How to Walk from Mumbai to San Francisco: Saumya Roy Navigates the Cracks in the American Dream

“There is the burden of being homeless and the burden of being judged for it.” — Saumya Roy on poverty in America How does the world look at America in the MAGA age? This is our third conversation drawn from How We See It, a collection of essays about America from the excellent new publication The Dial. In the first, The Dial’s Paris-based editor Madeleine Schwartz offered a very French version about the oddities of Trump’s America. In the second, the Turkish novelist and commentator Kaya Genç gave us his view from Istanbul. Today, we have a take on America from the Indian-born Saumya Roy, Al Jazeera’s San Francisco correspondent and the author of Castaway Mountain, a book about the wastepickers of her hometown Mumbai. Saumya Roy’s inside-out America is the one glimpsed from the back of a San Francisco cab, whose Indian driver told her he’d walked here from Mumbai. In her Dial essay, Roy compares the poverty of her hometown, Mumbai — the subject of Castaway Mountain — with the homelessness outside that San Francisco cab. The comparison isn’t quite what you’d expect. Mumbai’s poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing — a hundred thousand street people against San Francisco’s eight thousand. But in Mumbai Roy finds a social kind of poverty, whereas in San Francisco it’s atomized and isolating. In the land of personal responsibility, she reports, there’s a double burden of being on the street: being homeless, and being judged for it. Some of the street people Roy meets even shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won’t know their predicament. And yet Roy still recognizes the American dream. She reports that it often burns brighter in a Mumbai slum — where a young gig worker told her he wants to be “the Elon Musk of India” — than it does in America itself. That dream can be real, she says, just as it can be cracked. From the back of her San Francisco cab, Saumya Roy sees both Americas. Five Takeaways •       “I Walked from Mumbai to the US.” A cab driver’s five-word answer contains the whole story. In the popular imagination, Indian America is the America of tech CEOs and startup founders; beneath it are millions — many undocumented — who chased the same dream, work small jobs, and were left behind by the wave. San Francisco, Roy observes, is a boom and bust town — dot-com, social media, now AI — and the American dream is a wave: catch it and you make an amazing life; miss it and you may end up sleeping in the subway car of the world’s richest city. The dream, she says, can be fulfilled — and the dream can be cracked.•       The Double Burden. Mumbai’s poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing than anything in America — children dying of tuberculosis in their teens, perhaps 100,000 people on the street against San Francisco’s eight thousand. But it is social: even at a distance you see cooking smells, cradles, families living together on the sidewalk. American homelessness struck Roy as profoundly isolated — everything owned in a shopping cart, riding the train aimlessly because no one is waiting anywhere. And the ideology of personal responsibility cuts both ways: if success is earned, failure must be deserved. Hence the double burden — being homeless, and being judged for it — and the people who shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won’t learn where they live.•       What Is Growth For? The AI boom is minting $250 million research salaries and trillion-dollar IPOs that will change the face of San Francisco for decades — while polls show seventy to eighty percent of Americans fear losing their jobs to AI investment, and a single medical expense can capsize a family. Young Americans watch the markers of their parents’ lives — a home, affordable gas, a job within a year of graduation — drift out of reach. Roy’s question is the one policymakers keep dodging: what is growth really for, if it doesn’t translate into a better quality of life for the people who need it most?•       The Mumbai Model. Roy’s editor at The Dial asked why she wrote “homeless” for San Francisco but not for Mumbai — and the answer became the essay. In Roy’s own lifetime, Mumbai has moved more than 100,000 people off its sidewalks and railway tracks: not by sweeps, evictions, and demonization, but by involving communities — especially women — and giving people confidence that the housing they moved to would be safe and secure. Meanwhile only ten to twelve percent of San Francisco’s homeless report substance use or mental illness as the cause; eighty-eight percent are simply priced out, often working two or three jobs. As Roy puts it: they deserve a hug more than they deserve to be evicted.•       The Dream Burns Brighter Abroad. Reporting on unemployment in a Mumbai slum, Roy climbed a steep staircase to interview a young gig worker and asked him his dream. “I want to be the Elon Musk of India,” he said. The American dream, Roy suggests, now burns brighter in Mumbai and the Gulf than in America itself — where the darkness is emotional rather than economic, a mourning for the idea of America rather than its numbers. Neither MAGA nor doom-monger, Roy watches a country that leads the world in innovation while paying developers not to build wind farms, and concludes that what people everywhere are grappling for — left, right, and abroad — is a system that reflects the crises they actually live. About the Guest Saumya Roy is Al Jazeera’s San Francisco-based correspondent, covering technology and the environment. A former Mumbai journalist who co-founded the microfinance nonprofit Vandana Foundation, she is the author of Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai (Astra House, 2021), one of NPR’s best books of the year. Her essay on Mumbai, San Francisco, and the American dream appears in How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, June 2026), edited by Madeleine Schwartz. References: •       How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, edited by Madeleine Schwartz (The New Press, June 2026). Adam Shatz: “It is often foreigners who understand us best.”•       Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai by Saumya Roy — her acclaimed account of the lives built on Mumbai’s Deonar garbage mountain, an NPR best book of 2021.•       Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo — the Mumbai classic in whose tradition Roy’s reporting stands.•       Madeleine Schwartz and The Dial — the volume’s editor, whose own Keen On America conversation about the book preceded this one.•       Stephen Marche — the old friend of the show whose re...