were cruelly branded as Bhangis (those addicted to bhang as a solace for the drudgery).
Interestingly, a correspondent wrote this in the 1960s: “Nizamuddin has many attractive features but the huge refuse dump on its outskirts (not seen now) lessens the appeal of the place for both the tourist and the Delhiwallah. The dump, which contains all the refuse of the Capital, has piled up into a hill which could pass off as Delhi’s Gehenna. Vultures and kites hover over it, attracted by the carcasses which lie scattered all over. Like a medieval picture of hell.
Sohna has been working here for years. He is a lonely man without a family, though he remembers that there was a time when he had one. But his wife died and the children drifted away and this was the job he eventually got. He smokes a bidi while busy and a “chillum” when relaxing, and through the tobacco haze he views the dung-hill with a kindlier eye. “This hill provides us with our dal-roti. We are bound to it and have developed our own equation with the place,” he says with a philosophical look. His companion Radhey once worked as a sweeper in the bungalow of an Englishman. He remembers his name, Bird Sahib. That was in the pre-1947 days when every compound had its own sweeper, living in a ramshackle hut at the corner. His daughter Phoolie died of cholera after eating an unripe water-melon one evening and soon after his blind mother. His wife eloped with her cousin and then came Partition which saw the Englishman depart. After that life had not been the same for him. The new owner of the bungalow, a brown sahib, engaged another sweeper and Radhey was left to his charas and himself. Later, he came to the dump and now works on it by fits and starts. There are several others like him, though not all of them are relics of a broken home. The kites and vultures that swoop down on the “hill” seem to have become familiar with them, for together they constitute the morbid scene that is the dump. It is a place which gives a creepy feeling to even those passing by in a train. But how many of them know that like the Ancient Mariner, the outcasts who burn the refuse also have a tale to tell. Is it’s the same story at Ghazipur and Burari.
(The author is a veteran chronicler of Delhi)
