Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai

Castaway Mountain is a book about the extraordinary group of people who make their living picking through trash in Deonar, a mountain created by Mumbai’s garbage waste. The book is shocking from the opening, when Farzana Shaikh, one of the main characters in the book (whose life is traced from birth onwards), finds dead babies while she’s looking through a bag of hospital waste. The author, Saumya Roy, reveals herself a little in the opening pages of the book, and also comes across as a remarkable person. Starting out as a journalist, she ended up co-founding a nonprofit to help India’s poorest entrepreneurs. We spoke to Saumya about her favourite books on Mumbai.