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Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity Paperback – April 8, 2014
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“Inspiring . . . extraordinary . . . [Katherine Boo] shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care.”—People
“A tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece.”—Judges, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • USA Today • New York • The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • Newsday
In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport.
As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi’s “most-everything girl,” might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal.
With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds—and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.
WINNER OF: The PEN Nonfiction Award • The Los Angeles Times Book Prize • The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award • The New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Wall Street Journal • The Boston Globe • The Economist • Financial Times • Foreign Policy • The Seattle Times • The Nation • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Denver Post • Minneapolis Star Tribune • The Week • Kansas City Star • Slate • Publishers Weekly
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House Trade Paperbacks
- Publication dateApril 8, 2014
- Dimensions5.14 x 0.8 x 7.97 inches
- ISBN-109780812979329
- ISBN-13978-0812979329
- Lexile measure1030L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A book of extraordinary intelligence [and] humanity . . . beyond groundbreaking.”—Junot Díaz, The New York Times Book Review
“Reported like Watergate, written like Great Expectations, and handily the best international nonfiction in years.”—New York
“Incandescent writing and excruciatingly good storytelling.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Outstanding.”—USA Today
“A richly detailed tapestry of tragedy and triumph told by a seemingly omniscient narrator with an attention to detail that reads like fiction while in possession of the urgent humanity of nonfiction.”—Los Angeles Times
“Rends the heart, thrills the mind, pricks the conscience, and burns the pages.”—Washingtonian
“[An] exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter. . . . Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“A jaw-dropping achievement, an instant classic of narrative nonfiction . . . With a cinematic intensity . . . Boo transcends and subverts every cliché, cynical or earnest, that we harbor about Indian destitution and gazes directly into the hearts, hopes, and human promise of vibrant people whom you’ll not soon forget.”—Elle
“Riveting, fearlessly reported . . . [Behind the Beautiful Forevers]plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel. That’s partly because Boo writes so damn well. But it’s also because over the course of three years in India she got extraordinary access to the lives and minds of the Annawadi slum, a settlement nestled jarringly close to a shiny international airport and a row of luxury hotels. Grade: A.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A shocking—and riveting—portrait of life in modern India . . . This is one stunning piece of narrative nonfiction. . . . Boo’s prose is electric.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“[A] landmark book.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Moving . . . a humane, powerful and insightful book . . . a book of nonfiction so stellar it puts most novels to shame.”—The Boston Globe
“A mind-blowing read.”—Redbook
“An unforgettable true story, meticulously researched with unblinking honesty . . . pure, astonishing reportage with as unbiased a lens as possible.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“The most riveting Indian story since Slumdog Millionaire—except hers is true.”—Marie Claire
“Seamless and intimate . . . a scrupulously true story . . . It’s tempting to compare [Behind the Beautiful Forevers] to a novel, but . . . that would hardly do it justice.”—Salon
“Extraordinary . . . moving . . . Like the best journeys, Boo’s book cracks open our preconceptions and constructs an abiding bridge—at once daunting and inspiring—to a world we would never otherwise recognize as our own.”—National Geographic Traveler
“Behind the Beautiful Forevers offers a rebuke to official reports and dry statistics on the global poor. . . . Boo is one of few chroniclers providing this picture. She’s a moral force and . . . an artist of reverberating power.”—The American Prospect
“Kate Boo’s reporting is a form of kinship. Abdul and Manju and Kalu of Annawadi will not be forgotten. She leads us through their unknown world, her gift of language rising up like a delicate string of necessary lights. There are books that change the way you feel and see; this is one of them. If we receive the fiery spirit from which it was written, it ought to change much more than that.”—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family
