The Puzzle of Gilbert Hill

Signs of the Continental Drift are still visible in this densely populated part of Mumbai

When I reach Gilbert Hill, it is late in the afternoon. A slender woman is listlessly watering a small verdant patch of the field in the Municipal Garden. She looks up, glad to be roused from her reverie. Two little girls who were playing tag some distance away race towards us squealing joyously. Shankaramma’s face lights up. She introduces her daughters. Jaya is 8, and she goes to the Municipal. It’s not a good school. They teach her nothing. There are better schools in Raichur where she comes from.

Shankaramma is 25. Besides Jaya and Preeti, she also has a one year old son, Sachin. Her smile is jagged: black stumps of decayed teeth show past the slurry of mishri.

Does she know this hill? She should think so!

“My grandfather made it,” Jaya says, bursting with importance. “He made this big hill.”

“The child speaks the truth,” says Shankaramma. Her in-laws worked as stonecutters on the hill. They live in the slum in Juhu Gali now. She points to the south end of the hill. When her in-laws came to Bombay, the hill extended right upto their threshold. They had done well for themselves, and when she married, she thought life would be good. She didn’t know the quarrying was over. It was the only trade her husband knew. It is hard to get work these days. So they’ve been stuck in this slum ever since Jaya was born.

She wants to go back to Raichur now, but her husband wants to move to a place where there are hills to quarry.

They fight over this, naturally. He’s moody, he can’t do any other kind of work. They have been stonecutters as far as anyone can remember.

“I tell him there are no hills left to cut,” Shankaramma shrugs. “Look around you, I say, how many hills are there in Bombay?”

As I leave Valmiki Nagar, I cross a white field made entirely of tamped down plastic bags and garbage. Three incredulous goats tug at flaps of plastic. In the huts that fringe the field it is leisure hour. Women gossip, pick rice, sort vegetables. Children frolic. A barrow of tomatoes is wheeled past slowly by an incurious man. A boy at a cold-drink kiosk tinkles bottles invitingly as I pass. In the repair yard, men sweat over broken-down autorickshaws. The caretaker at the gate leaves his post and limps away mumbling, a bent figure in a checked lungi and threadbare kurta, hurrying for Asarnamaaz. Life is simple and ordered in this trash field in the shadow of the hill.

I drive down a crooked lane that bisects a pullulating shanty, turn left, and find myself confronted by the rocky stub of the south end of the hill. The rocks here are variegate with sedimentary stripes of human faeces encrusted into vertical stratifications that speak of an entirely different set of geological hazards.

But, what’s this?

Beneath the litter the rock shows true stratification—horizontal stratification. Breccia and tuff make up the sponge between the lava layer. I think this is what surrounded the columnar basalts.

I gather my notes and try to make sense of what I’ve seen of the invisible parts of Gilbert Hill. The columns of basalt are topped by rock that has horizontal stratification. But this I can spot only at the southern end of the monolith. The rest of the top is covered with a thin layer of murram—laterite, deep enough to support shrubs and small trees.

So what did the top of Gilbert Hill look like, before it was quarried?

Densely jungled, according to Norshirwan, the son of the man who quarried Gilbert Hill. Norshirwan’s uncle, who died recently, was the memory-keeper of this place, having been around since the first assault on the hill.

That was in the mid-1930s, when the Government invited tenders to raze the hill and develop the land. 

The hill was thickly wooded then.

Was there a river?  Were there streams?

Nobody knows.

There are no photographs.

Nobody lived on the hill.

According to Noshirwan’s uncle, there was no temple up there. His story of how the temple came about is a little more believable than Guruji’s Vijayanagara myth. When the quarrying commenced, the labourers set up a little shrine to bless their endeavour. Noshirwan’s uncle, the overseer, already had a masjid on his premises. Once the monolith emerged, and the labourers had to scale it every day, it seemed only politic to station their guardian at the summit. It was a neat and harmonious compromise—the Mandir on top of the monolith and the Masjid at the foot of it. Everybody, and the enterprise, was doubly blessed.

