Mountain Tales

Saumya Roy

Profile Books

Otago Daily Times, November 13th 2021

In 2013, journalist and social entrepreneur Sauma Roy joined the board of directors of the Vandana Foundation, a Mumbai-based non-profit providing low-interest micro-financing to the city’s poorest inhabitants. It is here that she first met the waste-pickers from the Deonar mountain: trash heaps eighteen stories high that stretch across 326 acres of marshy coastline where “the remnants of everything that Mumbai consumed came to die”. Living in make-shift dwellings in the lanes at the base of the dumping grounds, the pickers, most of whom are Muslim, comb the slopes for food, recyclables and lost treasures in constant danger from toxic fumes –  formaldehyde, methane, benzene and other carcinogens – fires, landslides and the garbage itself, which includes everything from demolition material to surgical waste. Respiratory disease and tuberculosis are endemic, and the average life expectancy of those who live within Deonar’s shadow is thirty-nine. Despite this, the pull of the mountains is almost inescapable, even for those with aspirations or opportunities to leave. Tempted by the thrill of the hunt, children slip away from school to scavenge from the never-ending stream of trucks bringing fresh riches, and Roy describes how pickers repaid loans “in order to hoard more and more rubbish that framed their lives and filled it”.

For the last twenty-five years, Mumbai officials have attempted to construct an incineration plant that would shrink Deonar to manageable size, turning the city’s waste into energy and providing official jobs for the pickers in the process. But legal disputes and logistical challenges have deterred potential contractors, and the preparations for the project – the diversion of waste to other sites and the introduction of walls and guards to keep people from the mountains – have made the pickers’ already precarious existence even more untenable.

Although the Foundation stopped lending to the pickers when it was discovered that their punctual repayments are financed by other, higher-interest loans taken from elsewhere, Roy has stayed in touch with many of them, and Mountain Tales tells the stories of four families she has formed friendships with over the years. Although it centres on a young woman called Farzana, whose life encapsulates the tragic trajectory of so many, it is also the tale of Deonar itself: its history, mythology and the interminable court case that will, eventually, determine its fate.

Waste masses like these are found outside cities around the world, from Colombo to Schenzen, Addis Ababa to Moscow, and part of Roy’s intention in writing this book is to draw attention to the consequences of our thoughtless over-consumption. Her graphic depiction of life in the trash township and the inescapable poverty of Mumbai’s pickers is arresting, and the moral complexities arising from balancing the pickers’ reliance on the garbage to sustain themselves against the risks it poses to public health. However, I fear that because it is set on the other side of the world, its exoticism will dilute Mountain Tales’ impact. Just as Mumbai’s solution to the uncontrollable metastasis of waste is not to produce less or recycle more but to burn it, out of sight can all too easily become out of mind. I hope I am wrong.