“I couldn’t put Behind the Beautiful Forevers down even when I wanted to—when the misery, abuse and filth that Boo so elegantly and understatedly describes became almost overwhelming. Her book, situated in a slum on the edge of Mumbai’s international airport, is one of the most powerful indictments of economic inequality I’ve ever read. If Bollywood ever decides to do its own version of The Wire, this would be it.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
“A beautiful account, told through real-life stories, of the sorrows and joys, the anxieties and stamina, in the lives of the precarious and powerless in urban India whom a booming country has failed to absorb and integrate. A brilliant book that simultaneously informs, agitates, angers, inspires, and instigates.”—Amartya Sen, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
“Without question the best book yet written on contemporary India. Also, the best work of narrative nonfiction I’ve read in twenty-five years.”—Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi
“There is a lot to like about this book: the prodigious research that it is built on, distilled so expertly that we hardly notice how much we are being taught; the graceful and vivid prose that never calls attention to itself; and above all, the true and moving renderings of the people of the Mumbai slum called Annawadi. Garbage pickers and petty thieves, victims of gruesome injustice—Ms. Boo draws us into their lives, and they do not let us go. This is a superb book.”—Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains Beyond Mountains and Strength in What Remains
"It might surprise you how completely enjoyable this book is, as rich and beautifully written as a novel. In the hierarchy of long form reporting, Katherine Boo is right up there.”—David Sedaris
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Annawadi
LET IT KEEP, the moment when Officer Fish Lips met Abdul in the police station. Rewind, see Abdul running backward, away from the station and the airport, shirt buttons opening as he flies back toward his home. See the flames engulfing a disabled woman in a pink- flowered tunic shrink to nothing but a matchbook on the floor. See Fatima minutes earlier, dancing on crutches to a raucous love song, her delicate features unscathed. Keep rewinding, back seven more months, and stop at an ordinary day in January 2008. It was about as hopeful a season as there had ever been in the years since a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of a country that holds one-third of the planet's poor. A country dizzy now with development and circulating money.
Dawn came gusty, as it often did in January, the month of treed kites and head colds. Because his family lacked the floor space for all of its members to lie down, Abdul was asleep on the gritty maidan, which for years had passed as his bed. His mother stepped carefully over one of his younger brothers, and then another, bending low to Abdul's ear. "Wake up, fool!" she said exuberantly. "You think your work is dreaming?"
Superstitious, Zehrunisa had noticed that some of the family's most profitable days occurred after she had showered abuses on her eldest son. January's income being pivotal to the family's latest plan of escape from Annawadi, she had decided to make the curses routine.
Abdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was her own. Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. The pale sun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and the parrots nesting at the far side of the lake could still be heard over the jets. Outside his neighbors' huts, some held together by duct tape and rope, damp rags were discreetly freshening bodies. Children in school-uniform neckties were hauling pots of water from the public taps. A languid line extended from an orange concrete block of public toilets. Even goats' eyes were heavy with sleep. It was the moment of the intimate and the familial, before the great pursuit of the small market niche got under way.
One by one, construction workers departed for a crowded intersection where site supervisors chose day laborers. Young girls began threading marigolds into garlands, to be hawked in Airport Road traffic. Older women sewed patches onto pink-and-blue cotton quilts for a company that paid by the piece. In a tiny, sweltering plastic- molding factory, bare-chested men cranked gears that would turn colored beads into ornaments to be hung from rearview mirrors-smiling ducks and pink cats with jewels around their necks that they couldn't imagine anyone, anywhere, buying. And Abdul crouched on the maidan, beginning to sort two weeks' worth of purchased trash, a stained shirt hitching up his knobby spine.
His general approach toward his neighbors was this: "The better I know you, the more I will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves." But deep in his own work, as he would be this morning, he could imagine his fellow Annawadians laboring companionably alongside him.
ANNAWADI SAT TWO hundred yards off the Sahar Airport Road, a stretch where new India collided with old India and made new India late. Chauffeurs in SUVs honked furiously at the bicycle delivery boys peeling off from a slum chicken shop, each carrying a rack of three hundred eggs. Annawadi itself was nothing special, in the context of the slums of Mumbai. Every house was off-kilter, so less off-kilter looked like straight. Sewage and sickness looked like life.
