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Title details for Castaway Mountain by Saumya Roy - Available

Castaway Mountain

Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai

by Saumya Roy
ebook
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1 of 1 copy available
*One of NPR's "Books We Love 2021"*
 
"'I came to see the mountains as an outpouring of our modern lives,' Roy writes, 'of the endless chase for our desires to fill us.' Readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers will be drawn to this harrowing portrait."
—Publishers Weekly

"Castaway Mountain deserves every accolade. A stunning achievement."
—Kiran Desai, Booker Prize Winner, author of Inheritance of Loss.
All of Mumbai’s possessions and memories come to die at the Deonar garbage mountains. Towering at the outskirts of the city, the mountains are covered in a faint smog from trash fires. Over time, as wealth brought Bollywood knock offs, fast food and plastics to Mumbaikars, a small, forgotten community of migrants and rag-pickers came to live at the mountains’ edge, making a living by re-using, recycling and re-selling.
 
Among them is Farzana Ali Shaikh, a tall, adventurous girl who soon becomes one of the best pickers in her community. Over time, her family starts to fret about Farzana’s obsessive relationship to the garbage. Like so many in her community, Farzana, made increasingly sick by the trash mountains, is caught up in the thrill of discovery—because among the broken glass, crushed cans, or even the occasional dead baby, there’s a lingering chance that she will find a treasure to lift her family’s fortunes.
 
As Farzana enters adulthood, her way of life becomes more precarious. Mumbai is pitched as a modern city, emblematic of the future of India, forcing officials to reckon with closing the dumping grounds, which would leave the waste pickers more vulnerable than ever.
 
In a narrative instilled with superstition and magical realism, Saumya Roy crafts a modern parable exploring the consequences of urban overconsumption. A moving testament to the impact of fickle desires, Castaway Mountain reveals that when you own nothing, you know where true value lies: in family, community and love. 
 
 
Interior map illustration copyright (c) Jake Coolidge

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 7, 2021

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781662600968

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781662600968
      • File size: 1841 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 5, 2021
      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.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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