Saumya Roy

Mountain Tales: Love And Loss In The Municipality Of Abandoned Belongings by Journalist and activist Saumya Roy is her first book. In this book, Roy discusses and explains the lives of often neglected rag pickers living and who work in the dump yards in the Deonar landfill of Mumbai.

The book talks about Farzana, a rag picker who comes from a family of rag pickers. Author Roy describes the difficulties, hardships and emotions between each of them and their families beautifully. Not every day do they deal only with plastic or dampen waste but also corpses and dead bodies. There are trigger warnings in the review, but some gruesome incidents are presented in the book as this is a work of non-fiction. The poverty, absence of basic amenities, odd jobs they do to pay the loans etc., have been explained that will melt the hearts.

As per statistics, the Mumbai Deonar landfill has been there for almost 122 years and houses millions of tons of waste spread over 314 acres. Surprisingly, some of these garbage dumps are up to 18 stories high! However, very little is known about him or the people who live there.

Attempting this kind of narrative that depicts the less known part of a famous city, with reality in mind, is a brave task. Kudos to writer Ray for taking up such a story. When I tried researching a little about her, I read something that surprised me. In one of her interviews, this debut author Saumya Ray, a teenage waste picker, writes about the life she spent for eight years. She shares a few moments of happiness and amusing incidents when she found toys, snacks, jeans, gift wrappers, friendships and love in the garbage mountains of Mumbai. And through her life, Roy unravels the truth about overconsumption, pollution, climate change and how the most vulnerable people bear the brunt of it all.

The book is not just about the souls that live in the dump yards but also the reasons and circumstances that led to the disparities. She also explained the conditions like urbanisation, modernization etc., that led some lives to shatter. This is a powerful book that will educate many people who are unaware about certain lives in the same place we live. This happens to be one of those books that will stay in my mind for a longer time.
… (mais)

"Castaway Mountain," also published under the title "Mountain Tales," by Saumya Roy is a smooth, easy to read piece of long-term reportage. Over the course of several years, Roy introduces readers to two families that make their living by recycling trash at a municipal dump in Mumbai and a tangential court case to close it.

Roy is an outsider to these families. She met them during her and her father's failed attempts to create a micro-loan scheme near the mountains, the term used to refer to the dump. The writing is wonderful. Even though the families and people who work in the dump deserve our sympathy, Roy presents their stories in a very matter-of-fact way. She describes their constant struggles as well as their victories, such as making additions to their squatter settlement homes, fixing cell phones, having tea amidst the trash while waiting for the next garbage truck, or celebrating a wedding.

At the heart of the story is Farzana. She comes of age during the book and is drawn magnetically to the dump time and time again, as are most of the people in the settlement. Because toxic gasses collect around the mountains, a local man sues the city over the course of nearly a decade to shut it down. Their only means of making money are with the trash, so the recyclers are worried about losing their livelihood. However, India's slow and plodding legal system, which Roy describes in passing so as not to bog the reader down, means the residents continue recycling, albeit under the threat of beatings if they don't bribe guards.

I have never visited India nor do I think I will ever have that pleasure, but I have read numerous books of fiction by modern Indian writers. Roy's writing confirms what many of them write about - that as the country's cities grow exponentially, entire classes of people are left out.

The book includes a map of Mumbai and a list of the people dozens of people Roy writes about. Because her writing was so clear, both the map and list were unnecessary.

"Castaway Mountain" is excellent. Roy makes no judgments about religion, ways of life, urban development, medical care in India, politics, or even the waste we send to dumps, although surely she had room and credence to make such cases. Instead, Roy takes readers by the hand into a mostly unseen part of the world.… (mais)