The slum had been settled in 1991 by a band of laborers trucked in from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to repair a runway at the international airport. When the runway work was complete, they decided to stay near the airport and its tantalizing construction possibilities. In an area with little unclaimed space, a sodden, snake-filled bit of brushland across the street from the international terminal seemed the least-bad place to live.
Other poor people considered the spot too wet to be habitable, but the Tamils set to work, hacking down the brush that harbored the snakes, digging up dirt in drier places and packing it into the mud. After a month, their bamboo poles stopped flopping over when they were stuck in the ground. Draping empty cement sacks over the poles for cover, they had a settlement. Residents of neighboring slums provided its name: Annawadi-the land of annas, a respectful Tamil word for older brothers. Less respectful terms for Tamil migrants were in wider currency. But other poor citizens had seen the Tamils sweat to summon solid land from a bog, and that labor had earned a certain deference.
Seventeen years later, almost no one in this slum was considered poor by official Indian benchmarks. Rather, the Annawadians were among roughly one hundred million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when, around the same moment as the small slum's founding, the central government embraced economic liberalization. The Annawadians were thus part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism, a narrative still unfolding.
True, only six of the slum's three thousand residents had permanent jobs. (The rest, like 85 percent of Indian workers, were part of the informal, unorganized economy.) True, a few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake's edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slumdwellers who didn't fry rats and eat weeds, like Abdul, a felt sense of their upward mobility.
The airport district was spewing waste that winter, the peak season for tourism, business travel, and society weddings, whose lack of restraint in 2008 reflected a stock market at an all-time high. Better still for Abdul, a frenzy of Chinese construction in advance of the summer's Beijing Olympics had inflated the price of scrap metal worldwide. It was a fine time to be a Mumbai garbage-trader, not that that was the term passersby used for Abdul. Some called him garbage, and left it at that.
This morning, culling screws and hobnails from his pile, he tried to keep an eye on Annawadi's goats, who liked the smell of the dregs in his bottles and the taste of the paste beneath the labels. Abdul didn't ordinarily mind them nosing around, but these days they were fonts of liquid shit-a menace.
The goats belonged to a Muslim man who ran a brothel from his hut and considered his whores a pack of malingerers. In an attempt to diversify, he had been raising the animals to sell for sacrifice at Eid, the festival marking the end of Ramadan. The goats had proved as troublesome as the girls, though. Twelve of the herd of twenty-two had died, and the survivors were in intestinal distress. The brothelkeeper blamed black magic on the part of the Tamils who ran the local liquor still. Others suspected the goats' drinking source, the sewage lake.
Late at night, the contractors modernizing the airport dumped things in the lake. Annawadians also dumped things there: most recently, the decomposing carcasses of twelve goats. Whatever was in that soup, the pigs and dogs that slept in its shallows emerged with bellies stained blue. Some creatures survived the lake, though, and not only the malarial mosquitoes. As the morning went on, a fisherman waded through the water, one hand pushing aside cigarette packs and blue plastic bags, the other dimpling the surface with a net. He would take his catch to the Marol market to be ground into fish oil, a health product for which demand had surged now that it was valued in the West.
Rising to shake out a cramp in his calf, Abdul was surprised to find the sky as brown as flywings, the sun signaling through the haze of pollution the arrival of afternoon. When sorting, he routinely lost track of the hour. His little sisters were playing with the One Leg's daughters on a makeshift wheelchair, a cracked plastic lawn chair flanked by rusted bicycle wheels. Mirchi, already home from ninth grade, was sprawled in the doorway of the family hut, an unread math book on his lap.
Mirchi was impatiently awaiting his best friend, Rahul, a Hindu boy who lived a few huts away, and who had become an Annawadi celebrity. This month, Rahul had done what Mirchi dreamed of: broken the barrier between the slum world and the rich world.
Rahul's mother, Asha, a kindergarten teacher with mysterious connections to local politicians and the police, had managed to secure him several nights of temp work at the Intercontinental Hotel, across the sewage lake. Rahul-a pie-faced, snaggle-toothed ninth grader-had seen the overcity opulence firsthand.