Norshirwan’s story is an interesting diversion, but he still didn’t have enough for me about the invisible hill. What he did tell me was this: the southern stub of the hill, that chunk of stratified rock I’d seen outside Sagar City, had been uncovered just six years ago. Till then that area had been occupied by a gigantic heap of murram from the blasting. When that was cleared away, the hard rock beneath was revealed.

But there was more to Gilbert Hill than the monolith.  What made up the rest of the hill?

At the northern end of the monolith I had seen a wide convexity of wrinkled stone, like the back of an elephant submerged in a bog. Pillow lava? That would mean an eruption of lava under water. The dome has crenellated markings, like the advancing toes of a pãhoehoe. At one point a cleavage line shows the underlying layer fitting matrushka-like into the convexity. At other places, the rock has a dimpled, almost cushiony, appearance, though the surface is ridged too sharply for comfort.

The east end of the cutting near Sagar City shows the columnar formation placed above a stratified base. Further south, the stump of the hill stops at the stratified layer, in which ash—finely granular, close-packed, biege to brown in colour—alternates with thin glassy plates of basalt.

Not all the perimeter of the stump is brown. Buffalo-grey basalt soon takes over. Here, the emplacements have amygdaloid bodies—most are embedded in the rock. Some layers are pockmarked. They must have contained amygdules that have been shed.

I recall the pillow lava at the base of the monolith. The white patches are changes in the rock—it has become albitic. Technically, this metamorphosed basalt is a spilite. Such a change is brought about by contact with seawater. This volcanic eruption was submarine.

“Mad or wot?” is Cajetan’s comment when I tell him about the pillow lavas. “I don’t think the sea was coming upto there, right upto the hill, not even in my grandfather’s time. Or people would have noticed, no? Reason nobody noticed Gilbert Hill was because it was a normal hill.”

I don’t want to challenge him over the definition of a normal hill.

“It wasn’t this sea,” I explain. “It was the Indian Ocean.”

He looks concerned. He calls for iced water. He offers me a seat closer to the fan. He hollers for tea.

He nods intelligently as I tell him that 65 million years ago, during the K-T extinction, India, recently ripped off from the Seychelles, was a little south of the equator, and on its way to a collision with the southern margin of Asia.

His daughter Letty-for-Letisha brings tea and biscuits and stays on to listen.

“Letty, go finish your homework,” instructs Cajetan curtly.

“I finished.”

“Go, go!”

Letty goes.

“Can’t have her geography spoilt,” Cajetan tells me. “India is above the equator, even I know that.”

“It is. Now. But not 65 million years ago. Then, it was moving upward.”

“Yeah. Sure, sure. Tell you what—forget Gilbert Hill. You want to see other places? Sure, we’ll go. But not Gilbert Hill.”

“Okay.”

I have stretched my credibility too far with Continental Drift. He must be relieved of Gilbert Hill.

“This hill now,” Cajetan suggests carefully, “you could start with this one.

Go little bit north and it’s Vyaravli.”

“Yeravli, you mean?”

“Vyaravli—Yeravli, some people say like this, some like that. Little bit further up is the lake. Vyahr Lake.”

Vihar Lake.

I hadn’t realised till I heard Cajetan said it thus, that Yeravli might actually be Vyravli.

Yeravli is very close to the hill on which I live—Malpa Dongar.  Before they blasted Malpa to build homes for one lakh people, the hill probably stood shoulder to shoulder with Yeravli. The highway cut through both of them. The two were probably one hill. The Kondivti caves of Mahakali Road are in Yeravli. Perhaps the division between them was artificial.

“Tell you what,” Cajetan says kindly, “why don’t you look at all the hills? Maybe they’re all like Glbert Hill.”

Are they? I need another map to answer that.

Excerpted from Once Upon A Hill by Kalpish Ratna, HarperCollins India. The book is due for release this month

About The Author

Kalpish Ratna

Kalpish Ratna is the author of The Secret Life of Zika Virus (2017) and Synapse (2019)