A Familiar Hill

Finally, we moved close to Delhi after several years. There had been periodic visits to meet relatives living in the vicinity before that. As soon as everything was settled in, it was absolutely imperative to visit every last place the capital had to offer. So, every Sunday when my Dad was free, all of us packed ourselves in our car and set out – explorers on a journey.

It was then that I saw it first. We had been on the highway just crossing the Delhi border when we came to an overawing sight. My siblings and I clamoured and got closer to the car window to see it properly. My parents were familiar with it though. 

It was a small hill, entirely man-made, of garbage. Black with grey roads around it, it nestled amidst a colourful cluster of houses at its base. This was the Bhalswa landfill. I joked that this is where my parents picked up my younger brother from. I asked him if he maybe wants to go back.

But the hill stayed with me, some forgotten impression itching to be remembered again. Me, in a car again. Except I am much younger and more easily fascinated. Its arrival heralded by an ominous horde of hundreds of dark birds and sharp clawed eagles. I look up at the sky and open my mouth in awe, my eyes glittering. There is a little fear as well. Some adult explained to me. It is because the mountain of garbage is near. 

A garbage mountain? What?! Ewwww! 

The windows of the car were carefully rolled up. I pressed my face very close to watch something I didn’t know existed..

The Bhalswa landfill came up in 1994, promising to be  a temporary measure to dispose of the capital’s municipal waste. By 2019, it measured around 65 acres and weighed over eight million tonnes. It is as much a part of Delhi’s landscape as a beauty mark on one’s skin.

Every time I see it, excavators work their way through its looped roads. But it’s not just them, surrounding it like bright, yellow bees. Despite its repulsive mass, the garbage hill is like any other ecosystem, a system of interconnections. So many people work in cohesion. After all, waste is the byproduct of living. Of consuming. Of creating. It all comes here. And to some other places. A place where people can guiltlessly dispose of their trash. A shared unspoken agreement to have clean homes at the cost of something that is not theirs. It is simply the best way to do it. It is easy to not feel guilty or self-conscious when throwing garbage in a place that is already dirty. Once the base exists, the peak is easy to make.

Whenever there is talk about hills like these, it oscillates between two extremes –complete eradication or unchallenged permanence.

The waste does not sit there and stagnate. It is a living organism, changing, moving, shifting. It wasn’t supposed to have a life after fulfilling its purpose but it has outlived many promises. If you look closely, embedded within its cracks, a lighter, in a no less muddy a colour, there are fragments of broken promises that it wears like gems on its crown. It has outlived them all. Unconquerable, undefeated. Even as it gains size, it also loses. Biomining and recycling efforts are underway after all. The yellow bees are actually parasites. But slower than the existing waste is removed, more is added.

No discussion about the hill can be held without those who depend on it. There is an invisible group of informal workers for whom this trash is treasure. Group is a small word.  There are actually at least five to six thousand workers on this hill alone. People who work with trash are the most disadvantaged and stigmatised groups in society. As Doron and Jeffrey write in Waste of a Nation, “…groups associated with waste are treated as if they themselves were waste.” The hill absorbs them till they are seen as one and the same. They journey through its curves and cracks to find things that can still be salvaged for a new life. They sort and sell it, the hot burning sun at their backs. So much of recycling, that goes unacknowledged, is undertaken by them. 

One assumes that’s all there is to it. But that’s not actually true. There are power structures and hierarchies of control within the waste hill ecosystems. Mafias and contractors. Money can come from waste also, after all. 

But it is more accepting that any other place can be. The garbage hill does not discriminate. It does not belittle. Because it knows what it is like to be a site of hatred and disgust, it graciously allows others the luxury of forgetting that they created it. The same way people guiltlessly dispose of their anger and hatred at a collective target while ignoring how they demonized it in the first place. 

One day, someone in power decided that this land will host waste. It is only a temporary measure, they said. I want to ask the land what it feels like to be shunned and hated because of the waste people threw on it. I wonder if anyone can tell me. No one asked the land; no one asked the people around it. The hill has many, many houses clustered at its base. It harms and poisons those who work on it and those who live around it. Their health is affected beyond repair, their social fabric changes to accommodate the immovable hill. And really, what must it be like? To open your window and the fresh breeze delivers the rotting stench of discarded waste? To step out and have the hill always in your view, its presence a reminder of neglect? The question somewhat reminds me of my mother. My mother who gets extremely worried anytime the garbage collectors miss a day at our house. I remember the smell of kitchen waste when it grows only a day old. 

So, yes, the hill should be torn down. Obviously. But it is too entangled in the lives of people now. The invisible recyclers, where will they go then? I think all of this while I’m sheltered in the car. When we disembark, we arrive someplace else. Beautiful, clean, free and fun. I forget all about the strange hill.

A few months later, I crossed the Delhi border again in a taxi with a friend. The sight of the dump resembles a mole from a distance. It is a familiar landmark now. I point towards it. Do you feel nostalgic? I ask my puzzled friend. Isn’t that where your parents got you from? She laughs. I crack a smile. It gets closer as the car moves on, moving through the oncoming traffic. The closest I have ever been to it is a comfortable distance away in a car. 

Then we leave it behind. Our backs towards it, it becomes a black dot, forgotten. Until I come back again.

The hill is a living place. It is a mirror. It is the most important landmark in Delhi.

Sources

Doron, Assa, and Robin Jeffrey. Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India. Harvard University Press, 2018.

https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/delhi/2025/Sep/22/bhalswa-the-mountain-that-wont-go-quietly

https://histecon.fas.harvard.edu/1800_histories/sites/delhi.html