And here he came, wearing an ensemble purchased from the profits of this stroke of fortune: cargo shorts that rode low on his hips, a shiny oval belt buckle of promising recyclable weight, a black knit cap pulled down to his eyes. "Hip-hop style," Rahul termed it. The previous day had been the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, a national holiday on which elite Indians once considered it poor taste to throw an extravagant party. But Rahul had worked a manic event at the Intercontinental, and knew Mirchi would appreciate the details.
"Mirchi, I cannot lie to you," Rahul said, grinning. "On my side of the hall there were five hundred women in only half-clothes-like they forgot to put on the bottom half before they left the house!"
"Aaagh, where was I?" said Mirchi. "Tell me. Anyone famous?"
"Everyone famous! A Bollywood party. Some of the stars were in the VIP area, behind a rope, but John Abraham came out to near where I was. He had this thick black coat, and he was smoking cigarettes right in front of me. And Bipasha Basu was supposedly there, but I couldn't be sure it was really her or just some other item girl, because if the manager sees you looking at the guests, he'll fire you, take your whole pay-they told us that twenty times before the party started, like we were weak in the head. You have to focus on the tables and the rug. Then when you see a dirty plate or a napkin you have to snatch it and take it to the trash bin in the back. Oh, that room was looking nice. First we laid this thick white carpet-you stood on it and sank right down. Then they lit white candles and made it dark like a disco, and on this one table the chef put two huge dolphins made out of flavored ice. One dolphin had cherries for eyes-"
"Bastard, forget the fish, tell me about the girls," Mirchi protested. "They want you to look when they dress like that."
"Seriously, you can't look. Not even at the rich people's toilets. Security will chuck you out. The toilets for the workers were nice, though. You have a choice between Indian- or American-style." Rahul, who had a patriotic streak, had peed in the Indian one, an open drain in the floor.
Other boys joined Rahul outside the Husains' hut. Annawadians liked to talk about the hotels and the depraved things that likely went on inside. One drug-addled scavenger talked to the hotels: "I know you're trying to kill me, you sisterfucking Hyatt!" But Rahul's accounts had special value, since he didn't lie, or at least not more than one sentence out of twenty. This, along with a cheerful disposition, made him a boy whose privileges other boys did not resent.
Rahul gamely conceded he was a nothing compared with the Intercontinental's regular workers. Many of the waiters were college-
educated, tall, and light-skinned, with cellphones so shiny their owners could fix their hair in the reflections. Some of the waiters had mocked Rahul's long, blue-painted thumbnail, which was high masculine style at Annawadi. When he cut the nail off, they'd teased him about how he talked. The Annawadians' deferential term for a rich man, sa'ab, was not the proper term in the city's moneyed quarters, he reported to his friends. "The waiters say it makes you sound D- class-like a thug, a tapori," he said. "The right word is sir."
"Sirrrrrrr," someone said, rolling the r's, then everyone started saying it, laughing.
The boys stood close together, though there was plenty of space in the maidan. For people who slept in close quarters, his foot in my mouth, my foot in hers, the feel of skin against skin got to be a habit. Abdul stepped around them, upending an armful of torn paper luggage tags on the maidan and scrambling after the tags that blew away. The other boys paid him no notice. Abdul didn't talk much, and when he did, it was as if he'd spent weeks privately working over some little idea. He might have had a friend or two if he'd known how to tell a good story.
Once, working on this shortcoming, he'd floated a tale about having been inside the Intercontinental himself-how a Bollywood movie called Welcome had been filming there, and how he'd seen Katrina Kaif dressed all in white. It had been a feeble fiction. Rahul had seen through it immediately. But Rahul's latest report would allow Abdul's future lies to be better informed.
A Nepali boy asked Rahul about the women in the hotels. Through slats in the hotel fences, he had seen some of them smoking-"not one cigarette, but many"-while they waited for their drivers to pull up to the entrance. "Which village do they come from, these women?"
"Listen, idiot," Rahul said affectionately. "The white people come from all different countries. You're a real hick if you don't know this basic thing."
"Which countries? America?"
