Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai

Journalist Roy’s gorgeous and heartbreaking debut profiles people who have cobbled together a life on the slopes of Mumbai’s massive trash heaps. Stretching over 320 acres, the Deonar landfill was created in 1897. Today, hundreds of people live there in small shacks and tents, foraging for plastic, glass bottles, metal, and cloth scraps. Focusing on trash picker Hyder Ali Shaikh and his teenage daughter, Farzana, Roy details the excruciating poverty of families who make their livings in the dumping grounds, describing unexpected fires that randomly erupt and burn on the heaps for days or weeks at a time. Those who live within the “halo” of Deonar have a life expectancy of 39 and suffer respiratory ailments such as bronchitis and asthma, which often lead to tuberculosis. Other dangers include territorial disputes waged by trash gangs, bulldozers, and injuries caused by sharp pieces of metal and discarded hospital syringes. Roy succeeds in humanizing her subjects while emphasizing the role that consumer culture plays in their degradation. “I came to see the mountains as an outpouring of our modern lives,” she writes, “of the endless chase for our desires to fill us.” Readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers will be drawn to this harrowing portrait. (Sept.)