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Behind the Beautiful Forevers; Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo. Random House, 2012. 256 pages; $27.00 (hardback). Reading level: adult.
In 1991, when a band of laborers was trucked in from Tamil Nadu to repair a runway at the Mumbai Airport, they decided to stay. They draped empty cement sacks over poles in the “sodden, snake-filled bit of brushland across from the international terminal” and the slum known as Annawadi, which eventually burgeoned to 90,000 families, was born. Investigative reporter, Katherine Boo, takes us deep into the struggles and dreams of a handful of these slum-dwellers, their lives playing out like a novel. We meet Abdul, a garbage “broker,” (age 16 or 19) accused, along with his father and sister, of setting their vindictive, one-legged neighbor on fire, he and his family are forced to negotiate a hopelessly corrupt legal system; Asha, a Hindu woman takes advantage of the corruption to get an education for her daughter; and Kalu, a garbage picker who over-steps and is killed outside the airport terminal. Animosities rage: Hindu against Muslim, northern immigrants against southern, those who have managed to acquire a few possessions against those who haven’t. Boo clearly shows that, in a system where the link between effort and result has been severed, it is “blisteringly hard to be good.” But, astonishingly, “some people are good, and many people try to be.” A hard topic, somehow written about with great beauty.