Rahul couldn't say. "But there are so many Indian guests in the hotels, too, I guarantee you." Indians who were "healthy-sized"-big and fat, as opposed to stunted, like the Nepali boy and many other children here.
Rahul's first job had been the Intercontinental's New Year's Eve party. The New Year's bashes at Mumbai's luxury hotels were renowned, and scavengers had often returned to Annawadi bearing discarded brochures. Celebrate 2008 in high style at Le Royal Meridien Hotel! Take a stroll down the streets of Paris splurging with art, music & food. Get scintillated with live performances. Book your boarding passes and Bon Voyage! 12,000 rupees per couple, with champagne. The advertisements were printed on glossy paper, for which recyclers paid two rupees, or four U.S. cents, per kilo.
Rahul had been underwhelmed by the New Year's rituals of the rich. "Moronic," he had concluded. "Just people drinking and dancing and standing around acting stupid, like people here do every night."
"The hotel people get strange when they drink," he told his friends. "Last night at the end of the party, there was one hero-
good-looking, stripes on his suit, expensive cloth. He was drunk, full tight, and he started stuffing bread into his pants pockets, jacket pockets. Then he put more rolls straight into his pants! Rolls fell on the floor and he was crawling under the table to get them. This one waiter was saying the guy must have been hungry, earlier- that whiskey brought back the memory. But when I get rich enough to be a guest at a big hotel, I'm not going to act like such a loser."
Product details
- ASIN : 081297932X
- Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (April 8, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780812979329
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812979329
- Lexile measure : 1030L
- Item Weight : 0.019 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.14 x 0.8 x 7.97 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #25,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8 in India History
- #10 in Sociology of Urban Areas
- #21 in Poverty
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Katherine "Kate" J. Boo (born August 12, 1964) is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service (2000), the MacArthur "genius" award (2002), and the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012). She has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 2003. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Even though India is now a democratic society, still their caste system remain in place: People at the bottom (eco/socio) are the poorest of the poor, and thus are treated as degenerates and nobodys. These people have no future due to the status they are born into. They are not protected by their government for modification standards regarding the all-around unhealthy home setting. By this I mean that these poverty stricken people living on top of their seweage have no say in the non-environmental laws which could change the clean up of the rampid sewage streets, their polluted rivers and streams, as well as the gargage dumps that welcome them to forage for material assets to be sold, to becoming a possible eatible 'something' that was thrown out from the city just a few miles away from their home. Yet this is how they make their living...within the garbage dumps...the best way to draw an income from any material...to be sold or traded for a family's daily meal. There is no hope for these people. That is because children can not afford to attend school. Children come from households by which they must help support the family income.
It seems combatively impossible to believe that only a few miles from this slum nation thrives a place of commerce--a community of wealth all due to outsourcing from indurtrialized nations, giving upper class citizens all types of jobs and housing, shops, hotels and more. But, scrap metals, food and other raw material valuables, filter close at bay...to the front doors of this squaller. These finding are what makes a day's pay or put a meal on that day's table.
The author identifies certain characters in this favala and studies family lives, as well as all aspects which they are exposed to. This book is written as a story of these people, as well as on a sociological and economical front, which brings the issues of these poor broken people to the surface--again just a few miles from a thriving modern city.
I suggest this book to people who want to acquaint themselves with an unfortuate part of a society, which you are born into, because of your lineage. Rarely would a dream pan-out for anyone living in these conditions.
I am glad that the author brought this society to the surface as there are so many... though hopefully... one day... will be no more.
Katherine Boo writes very well. Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and she’s won a MacArthur “Genius” grant. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is her anthropological-by-anecdote study of Annawadi, an “undercity” – a temporary colony in makeshift shelters – of 3,000 squatters under the flight path of the Mumbai airport. It sits in the shadows of the “Glimmerglass Hyatt” and other luxury hotels, symbols of India’s newfound prosperity.
