Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings – Saumya Roy

Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings – Saumya Roy

₹699.00

‘Roy has a journalist’s unflinching eye, a poet’s talent for detail, and a radical sense of empathy … a stunning achievement.’
– Kiran Desai, Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

‘If you read one book about India, read this one.’
– Geeta Anand, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of The Cure

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Description

All of Mumbai’s memories and castaway possessions come to die at the Deonar garbage mountains. And among these vast, teetering piles of discarded things – medical waste, rotten food, old clothes, broken glass and twisted metal – a small, forgotten community lives and works.

For decades, waste-pickers have scoured the dump for whatever can be resold or recycled. Like a mirror image, their own stories – of love found, babies born, money troubles and lucky breaks – are shaped by the influx of partly used things from the world outside. Then these discarded possessions erupt in fires, brining change, and the fragile world the pickers have built begins to fall apart.

In Mountain Tales, journalist Saumya Roy – who has spent nearly a decade working with the residents of Deonar – reveals a luminous and addictive modern parable of waste, consumption and the dark trail left by our modern lives.

About the Author

Saumya Roy is a journalist and activist based in Mumbai. In 2010, she co-founded Vandana Foundation to support the livelihoods of Mumbai’s poorest micro-entrepreneurs; through this she met the community who depend on Deonar. Her writing has appeared in Forbes India Magazine, wsj.com and Bloomberg News among others, and she has contributed a chapter to Dharavi: The Cities Within (HarperCollins, 2013), an anthology of essays on Asia’s largest slum.

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