Is Saumya Roys Mountain Tales one of the most important books of the year?
It was stuck in me! I had been a journalist left to run a non-profit, and I enjoyed the experience so much I thought I had left my journalistic mind behind. When the waste pickers of Deonar came to take micro loans from us in 2013, I had begun following them back to learn about their businesses and homes, to ensure our loans did not go bad. Then in January 2016, the garbage mountains had erupted in fires whose smoke engulfed the city. Pickers were getting arrested. I knew these peoplethis forgotten communityand I thought of writing a magazine piece about them, showing how this combustible situation and place was created by our own partly sated desires. Writing about the Deonar grounds allowed me to chronicle this community I knewand through them, us too. You received a fair few fellowshipsfrom the Rockefeller Foundations Bellagio Center, Blue Mountain Center, Carey Institute for Global Good, Sangam House and Dora Maar Houseto finish this book. They allowed me to stop procrastinating and start writing. I was running my non-profit full-timeinhaling all I saw and pushing off writing until I got my first residency at Sangam House in the last weeks of 2016. In the quietness and space of residencies, the world of Deonar came to me more distilled, almost in slow motion. I went over all the research I had collected, wrote and rewrote. Residencies also brought the gift of the company of other artists and writers. Watching them at work every day, shaping, refining and polishing their work, giving it a burnished glow was inspiring and kept me going. Youre a journalist, and Mountain Tales is a work of non-fiction. Yet the book is more than cold hard facts. Its not just reporting, its an act of storytelling and world-building. It came from immersing in all the varied accounts I collectedfrom pickers, court hearings and documentsand putting down all the layers of details that recreated a world. It also came from struggling with the dichotomy of what I heard pickers saythat this was a place of opportunity, they hoarded trash and hunted for forgotten treasuresand what I saw it do to them: their bodies shrivelled by years of working on the mountains, their minds filled with all they had seen and smelled on them, the unspoken trauma of it all.