As Boo explains in an author’s note, "Every country has its myths, and one that successful Indians liked to indulge was a romance of instability and adaptation – the idea that India's rapid rise derived in part from the chaotic unpredictability of daily life." And nowhere is daily life more chaotic or less predictable than in Annawadi. This book is not an academic cost/benefit analysis of modernization or an examination of the plight of the “average” Indian. It is the story of a half-dozen families living unimaginably brutalizing existences. There are stories of both courage and cowardice, filled with the personal complexities that permeate people’s lives. It is a grim subject, which Boo handles admirably in a brilliantly composed and eminently readable book – one that packs as much literary power as a great work of fiction.
Annawadi is a hard place. Neighborhoods like the South Side of Chicago or North Philly may define poverty for most Americans, but Annawadi is different in kind from those communities – as harsh as the Dickensian slums of 19th-century London. No matter how dire things appear when we first meet Boo’s subjects, their reality is worse. Boo uses lucid, sober and elegant prose, along with novel-like narrative arcs and character development, to tell their stories. Death, disease and alcoholism are everywhere. One woman walks aimlessly through Annawadi for weeks after her son’s suicide, asking everyone she passes if they could tell her why her son had taken his life. A man explains that because he has advanced TB, “Lately if I don’t drink, I don’t have the strength to lift anything.”
Here’s Boo’s wonderful (and awful) take on monsoon season:
“On the high grounds of the liquid city, rich people spoke of the romance of monsoon: the languorous sex, retail therapy, and hot jalebis that eased July into August. At Annawadi, the sewage lake crept forward like a living thing. Sick water buffalo nosed for food though mounds of wet, devalued garbage, s***ting out the consequences of bad choices with a velocity Annawadi water taps had never equaled. People, also sick, stomped the mud from their feet and said, ‘My stomach is on fire, my chest.’ ‘All up and down this leg, all night.’”
And yet there is hope too. Indeed, much like Dickens’ urban subcultures, Annawadi is a complex social landscape, where residents jockey to improve their position. Many are captivated with the opportunities of modern India and are on the make (or hope to be). There is even a brothel, run from his hut by a Muslim man who considers his whores a pack of malingerers. There are also goats that belong to him and have the run of the place.
And, of course, this being India, there is corruption. Boo does a great job of illustrating its pervasiveness. Even the Catholic orphanage is run by a crooked nun. When Westerners visit, she recruits kids to beg for rupees from the rich white women. She pockets some of the money and shares the rest with local politicians and underpaid police dependent on graft to make a living. One of the children Boo focuses on, Sunil, refused to play the game and was banished from the orphanage, where he had occasionally gotten food and shelter.
Most Annawadi residents do menial jobs, are unemployed or do something imaginatively entrepreneurial to get by. At least one – a woman named Asha – has decided that governmental sleaze has created an opportunistic path to respect and relative affluence. Asha is an intelligent woman capable of penetrating insight into people. But she also has profound wounds from her upbringing in rural India, where the limits of caste, gender and destitution are even more unforgiving and unrelenting than they are in Annawadi. The resentment triggered by those memories enables her to act amorally, without remorse or empathy. In a discussion with her daughter about how a nonprofit trust she controlled could be used to steal money intended to educate unschooled children, she says, “Of course it’s corrupt. But is it my corruption? How can anyone say I am doing the wrong when the big people . . . say that it’s right?”
Boo’s message is that notwithstanding the myth of economic growth through chaotic unpredictability, as the Indian economic miracle unsteadily lurches forward, it is accompanied by an ongoing search for solid ground on which citizens can seek the promised rewards. As Boo tells the story of Sunil – the boy banished from the orphanage – she notes that he had experimented with becoming a “road boy,” essentially a street urchin and thief. But he decided that was too risky; he would stick with being a scavenger who dumpster-dives for a living, seeking to recycle other people’s trash and providing one of Boo’s best metaphors: “Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas.”
Sunil found his “territory” on a narrow ledge behind some dumpsters by the airport, where taxi drivers throw litter over fences adorned with repeated ads for floor tiles that promise to be “forever beautiful forever beautiful forever beautiful . . . .” From his precarious perch on the ledge behind the beautiful forevers, Sunil retrieves cans, bottles and whatever else he can salvage, providing Boo with another metaphor for the Indian economy, which she chooses to imbue with hope at the end of her tale.
