Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.

A reader should almost turn to the afterword of Behind the Beautiful Forevers before plunging into the main text. In this afterword, author Katherine Boo explains the four year long process of research – in which she got to know and gained the trust of the residents of the Mumbai slum known as Annawadi – that this book is based upon. Since the book itself includes a murder trial, you might think that Boo entered the slum in order to research this event, but no, the trial and the corruption that it reveals simply happened while she was there; another day in the life of Annawadi.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is narrative non-fiction done right. We follow the interconnected stories of a variety of people, focussing on two contrasting families: Asha is a middle-aged woman who had come to the slum from absolute poverty, but through hard work, manipulation, and prostitution, is poised to become a rare female slumlord; Manju is her teenaged daughter – smart, beautiful, kind, the “most everything girl” of the slum – who is attending college, doing most of the housework, and teaching the small children of the neighbourhood (even though her mother gripes that she only really needs to hold classes when an inspector comes by); not far away lives Abdul – a garbage sorter who has been working to support his family since he was six; his father (either a malingerer or actually too sick to work); his mother (a sharp-tongued baby machine); and his countless siblings. As poor as Abdul's family appears, their relative prosperity provokes jealousy and bitterness in their neighbours; even in those to whom his family has been especially kind. Below them in the hierarchy are garbage pickers like Sunil (who was kicked out of the orphanage by its limo-riding Nun Director when he became too big to attract appropriate charity – at 11-years-old), and Kalu, a fearless homeless teenaged thief that the other boys admire. Everyone in Annawadi dreams of getting enough money to escape the slum, but as corruption and acts of God take away what little they have, too many residents turn to rat poison or self-immolation for the ultimate escape.

I have read quite a few novels set in middle class India, and as helpless as those fictional characters felt in the face of a corrupt society, it's nothing compared to the effects this system has on its very poorest citizens. The police demand bribes to allow people to operate their businesses (or point out good places to steal from for a cut of the haul), and when there's a crime, these same officers beat suspects, demand bribes to set the innocent free, and refuse to investigate actual murders; preferring to ascribe every death to natural causes and proudly point out their solve rates. Anyone lucky enough to be brought to a hospital will be told that there is no food and no medicine (the goods having been stolen and sold right off the charity or government trucks), and what services are offered, often come with an under-the-table payment to the doctors. Prisons are bedlam, courts are more interested in completion rates than justice, and at every turn, some person with a slight advantage over you has their hand out for a bribe that might or might not lead to help. It was horrifying to be constantly reminded that this is nonfiction; this is simply the every day lives of a huge number of people. 

And what's most disheartening is the notion that nothing can really be done for the residents of Anniwadi. If education is the key to leaving the slum, no one is actually educating the children. More than once, a school was set up and closed immediately after foreign donors were pleased with what they saw. By the end of the book, even Manju has been persuaded by her mother to suspend her little “bridge school” in order to focus more fully on one of Asha's scams. But since the scam netted Manju a laptop and her brother a motorcycle, can she be blamed for going along? What could Manju possibly think of this book and the way it portrays her family?

Even foreign charity doesn't trickle down to the people who actually need it:

The municipality sent water through six Annawadi faucets for ninety minutes in the morning and ninety minutes at night. Shiv Sena men had appropriated the taps, charging usage fees to their neighbors. These water-brokers were resented, but not as much as the renegade World Vision social worker who had collected money from Annawadians for a new tap, then run away with it.

Hidden behind billboards beside the sprawling Mumbai airport and its nearby luxury hotels, the Anniwadi slum is an eyesore and embarrassment to the Indian government, and under constant threat of demolition. But then where will its 3,000 residents go? It's a heart-wrenching image to think of all these children spending their days scavenging for garbage, but what happens to them when that meager living is taken away? And although we feel outrage for the little girls doing piece work for manufacturing companies out of their huts, would they be better off picking garbage? Or offered for sale, like one 11-year-old in the book? You might think that if only the Annawadians, and other slum dwellers, could get together and refuse to participate in the corruption and refuse to be treated as inferiors, they might have a chance – like Gandhi himself – of peacefully changing their conditions, but back to the afterword, as Boo says:

In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of a mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a horrifying and true story that left me feeling broken-hearted and impotent. It's an important read even so.