COVER STORY: Review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Residents of the Annawadi slum, Mumbai -- AFP

Reviewed by Razeshta Sethna

Urban poverty in India is expected to rise as the pace of modernisation increases, resulting in the continued marginalisation of slum settlers. By 2030, urbanisation is projected to reach the 50 per cent mark with more and more people migrating from rural areas.

Because economic reforms have not created opportunities or provided infrastructure such as housing, water, sanitation, healthcare, and education, slum settlers live in abject poverty. More than 54 per cent of slums do not have toilets, for instance, and settlers face the perpetual threat of eviction and violence. Families living below the poverty line are not eligible for government services such as healthcare, security and education, although they contribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually in economic output.

This makes for the story of a Mumbai slum settlement, Annawadi, documented meticulously by Katherine Boo in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. The book has been nominated for the Guardian First Book Award 2012. A Pulitzer Prize winning staff writer at the New Yorker, Boo spent more than three years researching Annawadi, experiencing the noxious smells, the violent scenes and painful incidents in a place where “scavengers slept on top of their garbage bags to prevent other scavengers from stealing them”.

Economic survival for Annawadi’s slum-dwellers is a daily struggle with minimum rewards. Yet, to be called a “poor boy” is an insult nobody is ready to take, Boo explains in a narrative that is part-story and part anthropological study of “a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of the country that holds one third of the planet’s poor”. Here 3,000 residents don’t hold permanent jobs, most young boys work for daily wages as scavengers or try to earn some money hawking flowers on traffic signals. Others clean homes as domestic servants and some desperate women work afterhours to please eager-to-buy clients for a few hundred rupees.

Annawadians, who “[understand] that their settlement [is] widely perceived as a blight, and that their homes, like their work, [are] provisional”, realise that their dreams for a brighter (and healthier) future is a miracle. Most residents struggle to escape the clutches of corrupt police and government officials waiting to exploit their meager earnings. Boo documents the lives of selected families in an attempt to understand their challenges and their hopes. Beautiful Forevers follows the lives of young boys like Abdul Husain, a single-minded teenager whose expertise as a waste-picker (he was known for his speed at sorting garbage since he was six) led to the amassing of a small fortune, boosting his family’s earnings and improving his squatter hut. “Shoeless, unclean, pathetic” like his fellow slum dwellers he had “bestowed on his family an income few residents of Annawadi had ever known”.

Boo has said that Abdul’s story is critical: a determined boy who looked way past his years, he slept atop his sorted garbage to guard it from petty thieves in an effort to support a family of 11 so that his siblings didn’t have to work as scavengers. Attracting the envy of their neighbours, the Husains’ are at the crux of the plot. The book begins with an incident of self-immolation, an act of vengeance that brings down the boy and his family to become the mainstay of the plot, which then goes back and forth between developing the family’s story and exploring the lives of other Annawadians.

Abdul’s family are further disadvantaged because being migrant Muslims from Uttar Pradesh they are targets for the Hindu far right as it attempts to drive them out of their livelihood and home. When the family are falsely accused of driving their neighbor Fatima (also known as One Leg who “took lovers while her husband was out sorting garbage elsewhere” for extra money) to suicide after an abusive squabble over the construction of a wall — when in fact in a bout of violent rage she had set herself on fire — Abdul, his sister and father are imprisoned. You see, “to be poor in Annawadi, or in any Mumbai slum, was to be guilty of one thing or another… Simply living in Annawadi was illegal”.

Boo reconstructs scenes with her central protagonists, often allowing their distinctive expression to describe incidents that seem at first explosively horrific and then register as miserable and fated. For instance, “a decent life,” Abdul explains while philosophically studying his neighbours, “was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught”.

His character and inherent wisdom come through at many instances: “it was clear that here was a really smart kid with an interesting way of looking at the world,” Boo says of Abdul. On the wretchedness of the lives of slum dwellers, Abdul contemplates: “even the person who lives like a dog still has some kind of life. Once my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, ‘If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too’”.

Boo has not romanticised poverty but narrated a human story using a novelistic approach. With feeling and understanding for people, Boo doesn’t judge their ways of manipulating others to get ahead or their sometimes wily survival tactics, explaining that some Annawadians would ask her for 10 rupees but she would “explain to them that with the way I work I can’t pay you for stories”. For her, this is not only about bringing hours of research into her writing but more about showing that this slum made violent, venal and apathetic by poverty has stories of people fighting, playing cricket, waiting outside brothels, cooking, smoking, teaching, flirting, living and loving.

In this “new India of feisty convention-defying women”, the unscrupulous Shiv Sena supporter Asha and her family, with a taste for all things expensive, symbolise how small ambitions of control and power turn into larger, tainted triumphs and are the third family Boo profiles. Asha gets government funding for running a make-shift school in Annawadi and with hardly any education to back up her make-believe credentials, she maneuvers her way to prosperity. Another female empowerment scheme she propagates is high-interest credit to local women. Determined to better her living conditions and elevate her status to slumlord, Asha raises her daughter Manju as the “only college-going girl” in the slum. Having lived in poverty as a young woman, Asha knows her family must have different aspirations and Boo doesn’t question her methods of gaining control and financial power: “Although most people talked of hunger as a matter of the stomach, what Asha recalled was the taste — a foul thing that burrowed into your tongue and was sometimes still there when you swallowed, decades later”. She moonlights at night without remorse or even explanation: “relaxing into her authority, Asha stopped making elaborate excuses to her family about the men she met late at night”.

With unusual and unrealistic drive to remove themselves from poverty, Annawadi’s families, forced to live on marshy land adjacent to a sewerage lake that had brought dengue fever and malaria, and amid growing piles of ancient garbage, point towards not only growing inequality but government apathy. What is also striking is how the powerless prey on one another in this state of abject deprivation and madness. Boo observes: “Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, like Asha, they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people”.

Located at the periphery of Mumbai’s airport, Annawadi’s dirt poor residents are surrounded by luxury hotels, fenced off by advertising boards for Italian floor tiles with the slogan reading Beautiful Forever — giving the book its title. But all this doesn’t last, including the Beautiful Forever wall that comes down when bulldozers belonging to the airport authority begin to raze Annawadi. In Mumbai, where gold jeweled politicians gain allies through corrupt practices, where the rich remain unmoved — unable even to conjure up the putrid smell of garbage — and only become richer and where the poor are angry and hopeless, there is no solution but to create opportunity. In the epilogue, Boo writes about how extreme poverty can be alleviated in the age of global market capitalism, even though weak governments are unable to fight corruption and even remain supportive of it, refusing to distribute economic benefits. Why does obvious inequality exist, she questions, and why don’t the poor communities of this world evolve into violent ones as a result? These are some of the issues Boo raises as she attempts to understand the hopes of these women, men and children forced to peddle anything they can find a buyer for on Mumbai’s streets.

The reviewer is a staffer at the monthly Herald