Then there’s Manju, Asha’s daughter, who is almost too perfectly emblematic of Boo’s vision of modern India. Manju is attending college – she wants to be a teacher – and no longer fits in anywhere. Her classmates think she’s peculiar because she’s from a slum, while her neighbors think it is weird that she is pursuing an education. She doesn’t understand why anybody would want to talk to her, and few do. But her biggest fear is that her mother will marry her off, in which case she “would die doing the things she was doing now: sweeping the dirt that had blown in from outside, mopping, then sweeping the new dirt that had blown in while she mopped.” Manju is nonetheless deferential to her mother, even agreeing to falsify documents as the secretary of her nonprofit trust.
A recurring focus of the book is on the Husain family, especially their oldest son, Abdul. As Boo recounts their background and the details of their daily lives, we learn about Abdul’s expertise at evaluating scavengers’ rubbish, a vital skill that enables him to act as a middleman between scavengers and corporate recyclers. We also learn about the imprisonment, torture and trial of Abdul, his father and his sister on trumped-up charges of . . . well, they don’t know what exactly, but the allegations seem to have something to do with inciting their next-door neighbor to kill herself by self-immolation. The neighbor had an ongoing feud with various members of the Husain family over seemingly trivial matters; her dramatic suicide may have been triggered because a Husain home-improvement project financed by Abdul’s earnings caused rubble to fall into rice she was cooking for dinner.
After being tortured and held in the local police station for months, Abdul was released to a juvenile facility (ironically because his mother was able to acquire false documentation that he was younger than he was). The trial of Abdul’s father and sister was held in a “high speed court” in Sewri, a South Mumbai neighborhood that is a one-hour bus-and-train ride from Annawadi, but it feels to the Husains as if it were another world, oceans away. I won’t reveal the outcome, but the fiasco illustrates the dictum laid down by Abdul’s father at the beginning of the first chapter: “Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, ‘What a navigator I am!’ And then the wind blows you east.”
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The hope of it all!
"Slumdog" is a good film. And a lot of the reportage is also good, and if it's not it's generally well-meaning. But I find it all a bit discomfiting. It's human to believe in hope, but it seems to me that, as Westerners, focussing on the small hopes that slum-dwellers have might be a convenient way of deflecting our own guilt that people have to live this way. (And the likes of Amitabh Bachchan castigating "Slumdog" for focussing on a small part of Indian life might be an Indian way of doing the same thing).
I thought this book might be more of the same. It wasn't.
Boo is no polemicist. She's a true journalist, and she tells this story with a journalistic dispassion, making it all the more affecting. (She has a novelist's eye, though; at times, the prose is breathtaking.) The stories are set in a small slum, rather than one of the giant cities-within-a-city like Dharavi; a wise choice, as she manages to paint a picture of a whole community, almost like a small village. There are a lot of characters to keep up with, and at times it's downright confusing. But even this makes sense. After all, urban India is a confusing place, teeming with people.
Despite the wonderful writing, there were times when I felt I could not go on. When I read about the disease and the filth and children being bitten by rats as they slept. The fungus "like butterfly wings" that grows on feet in the monsoon season. The exploitation and corruption, the abuse of slum-dwellers by the authorities, the abuse of slum children by their own families. The unsolved murders and streets-sweepers left to die on the pavements, the infanticide and the many suicides. And the hope - what there is of it - is almost the worst. That a family, pursued by a rotten judicial system, might not go to prison for a crime they did not commit. That one slum-dweller might, just possibly, scramble over others and into a very slightly less hardscrabble life.
I cried again and again. I became very angry. Occasionally, I laughed out loud. At times I was so scared for the characters that I felt ill with it. And when I had finished, I thought about them all for a long time, and wondered what they are doing now, the ones that survived. Because, of course, there's no story-book ending. Jamal does not win his millions. He doesn't get his Latika. The story might end, but life in the slum staggers and claws and bites and struggles on.
