When the garbage trucks had come and gone, the simit-sellers on the way to the garbage heard that eight huts had been built on the slopes and spread the news through the neighbouring warehouses, workshops and coffee houses. By noon people had begun to descend on the hillside like snow. Janitors, pedlars and simit-sellers all arrived with pickaxes, closely followed by people who had left their villages to move in with their families in the city, and by others roaming the hills behind the city in the hope of building a hut. Men and women, young and old, spread in all directions. Kneeling and rising they measured with feet and outstretched arms. Then with their spades they scratched crooked plans in the earth. By evening Rubbish Road had become a road of bricks and blocks and pitchpaper. That night in snowfall and lantern-light a hundred more huts were erected in the snow.
Next morning, by the garbage heaps — downhill from the factories which manufactured lightbulbs and chemicals, and facing the china factory — a complete neighbourhood was fathered by mud and chemical waste, with roofs of plastic basins, doors from old rugs, oilcloth windows and walls of wet breezeblocks.
Throughout the day bits and pieces arrived to furnish the houses, and the remaining women and children, with sacks on their backs and babies in arms, entered their homes. Mattresses were unrolled and kilim-rugs spread on the earthen floors. The damp walls were hung with faded pictures and brushes with their blue bead good-luck charms, cradles were slung from the roofs and a chimney pipe was knocked through the sidewall of every hut.
The factory workers gathered at the windows to watch, laughing at the belongings arriving in horse-drawn carts and the people chasing up and down. All day long there were whistles, catcalls, jeers. In the evening a weariness settled on the huts and the inhabitants dozed off under the wet walls, and the roofs creaked in the wind. By the time the factory nightshift had left, the founders of the community were fast asleep. The factory machinery had stopped; lights were out. The hill was engulfed in pitch darkness, but in the small hours a wind sneaked up, loosened the rooftops, and carried them away. And the babies too, asleep in the roof-cradles, flew off along with the roofs.
The hut people woke with snow falling on their lashes and faces still warm from deep sleep. They thought at first they were having a wonderful dream; the sky had turned to snow and filled their huts. Then their cries rent the night. Men and women, old and young, rushed out in their underwear; lanterns were lit; everyone turned out to search for roofs and babies. Keening and lamenting, the women tied magic knots in their handkerchiefs and headscarves to arrest the passage of the wind, praying it would carry the babies no further.
One roof was found in the garden of the lightbulb factory, come to rest and stuck between two mulberry trees. The baby from the roof-cradle was hoarse from crying and its eyes were enormous with fear. The other roofs were lined up side by side on the level ground around the china factory and the babies were out of their cradles, crawling about in the snow and playing with broken shards. In the wind the clatter mingled with their shrill little cries.
Fervently the women hugged their ice-cold babies and sheltered in a coal shed a little way off. The men dragged the roofs back, one or two at a time and, lifting them over the walls, tethered them with stout ropes and secured them with battens to prevent them flying off again. They wound the ropes round the legs of the long seats which lined their walls, and whenever the wind blew hard they hung on tight and pulled on the ropes and battens.
While they were securing the roofs and praying they would not fly off, all the birds of the city flocked together to the Wood-and-Plastic Neighbourhood. They circled round the huts and mocked the roofs that wished to sprout the wings of a bird:
Wee wee rooftops,
Won’t you wing with me?
Drop the babies’ cradles
And fly away free.
Fling us out a wee one,
Wee, wee, wee!
For days the birds circled and swooped over the huts, their wheeling and screeching betraying the site. And while they flew and mocked ‘wee wee wee’, the demolition men arrived on the hill.
‘Don’t bunch together: we’ll be sitting ducks and they’ll raze our homes to the ground.’
The women dropped their babies and picked up hatchets, the men held shovel handles at the ready and took up positions in front of the huts. A lame woman struck the first blow at a wrecker kicking down the wall of one of the huts. He lay bleeding on the ground, then over and over he rolled down and down to the stream. The hut people hurled themselves in a body at the wreckers, and the fluttering birds flew up to the clouds. The wreckers dropped their pickaxes and fled down to the stream.
That night huge trucks arrived and a jeep followed by five trucks made its way between the huts. Headlamps were switched on, and the hut people were summoned to the headlights at gunpoint.
‘Don’t bunch together, if they surround us we’re finished!’
The fight lasted nearly an hour but the hut people were finally surrounded and trapped in the light of the headlamps. Belongings vanished under the wreckage of their homes and in the early morning light all the people were crammed into trucks and driven away.
When the trucks had gone the birds who came to play among the roofs glided from the sky, and feathers bedewed with tears fluttered down on the ravaged huts. Then they swooped away.
In the afternoon all those who had been removed in the trucks came back to the hill of demolished huts. They wandered sadly about amongst their broken, scattered belongings which the scavengers and the wind had picked to bits, tossed aside and blown in all directions. At first they wept tears of rage, then threw themselves angrily into action. They rapidly reassembled the fragments of wood, cobbled the torn kilims and nailed together bits of tin while the children collected stones, unbroken breezeblocks and bricks and piled them up. That night they erected new huts half the size of those demolished. On the roofs they spread spoils from the garbage heap, bits of plastic, tattered cotton rugs and kilims and, dragging fragments of broken crockery up from the flat ground below the china factory, they used them as tiles. They retired to their new homes after midnight, weary and disheartened and drifted into sleep listening to the shards singing in the wind.
But the fragments on the roof fell off one by one, the kilims and bits of plastic blew away and were scattered far and wide. Water seeped between the breezeblocks and formed pools in the middle of the huts. A flurry of snow fell through the gaping roofs onto the cradles, but no one, woke till the babies began to cry. So the women got up at last and lit the broken lamps. They dug a ditch in each hut to channel off the dammed-up water, brushed the snow from the mattresses and covered the roofs with rugs and rags.
Towards morning, unable to resist the wind any longer, one of the huts collapsed. The baby who had flown off with the roof into the factory garden was killed, trapped between fragments of stone and wood. In the morning they wrapped the child in an old quilt. Three men carried the bundle to a distant graveyard and leapt stealthily over the cemetery wall, but the baby gently abandoned the quilt and took wing. The mother tore her hair and ripped open her bodice. Filling her skirt with stones, she climbed to the hilltop where she cursed the wind and pelted it with stones till they had to drag her away. And from that day the hill was known as Wind-Curse Point.