Behind the beautiful forevers: life, death and hope in a Mumbai undercity
By Katherine Boo
Random House, 256 pages
Katherine Boo, a writer for The New Yorker, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist spends nearly four years inside a Mumbai slum. There, she documents the experiences of its residents using notes, video recordings, audiotapes and more than 3,000 public documents. Her first book, Behind The Beautiful Forevers, takes an up-close look at the lives of the urban poor in today’s India. Boo tells us there were nagging questions that begged for answers: How can India, an increasingly wealthy and powerful nation, still house one-third of the poverty and one-quarter of the hunger in the world today? How are the poor faring in the age of expanding wealth and the rise of global cities? Is it really possible to get out of poverty in contemporary India, or in America, for that matter? Boo has reported for years on poor communities within the United States. There is also a personal aspect that explains her interest in India. “Ten years ago,” she writes, “I fell in love with an Indian man and gained a country.” With a cause and another country to call her own, she sets out to tell the story of the residents of Annawadi, a slum dwelling that sits in close proximity to the luxury hotels near the Mumbai International Airport. Over the course of several interviews, the Annawadians shared their life stories with candor and openness. “They worked hard to help me portray their lives and dilemmas,” writes Boo. “They put up with me because they shared some of my concerns about the distribution of opportunity in a fast-changing country that they loved.”
The residents of Annawadi somehow live with the hope of a better tomorrow despite the daily fight for survival. But some don’t make it. The rough and dehumanizing conditions of living in a hard-core slum have gotten to them — so they take their own lives; some consume rat poison or others burn themselves to death.
The city of Mumbai is India’s financial center, home to Bollywood and the nation’s rising class of billionaires. There is reference made to a billionaire who constructed a 27-story house and employs 500 servants who live in the lower floors of the residence. In recent years, there’s been much focus on the growing prosperity of the nation and its wealthy sectors. Yet little is known about the harsh realities of life in an urban slum. Annawadi, home to 3,000 inhabitants, is one such place. It is hidden from view by a wall that carries an advertisement for a ceramic tile and a slogan that reads, “Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever” running the length of the wall.
Behind the wall lies a community untouched by the economic prosperity of recent years. Even with the rise of affluence in global cities, invariably some sectors are left behind. India has always been a land of stark contrast, where great wealth and privilege coexists with widespread poverty, where class lines are rigid, and social mobility is more the exception than the norm. Given this framework, creating wealth is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in the equitable distribution of wealth. While the lives of 3,000 slum dwellers of Annawadi cannot tell the story of an entire subcontinent, it says that prosperity is only part of the story of contemporary India. A long road lies ahead to lift people out of grinding poverty. For Ms. Boo the first step is a keen awareness and understanding of the realities on the ground. As she points out, “Better arguments, maybe even better policies get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives.” She chronicles the daily lives of the Annawadians so we sense their pain, struggles, desperation, as well as their remarkable ability to overcome adversity of every kind. Garbage traders lie dead on a roadside — nobody knows why and no one cares, corrupt local officials extort money from the poor in the guise of protecting them, yet they are left more defenseless than before; we are told of physical and mental abuse within the home, of slumlords who take advantage of fellow slum dwellers instead of coming to their aid. Yet each new day brings moments of hope in the midst of suffering, in a life marked by constant upheaval. As one Annawadi girl would say, “We try so many things, but the world doesn’t move in our favor.”
As the stories of Annawadi unfold, we learn that there are different ways of coping, even in the toughest environment. For Asha, the goal was to leave the slum and join the ranks of the middle class by aligning her interests with those of corrupt local officials. Asha’s daughter, Manju, is the first college-bound girl in Annawadi. Manju wants to be an insurance agent selling life insurance to the wealthy residents of Mumbai. Asha is intent on marrying her off to a middle class man from her rural hometown. But Manju has found a love interest. Their brief encounter does not prosper and Manju is shattered when she learns that class barriers still matter in the 21st century. Asha would later discover that corrupt officials do not always live up to their promises and it may be a long way out of the slum. Abdul Husain, who is the book’s central character, is a hardworking garbage trader, an optimist who dares to dream. Because of his labor, his family fares better than most in Annawadi. He hopes the city’s prosperity will somehow trickle down to its slum dwellers. But a confluence of world events — the global financial crisis, and a terrorist attack on Mumbai leave even the wealthy feeling vulnerable — terrified about their safety and security. Inside Annawadi, a one-legged woman known as Fatima pours kerosene over her body and sets herself ablaze. She survives long enough to blame her suicide attempt on her neighbors, the Husains. By Fatima’s account, Abdul, his father, Karam and sister Kehkashan, threatened to maim her in a bitter exchange of words that ensued before the incident occurred. Out of fear and desperation, Fatima testified that she chose to take her life. In a moment of fury, she had chosen suicide as a way of implicating the Husains in a murder charge thus taking down those she hated and envied. As Boo observes, “powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process.” As the trial is recounted, it exposes a slow-moving and highly corrupt system of justice, where at every turn, someone is out to exploit the poor or downtrodden. It seemed for a long while that the prospect for a fair trial had grown dim. But eventually the trial concludes in favor of the Husains.
Abdul, who for a time was held in youth detention center, had time for some soul searching and reflection. If there was no hope of a brighter tomorrow, then he could at least strive to become a better person. As Katherine Boo recounts, “He wanted to be better than he was made of. In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals. For self-interested reasons, one of the ideals he most wanted to have was a belief in the possibility of justice.”
Behind The Beautiful Forevers weaves a fast-moving and compelling story of the lives that intersect in the small slum dwelling of Annawadi. Here, they come to life as individuals with their fears, hopes and aspirations. The tragedy is that most of them may not be given a chance to reach for a solid and promising tomorrow. In these pages, we are reminded that the basic rights, liberties and opportunities most of us take for granted are not open to all.
Katherine Boo brings heightened awareness of the glaring inequities in the global city of Mumbai. The formidable task for Mumbai, and for India, is to lift large sectors out of poverty, and to bring more people into the growth story that has come to define present-day India. Given the fact that India is diverse as it is populous, that will take some time and a lot of doing. In Boo’s powerful narrative, we learn about the inner world of those who struggle with little to make a life — stories of poverty and injustice told in many parts of the world. Sadly, real change comes last to those who need it the most.