The people of the slum do questionable things - sometimes terrible things - to survive. But I think there is hope. They also do good things. That people forced to live like this could ever be decent, live by any kind of moral code, gives one hope of a sort.

As the story opens out, we are introduced to the wider population of the slum, Asha, an unscrupulous fixer, desperate to climb out of the degradation and prepared to do just about anything to escape, her beautiful daughter Manju, who hopes that education will enable her to escape from an arranged marriage, Sunil, a young but resourceful scavenger, the one legged sexually voracious Fatima.
The story spreads both backwards and forwards from Adbul’s flight from the law. It provides an account of how he came to be hiding under a pile of rubbish, and also the story of what came after.
At its heart this book provides a fundamentally horrific picture of modern India. It is a society divided between extreme wealth and extreme poverty. It is a world of endemic corruption, where courts are not courts of justice but courts of law, and the law is driven by those who can pay for it. The slum is not a community, but a brutal dog eat dog world where the inhabitants gleefully seek to climb to the top of the rubbish heap by stepping on each others’ faces. It is a society in which external aid is cynically manipulated to divert funds to the powerful, not those in need.
This brings me to the most shocking thing about the book. I read it for my book club, and so knew nothing about it when I picked it up. This is not, or is not positioned as, a work of fiction. This is a documentary. Author Katherine Boo is a journalist who worked within the slum, extensively interviewing, and filming the inhabitants. With that in mind, I find it quite difficult to criticise this brutally dispassionate account of a modern Dante’s Inferno. Living in the affluent west what right I have to form any opinion of an account of a society of such extreme poverty, degradation and struggle. At one level it is difficult to justify a world in which people are forced to live like this and to justify one’s own privileged position within it.
Within that, the book for me posed some huge questions. Is this an inevitable part of development? Is it an inescapable part of economic advancement that societies must live through periods of extreme inequality in which huge numbers of people endure an horrendous existence? Is India, along with other developing countries, living through what countries like Britain experienced in Victorian times? Alternatively, is the horror of Annawadi a more modern consequence of globalisation?
It is in asking these questions, that I begin to get a little more uncomfortable with the book. Of course, the author has been enormously brave in producing the work, and it is something I could never do. And she has provided a clear factual, unemotional journalistic work. And she and her husband are bringing benefits to the slum. I just question whether a dispassionate account is the right response to what she has seen. Anger, disgust, zeal would seem more appropriate than calm observation.
The other problem I have with it is that it doesn’t really work structurally. I don’t like books where non-linear structure is used to make up for lack of narrative. Here there is no point to starting in the middle, other than to add complication. Secondly it is a hugely confusing book. It feels like a nature documentary, as the textual camera switches regularly between different inhabitants it is at times difficult to keep track of who is whom. Finally, there is no sense of closure, Boo just leaves her story in mid air, with no sense of resolution. I recognise that these features could also be seen as strengths. The confusing nature of the book reflects life in the slum, and the lack of a conclusion is just real life. However not even to reveal the result of the central court case is a very strange choice.
So, in what is portrays, this is an admirable and important book, it’s just that I’m not convinced by the way the author tries to use the conventions of fiction to write a documentary.



Secondly, her methodology and style of writing caused me some problems. It's written very much like a novel, including direct speech and passages describing the characters' inner thoughts and feelings. I understand that Boo and her translators spent a lot of time in these slums, became close to the people, and gained their trust to the extent that they could almost forget that they were there, watching and listening and taking notes the whole time. And still, I can't help feeling that there must be layers of interpretation and the presence of the observer must have had some effect, however small. I was conscious of this throughout most of the book and found it quite distracting. On the other hand it raises interesting questions about how any kind of reportage or non-fiction book is written.
What's undeniable is the power of the stories being told. The sense of hopelessness (in spite of the cover blurb which promised a book about "life, death and hope") is palpable, especially in the face of systemic and generally accepted corruption. At times it just became too depressing and I almost didn't want to read on, but I'm glad I did.